Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #824 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-02
• Released on: 2006-03-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 276 pages

Synopsis
In one of the most acclaimed and strange novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, "Never Let Me Go" hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, "Never Let Me Go" is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

Customer Reviews

Who will care for Kathy?
This novel begins as a disquieting and oddly discordant story of an apparently idyllic upbringing at an English boarding school, which then unfolds with subtle brilliance towards a terrifying denouement. The strength and intricacy of the narrative alone makes it a superb work of fiction. But it is the personalities of the characters, particularly that of the narrator, Kathy H, which transform a modern gothic horror story into a heartbreaking tale of quiet human suffering and weary acceptance. Kathy's unassuming way of expressing herself, her often banal language, her very English ordinariness, all serve to highlight a deep kindness and huge heart, coupled with an amplified need for acceptance in the absence of family and home, which constantly lead her to under-stated acts of great compassion, initially school-girlish and adolescent, later adult : Whilst her Hailsham friends look on mockingly, she is worried that Tommy, the object of bullying for his lack of 'creativity', will spoil his prized polo shirt in a fit of rage induced by his tormentors ; she goes to great lengths to restore the face and self-esteem of the manipulative and often selfish Ruth after catching her lying about receiving special treatment from a favoured 'guardian' (teacher) ; as the trio progress to young adulthood, she sacrifices her own love for Tommy so that he and an unappreciative Ruth can be a 'couple' ; throughout the narrative, which covers most of her life, she unfailingly but self-effacingly puts the interests and feelings of Ruth, Tommy, and the novel's other periphery ahead of her own, even as each one of them is in turn inevitably torn away from her. Only seldom does she allow herself the luxury of expressing her own emotions, which makes those rare passages so intense : When Hailsham's shadowy patroness inadvertently witnesses her dancing alone with the imaginary baby both know she can never have to the music of the title, "Madame's" tears are our tears. The novel's final desolate scene, its cold and windswept loneliness, its silent grief, makes the reader want to sweep up this gentle angel into one's arms and never let her go.

A horrible truth
This book is a masterly allegory and a profound meditation on the way of the world, art and the real nature of man.
It slowly reveals a horrible truth: man has set up a macabre production system of willing, sterile human clones in order to use them as organ `donators' when they are grown up.
The institution where they are brought up functions as an art school: `we thought you art because we thought it would reveal your souls ...we did it to prove you have souls at all.' But unlike Bartolome de las Casas's defense of the Indians, here the proof comes too late. With the support of `cabinet ministers, bishops, all sorts of famous people', this was what the world noticed the most: `all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. They preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere.'

The major theme of this book is the same as the one of the first masterpiece in world literature, the Gilgamesh epic and its search for eternal life. The search here turned into a horrifying massacre of copies of human beings ... for the benefit of the originals.
It shows how deep mankind has fallen. But there is a sprinkle of hope in the form of one dissident among the originals, who defends the viewpoint that the clones should `made aware' of their sinister destiny.

For Kazuo Ishiguro, we should never let her go, the `old kind world', and never replace it by a more scientific, efficient, but harsh and cruel one.

Although some will not like the slow progress, the piecemeal revelation and the indirect suggestive style, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a dark, but formidable masterpiece.

Pansy Potter and the Philosopher's Clone?
Imagine an alternative Hogwarts where...

Took me two attempts to get through this book with about three years inbetween. All the blather about carers and donors without any explaination for the first third of the book really got on my wick. Finally picked it up again when I was stuck for a bedtime read and...

It's okay. Booker Prize shortlist material it is not but it's okay.