Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

This was an interesting story. Since I have the habit of not reading synopsis beforehand, I wasn't really sure what to expect. This is a bit of a Dystopian worldview and damn, it was depressing.

Kathy is our 30-something narrator. She tells us she is a carer, which at the time means not much more than it's context, and she travels back in her memories to Hailsham, a private school in England. At first, I did start thinking it was going to be about uppity children growing up into obnoxious adults.

Boy, was I wrong.


Spoilers are ahead so beware!



Kathy's main friends at Hailsham are Ruth and Tommy. Throughout their time there, they are strongly encouraged to create art. So encouraged, they have events called Exchanges, where they pay for other students art via tokens they've earned. They also have Sales, where they can actually purchase items from outside the school. Both of these events allows the student to create their own collections. Around this point, I was finding it odd that parents were not mentioned. Oh, naive Amanda.

As they got older, Ruth and Tommy become a couple, even though it is Kathy that Tommy seems to gravitate towards.  Sex is a hot topic and taught, with props, by the Guardians. But, the students are reminded they cannot make babies and MUST keep themselves free of disease and stay healthy.

From Hailsham, they move into the Cottages. Ruth is essentially the type of girl I would not like. Kathy, as a narrator, seems to get off her point quite often and tends to take the long way to her initial thought. And Tommy, poor dear, he doesn't seem to fit very well anywhere. After a rift between Ruth and Kathy, where Tommy is in the middle, Kathy goes off to training to become a carer.

It made me ill around this time to learn that all of these kids-growing-to-adults are clones. Their sole purpose in life is to live until they are required to make donations of their organs for their "original'. Sometimes the donations kill them, sometimes they recover enough to come upon their fourth donation, where they are kept alive and harvested as needed.

What is most horrifying is that none of the students seem worried about their fate. No one rails against donating. They just do. We learn that Hailsham was an experiment, a way to prove that the clones had souls and were human. It didn't take and Hailsham was eventually shut down. It's described that other clones live in deplorable conditions until they are harvested. People are not willing to bring back diseases into their life just because clones can feel.

I sincerely hope we never get to this type of future. But dystopia seems closer and closer some days, doesn't it?

There is a movie out based on the novel, streaming on Netflix. I'm curious enough to watch it.