Product Description

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day comes a devastating new novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.

Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special–and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7499 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-14
• Released on: 2006-03-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400078776
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.

Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–The elegance of Ishiguro's prose and the pitch-perfect voice of his narrator conspire to usher readers convincingly into the remembered world of Hailsham, a British boarding school for special students. The reminiscence is told from the point of view of Kathy H., now 31, whose evocation of the sheltered estate's sunlit rolling hills, guardians, dormitories, and sports pavilions is imbued with undercurrents of muted tension and foreboding that presage a darker reality. As an adult, Kathy re-engages in lapsed friendships with classmates Ruth and Tommy, examining the details of their shared youth and revisiting with growing awareness the clues and anecdotal evidence apparent to them even as youngsters that they were different from everyone outside. [...] Ishiguro conveys with exquisite sensitivity the emotional texture of the threesome's relationship, their bonds of personal loyalty that overcome fractures of trust, the palpable boundaries of hope, and the human capacity for forgiveness. Highly recommended for literary merit and as an exceptional platform for the discussion of a controversial topic.–Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA
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From The Washington Post
Kazuo Ishiguro's strange, and strangely affecting, new novel revolves around three people whom we first meet as children and whose fates are decided in early adulthood. It is an exceedingly difficult novel to review because essential aspects of it are also essential to the complex mystery at its core, so discussing it almost immediately becomes a delicate balance between what can and cannot be revealed. Believing as I strongly do that readers must be allowed to discover a book's secrets for themselves, guided by the author's hand, rather than have those secrets gratuitously spilled by a reviewer, I shall err on the side of silence, so please bear with me.

Never Let Me Go is set in an undisclosed time -- not in the future, though the novel pays more than a slight bow to science fiction, perhaps between the 1950s and the 1970s -- at a place in the British countryside called Hailsham. It is a school, but a school unlike any other. It was intended to be "a shining beacon, an example of how we might move to a more humane and better way of doing things." The teachers are called "guardians" and the students, though that is what they are called, are neither ordinary students nor ordinary children. They come to Hailsham at a very early age and stay there until, as older teenagers, they are permitted to live in "the Cottages" or "the White Mansion" or "Poplar Farm," halfway houses from which they make tentative steps into the real world.

The narrator of the novel is Kathy, or Kath, and the two other principal characters are her close friends and occasional rivals, Ruth and Tommy. She is "thirty-one years old, and . . . a carer now for over eleven years." What is a carer? One of the novel's mysteries, not really to be solved until two-thirds of the way through; suffice it to say that it's a difficult, emotionally and physically wearing job. Ruth and Tommy, approximately her own age, are "donors," but that mystery, too, must be left to Ishiguro to solve.

In any event, for most of the novel Ishiguro is primarily concerned with the three as children and with the odd world they inhabit at Hailsham. The school, or institution, or whatever one cares to call it, is located on a large parcel of beautiful land, isolated from the outer world. Its students are made to understand that "we were all very special," that "we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside." Their futures are hinted at but not faced head-on: "We hated the way our guardians, usually so on top of everything, became so awkward whenever we came near this territory. It unnerved us to see them change like that." They have a "special chance," but they have only the vaguest idea what that might be.

They are so caught up in the rituals and routines of Hailsham, though, that they have little time for speculation about the distant time of adulthood. They excitedly await "Exchanges," for example: "Four times a year -- spring, summer, autumn, winter -- we had a kind of big exhibition-cum-sale of all the things we'd been creating in the three months since the last Exchange. Paintings, drawings, pottery; all sorts of 'sculptures' made from whatever was the craze of the day -- bashed-up cans, maybe, or bottle tops stuck onto cardboard." Each child is given "Exchange Tokens" with which he or she can "buy work done by students in your own year," from which they form collections that become precious mementos of their time at Hailsham.

The very best products of their creative labors go to "the Gallery." None of them has ever seen it or even knows where it is, but the pieces for it are regularly chosen by a woman whose name they do not know -- "we called her 'Madame' because she was French or Belgian -- there was a dispute as to which -- and that was what the guardians always called her" -- and having one's work selected is regarded as a great honor. They also know that Miss Emily, the head of Hailsham, told one student "that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul."

Besides the Exchanges, the children look forward to the Sales, which "were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside." Every month "a big white van" brings the flotsam and jetsam of the outside world:

"Looking back now, it's funny to think we got so worked up, because usually the Sales were a big disappointment. There'd be nothing remotely special and we'd spend our tokens just renewing stuff that was wearing out or broken with more of the same. But the point was, I suppose, we'd all of us in the past found something special at a Sale, something that had become special: a jacket, a watch, a pair of craft scissors never used but kept proudly next to a bed. We'd all found something like that at one time, and so however much we tried to pretend otherwise, we couldn't ever shake off the old feelings of hope and excitement."

Too, the Sales are a way of connecting to the world outside: "at that stage in our lives, any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land; we had only the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn't possible there." Hailsham is a closed circle beyond which they are not permitted to venture, with the result that the larger world becomes the subject of apprehension as well as curiosity: The children are "fearful of the world around us, and -- no matter how much we despised ourselves for it -- unable quite to let each other go."

That theme, which recurs throughout the book, is summarized for Kathy by a long-playing record she owned for a while -- eventually, and mysteriously, it vanished -- called "Songs After Dark," by a singer named Judy Bridgewater (fictitious, as best I can determine), one track of which is a song titled "Never Let Me Go." The students have been told "it was completely impossible for any of us to have babies," but even as a very young child Kathy dreams of having one:

"What was so special about this song? Well, the thing was, I didn't used to listen properly to the words; I just waited for that bit that went: 'Baby, baby, never let me go. . . .' And what I'd imagined was a woman who'd been told she couldn't have babies, who'd really, really wanted them all her life. Then there's a sort of miracle and she has a baby, and she holds this baby very close to her and walks around singing: 'Baby, never let me go. . .' partly because she's so happy, but also because she's so afraid something will happen, that the baby will get ill or be taken away from her. Even at the time, I realized this couldn't be right, that this interpretation didn't fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn't an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance."

One time Kathy is alone in her room, playing the song, "swaying about slowly in time to the song, holding an imaginary baby to my breast." Then "something made me realize I wasn't alone, and I opened my eyes to find myself staring at Madame framed in the doorway. . . . She was out in the corridor, standing very still, her head angled to one side to give her a view of what I was doing inside. And the odd thing was she was crying. It might even have been one of her sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream." When she tells Tommy about this, he says: "Maybe Madame can read minds. She's strange. Maybe she can see right inside you."

What Madame thinks she sees will not be revealed for many pages, but it gets right to the essence of this quite wonderful novel, the best Ishiguro has written since the sublime The Remains of the Day. It is almost literally a novel about humanity: what constitutes it, what it means, how it can be honored or denied. These little children, and the adults they eventually become, are brought up to serve humanity in the most astonishing and selfless ways, and the humanity they achieve in so doing makes us realize that in a new world the word must be redefined. Ishiguro pulls the reader along to that understanding at a steady, insistent pace. If the guardians at Hailsham "timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information," by the same token Ishiguro carefully and deliberately unfolds Hailsham's secrets one by one, piece by piece, as if he were slowly peeling an artichoke.

Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The Truth Between the Lines
Set in the 1990's, Kazuo Ishiguro's quietly disturbing novel aims to make us question the ethics of science even though the author never directly raises the topic. The narrator of Never Let Me Go is Kathy H., a woman who introduces herself as a "carer" mere months away from becoming a "donor," as though we should know what these terms mean. This nearness to ending one stage of her life to entering another causes her to reminisce about Hailsham, the school in the English countryside where she grew up with her two closest friends, Tommy D. and Ruth. The three form an unlikely trio: Ruth is headstrong and imaginative; Tommy has an uncontrollable temper; and Kathy is steady and observant in the subtleties of human behavior. It is this last quality belonging to Kathy H. that sets the tone of the novel. Everything is precisely told in an even, matter-of-fact voice that never questions the strange terminology and conversations that alert the reader to something more grave lurking under what seems, on the surface, to be an ordinary story about three childhood friends. As the three grow up, they begin to face moments more important than the minor disagreements of childhood.

Ishiguro's richly textured description of the relationship among the three supplies all the details without confronting the larger issues. As Kathy tells us, the guardians at Hailsham both tell and not tell the students the truth about Hailsham and their lives--exactly what Ishiguro does to the reader. The truth is doled out in increments, over the course of the entire novel, requiring the reader to understand what is implied as much as what is told. The frightening side to all this is that the characters never question the course of their lives. No one runs, or questions why they are the ones to make the ultimate sacrifice. One of the most poignant moments comes near the end when Kathy says, "Why should we not have souls?" By this point, it has been apparent to the reader that Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth are human in every sense of the word, with talents and intelligence and foibles and complex emotions, and yet are regarded as both freaks and disposables by the "normals." For the reader, these characters are anything but expendable.

Ishiguro's literary style of examining small moments might disappoint readers who expect a strong plot. Although the premise may belong to science fiction, this novel is more concerned with characterization and theme. If you like writers in the tradition of Ian McEwan, Marilynne Robinson, Chang-Rae Lee, and Margaret Atwood (whose The Handmaid's Tale creates a different dystopia), you'll be immediately swept into this alternate world where the past is also the future.

The Banality of Amoral Science
Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant new book, NEVER LET ME GO, returns the author to the themes and approaches he first addressed in THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Just as Stevens the butler devoted himself unthinkingly and uncritically to the minutiae of daily life on behalf of his Nazi sympathizing master, Lord Darlington, the main characters in Ishiguro's latest book focus on the irrelevant small details and minor tribulations of their lives without ever once contemplating the bigger picture. In both cases, the author not only conjures the question of the meaning of life, he asks us to contemplate the tragedy of wasted lives.

On its surface, NEVER LET ME GO tells the story of three special young people - Kathy H., Tommy D., and Ruth - all of whom meet as students at an idyllic private school called Hailsham. Kathy H. is the narrator, now 31 years old, telling her story in hindsight. She recalls her student days at Hailsham fondly, filling her tale with numerous minor anecdotes about the most mundane affairs that slowly reveal the nature of the school and its students' place in the world. (...) Ishiguro creates a convincing vocabulary, milieu, and mythology for this setting: guardians, carers, donors, completing, Exchanges, Sales, the Gallery, Norfolk, and an eerie sense of the students having "been told and not told."

NEVER LET ME GO accomplishes the remarkable challenge of presenting 288 pages' worth of reading between the lines. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are not the real main characters of this story, only the visible ones. The real main characters are invisible, the ones who have not only facilitated the use of cloning as a form of organ farming, but who have created a conditioning environment in which their victims accept their fate without question, as the natural order of things. Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and their ilk live among normal people yet virtually never approach them, willing segretating themselves from the rest of society as though they were lepers. They live in Skinner boxes without boundaries, conditioned to believe they exist only to sacrifice their lives for the continued life of others. We never see the bioengineers or social scientists who create and maintain this horrifying use of humanity. Instead, they are represented (only on a limited scale) by Hailsham's headmistress, Miss Emily, and the mysterious, art-collecting Madame Marie-Claude.

In 1963, after attending the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel, the renowned Hannah Arendt wrote a profound and controversial book entitled EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: THE BANALITY OF EVIL. Arendt went to the trial expecting to see a monster. Who else could be responsible for such evil as the Holocaust? Instead, she found an accounting clerk. Not only were the most normal of people apparently capable of mindless cruelty, but their evil was senseless, meaningless even to themselves. In this way, their evil was banal. Ishiguro creates a similar feeling, using the triteness of Kathy H.'s reminiscences and Miss Lucy's behaviors and rationalizations to illustrate the banality of their own peculiar form of evil: science practiced for its own sake, without the application of moral standards. NEVER LET ME GO is neither preachily anti-science nor moralistically pro-religion. It is simply a call to include our consciences in the application of science. Perhaps the fact that the first identified character in the book to speak other than Kathy and Ruth is a student named Hannah (who never appears again in the text) is Ishiguro's way of telling us to beware the dangers of banality, that sliding over the edge from ordinariness to "Ruth-less" evil is easier than we think.

I puzzled for a while over the setting - England in the 1990's - until I realized that the first sheep clone, Dolly, was created in England in 1996 and died prematurely a few years later. In a sense, all of Hailsham's students are sheep, raised in out-of-the-way rural settings, separated from society and isolated from knowledge of both the practical world and the world of ideas, limited in their human interactions except with one another, and, of course, bred to be consumed (for their vital organs). On several occasions, I was reminded of the cowlike creature in Doug Adams's RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE who greets diners by declaiming the tasty virtues of his best parts and declares: "..it was eventually decided to ... breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am." Adams presented his creature for comic effect; Ishiguro presents his "poor creatures" (as Madame repeatedly calls them) for a low key but nightmarish effect.

NEVER LET ME GO is a transcendent novel, an astonishingly powerful work of literature. The pace is slow and the details seem trivial, but patient readers will be rewarded for their efforts with a thought-provoking exposition on whose life is worth living and who, if anyone, has the right to set the terms and conditions. Arendt contemplated the banality of evil - Ishiguro warns us of the evils that lurk behind banality.

Simply Brilliant
WARNING: This review contains "spoilers," information that reveals key plot details.

This novel works beautifully on multiple levels, giving it a quality that kept me thinking about its plot, characters and themes long after I finished its final page. On the most obvious level it is a sort of alternate history that depicts a dystopian society in 1990s England that breeds human clones to become organ donors for "the normals." In that aspect, it brings to mind Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where humans are created in test tubes and have fixed functions that they grow up to perform in society.

However, Never Let Me Go is more subtle than either Huxley or -- another obvious comparison -- George Orwell's 1984, in that the oppressor is not specifically depicted and there is no one person or group that is in obvious conflict with Ishiguro's main characters. There is nothing overt that keeps them in their places, whether that place is at school when they are children, or at "recovery centers" while their internal organs are being systematically plucked out. I kept wondering why the two lovers, Kathy and Tommy, didn't just pick up their stuff, get in her car and take off for parts unknown, eventually blending in with the "normal" population.

And that brings me to the next, deeper level, of the novel, which is about the nature of humanity. All of this novel's characters seem to meekly accept their fates, even Tommy, who has a temper and often throws fits of rage when frustrated. They are also hyper-sensitive to one another, reading motivations and emotions into each small gesture and remark, as though every utterance and movement each one makes is deliberate, premeditated and loaded with significance. To me, human behavior is much less reasoned than that, with much said and done that has no rational basis. (Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)

In that regard, perhaps the clones (euphemistically called "students" in the novel) really are not human beings with souls, but beings bred for a specific function, which strong emotions tend to derail. If that is the case, perhaps the students' creators bred human emotion out of them in order to facilitate their end purpose. Most "normals" seem to view the "students" as sub-human, which is of course necessary if the "students'" organs are to be harvested in good conscience. This brings to mind a host of justifications for deplorable acts and practices throughout human history, from slavery to the contemporary killing of the Great Apes.

Ishiguro reveals to his readers that the students' adult "guardians" believe they are human beings with souls, and the "guardians" spend a great deal of time and effort trying to prove this to the other "normals." This takes us to yet another, deeper question posed by the story: Can members of a privleged class save those who are less so, or must the oppressed save themselves?

The actions that the "guardians" take on behalf of their "students" do not change the ultimate fate of the latter. They do, however, change the conditions in which the "students" are reared. So, in the end, the main "student" characters are well-read, cultured and, as children, had more creature comforts than many of their peers. But they also have false hope that some outside force may "defer" their fates, and in the end those dashed hopes may be more painful to endure than if they never had hope at all.

Essentially, the "guardians" are reformers of the Jane Addams type, who move in with the oppressed and try to help them. But the final outcome is not changed, and one is left wondering about the validity of a reform movement in the first place. Perhaps the only real way to make institutional change of the magnitude required in this novel's world is for the "students" to embrace their true identity as clones and start focusing on how to stay alive.

Ishiguro does not offer opinions on any of these issues, rather presents the questions in powerfully compelling ways that make us stop and think about our assumptions and the way the tasks of daily life tend to distract us from considering deeper issues.

While it's always true that a great novel will mean different things to each person who reads it, I believe that this is particularly the case with Never Let Me Go. There is so much thought-provoking stuff packed inside this relatively short novel that its title becomes prophetic -- you won't stop thinking about it for a long while.