never let me go

i finished kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go two nights ago and i wish i had written about it immediately, while i was still “inside” it, but i didn’t have time and have now started a new book (ali smith’s the accidental). in any case, never let me go is a quite exceptional literary accomplishment, though i think ishiguro’s decision to break the spell at the end was a bit unfortunate, and aesthetically clumsy. but this may just be me. it’s just that this book is so entirely mysterious, not only because of its subject matter, but, more so, for the way ishiguro decides to portray it. it is mysterious, for instance, that the book’s england should be so bucolic, so a-modern, some fantasy-land not necessarily beautiful (it is often grey and rainy), but certainly uncontaminated by the worst civilization brings (the book is solidly and explicitly set in the late 1990s). even cars figure in it only accidentally, and TV sets. but no phones, no modern devices, no cities. there is a scene near the end when kathy, ruth, and tommy are quite taken by some big advertising poster, and what’s striking is the sense of wonderment these people have, not precisely at manifestations of modernity—they seem not to care, really—, but at allusions to what their life might have been like, or to what other people’s, people not like them, lives are. i think the wonderment at the poster with the office scene is not that different from the wonderment they all feel at the strangely beached boat.

it’s occurring to me now, and i’m not going to go back and organize these thoughts better but i’m going to let myself follow my thoughts as they come, that maybe the clones have a different sensibility from the “other people.” it seems pretty obvious from the boat scene that it is a big deal for all of them, even those who, like tommy, are at first not particularly interested. yet, it is also made somewhat clear (at least to me), that the boat is not a big deal for people in general. it’s like this event that really affects this community but not other communities, for some reason. so one might think that the idea is that the clones have a different sensibility.

their most striking feature—even though ishiguro magisterially makes it come across as if it were absolutely normal, so you realize it is strange only after thinking a little bit—is how obsessed they are by the vagaries of their interpersonal relationships, their relationships with one another. kathy, as the narrator, analyzes little events and exchanges between them to the minutest detail, as if they had the greatest significance in the world. it is only when the book ends that you realize that none of it was really that important, except maybe all the discussions that concern the clones' relationship with the guardians, because those provide clues to their status and future as clones. but this is interesting for us, the readers, the normal people. to them, to the clones, what is important are the subtlest nuances of their friendship, and their rapport to the guardians. it’s as if their world were incredibly fragile, and they needed to pay tremendous attention not to spoil the good mood between them, or make things uncomfortable for themselves and each other.

so the strange thing about this book is that these characters, or at least kathy, are simultaneously rather detached and rather obsessed. they are detached from what worries most of us, the readers. but they are obsessed with their—not inner life exactly, but the inner life of their relationships. kathy never spends much time analyzing the way she feels (the scene with the “never let me go” song is an exception, though obviously an important one), but she spends a tremendous amount of time analyzing the way she feels towards tommy and ruth, and the way they feel towards her and each other.

both tommy and ruth are, by the way, not wholly sympathetic characters (neither is, one might argue, kathy, though she’s certainly more sympathetic than either ruth or tommy). you keep expecting to find out why we should care about them, but at the end there’s nothing. so it is unclear, too, why kathy should love either of them so much. and it is hard, ultimately, to determine how much she does love them. she does, in spite of the title, let them go rather matter-of-factly, even though i’m fairly sure those separations are meant to be more emotional and devastating than i myself felt them. this may be a failure in ishiguro or a failure in me. i don’t know.

it is undeniable, though, that the book doesn’t call for much identification on the part of the reader. although undeniably human, the characters are also wholly alien, partly because of the things i’ve mentioned so far, partly because of their passive acceptance of their “destiny.” why don’t they conceive of, and put into being, a different life for themselves? why don’t they run away? but they don’t, even though it is absolutely clear that they received little to no indoctrination at hailsham; that, in fact, the whole purpose of hailsham was to keep them as innocent as possible about their future.

so this intensely alien, mysterious atmosphere gets somewhat spoiled, i think, when kathy and tommy (and we) get told about everything, get given the whole sorry story, at emily’s and marie claude’s house at the end. there the book jumps, if for a second, into realist mode, and though i am a great fan of realist fiction and do not enjoy non-realist fiction a whole lot, it is a bit of a let down. we did after all gather a sense of what was going on, and i, for one, would not have minded if the book had left me with some unanswered questions.

a lot of this book reminded me of this incredible japanese film i saw a couple of years ago, afterlife. same mixture of dingy realism (in never let me go, broken down houses, cassette tapes, mud, fences, cement, roadside cafés) and intense concentration on the characters’ interaction with each other, but in a way that makes them absolutely alien to us, the viewers.

this book gathers its rarefied, elegiac atmosphere also, partly, from what it omits: clothing is barely there (not in the sense that the characters go around naked, but in the sense that their clothes are rarely described), as is all physical appearance. in general, what is missing is all that concerns the life and comfort of the body: food, sleep, money, homes, rest, play. and, to some extent, even the life and comfort of the mind: there are books (i found ishiguro’s dropping of classics’ titles playful rather them meaningful in a deep way), but there is no cinema, no theatre, no museums, no history, no buildings and monuments, no science. also: no alcohol, no smoke, no drugs. even illness and physical decay, key elements of course in the novel, are dealt with with incredible scarcity of details: what gets donated on the “donations?” why carers? how are the recovering patients taken care of? are they in pain? do they take medication? do they undergo dialysis? there are only “tests,” and “completions,” and that’s about it for the details of the grueling medical procedures they have been “created for.”

the whole sociology and ethics of the cloning business is touched upon only at the end, in the scene with emily and marie claude that i thought ham-fisted, too explicit for such an inexplicit book. there are these mysterious “they” who send notices and keep the clones lined up for the next task, but one feels strangely incurious about them. the story, ultimately, is not about what goes on (and that’s why the scene at the end doesn’t work). the book is about holding on to one’s humanity, about balancing knowledge and ignorance, maybe about faith and love and those precious, fragile, impalpable things that keep us human in a inhuman world.