As a child, Kathy H. attended Hailsham, an elite boarding school where children were raised to be both healthy and artistic and taught to believe that both their health and creativity were essential to themselves and to the world they would one day enter. Now an adult, Kathy reflects back on her life. She charts the very slow progression of her growth, her friendships with fellow students Tommy and Ruth, and her knowledge, as she herself gradually began to learn about her role in the outside world—and what this role dictates about her identity. A combination of heavy introspection and soft-scifi, Never Let Me Go has a thought-provoking premise and is brilliantly written, but fails to reach its potential, spending all its time in excruciatingly slow buildup and none of it in impact, theory, or debate. Enjoyable, but somewhat empty, and so moderately recommended.

This book's greatest strength is its writing style, but it is also one of the most irritating aspects. Kathy, the narrator, is intensely thoughtful and analytical, breaking down her personal history into eras, important moments, and developing themes. She walks the reader through the story of her life much in the way she lived it, slowly, very slowly, bringing to light her final realizations. In other words, there is a lot hidden in this book, and it takes the book's entire length—literally until the last fifteen pages—to reveal it all. In between are circuitous examples, where Kathy starts to talk about one event, goes back a bit to explain why the event was relevant, explains the event itself, and then goes on without having drawn a major conclusion—instead, she's just mapped another point on her gradual arc or argument. The resulting pace is excruciating, both artful, brilliantly thought-out and executed, and simply painful as the reader is lead along, disappointed, and lead along again. The book's pace bring the characters to life (although both Ruth and Tommy lack some dimension) and, with it, the life that they lived, through Hailsham and beyond. As such, it is the highlight of the book, worked like an artform, but it is also intensely irritating and makes the book (which actually reads quite quickly) seem longer than it is.

There are a near-infinite number of issues, from the ethical to philosophical, that could be brought to question and debate in this book. The very premise almost begs them—both the science of the base culture and the purpose of Hailsham itself. Unfortunately, however, none of these topics are brought to issue in the text. Instead, the book is consumed by the very slow progression of the story, the creep towards the "twist" revelations of who the children are and what purpose they serve. When finally revealed, these revelations are not all that big—not because they lack the potential to be, but because they pale in comparison to the immense buildup that leads to them. The characters just barely exceed the gradual revelation of the book's premise and are largely just passive carriers of the story, and so the other various issues, the possible debates, never enter into the text. So when other reviewers talk about the questions this book raises, what they're really talking about is the potential for questions—and that is not the same thing. The burden of meaning for this book, everything that the reader could take away and continue to think about, rests entirely on the reader, who must pull out the themes and ask the questions himself, carry on the debates himself. The author shirks his responsibility, and the book suffers for it, failing to live up to its potential.

My final complaint with this book is that the underlying concept seems, blandly, unrealistic. **SPOILERS** follow, so be warned: The fact that in the book's contemporary culture the clones are considered non-human despite looking, acting, and living like humans seems entirely impossible. Consider: Humans never viewed the first cloned animals as different than their original counterparts; indeed, we were amazed and drew attention to the fact that they were identical, that they were clones. So why would cloned humans be any different (especially that these clones pass in human society as normal and indistinguishable)? Outside of the huge wastefulness of cloning entire humans just to harvest their organs, the fact that the cloned humans were not considered humans seems unreal to me, no matter who the gene donors were, no matter what brief attempts Ishiguro (though Ms. Emily) makes to justify it. **END SPOILERS** This is the underlying basis of the book's conflict and plot, and so problems with this concept create problems throughout the book. They weaken the foundations, making it difficult to accept the book and, as a result, even more difficult to take on the work of finding and analyzing themes, which the author fails too do. In the end, Never Let Me Go has a thoughtful premise with heavy potential for thought, theory, and debate, and it is skillfully, even artfully written, but the book fails to live up to its potential: the author does not tackle his own themes, and no matter how interesting the premise, it is an unreasonable one. I wanted to enjoy this book, and I did, but I felt cheated at the end: the final product was surprisingly empty, with the burden of meaning placed entirely and unfairly upon the reader alone.

Um...I'm sorry but I just didn't like it. (Insert frowny face) A few times I thought "okay, here we go!" But then nope, nothing, nada. The majority of the book felt like an epilogue.

2.5

Edit July 2024: I finally got the time to peruse the NY Times The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.I am happy that Never Let me Go got a deserved place in Top 10 (no.9).


Just announced as Winner of the Nobel Prize 2017!!! Well deserved.

****

I believe a good book transmits a feeling, happiness, sadness, outrage etc. Of i do not feel anything after I read a certain book I do no consider it was worth it. And this book defenitely made me feel something. What? I cannot put it into words. A feeling that made me take a break from the for two weeks but also made me return to it when I felt I was in the right spirits. I do not know why but I really liked this book. It is quite different than anything I've read before.

This book - a "Man Booker Prize' finalist - has gotten good reviews so I had high expectations. The book is narrated by a young woman named Kathy. Kathy has a job as a "carer" (a sort of nurse) for special people called "donors."

Kathy is telling the story of her life beginning when she was a student at an exclusive British boarding school called the Hailsham School.



Kathy and her friends - Ruth, Tommy, Grace and others - seem to exhibit the usual kid behaviors. They form cliques, join clubs, play games, tease each other, have fights, and so on.







The kids also go to classes taught by teachers called "guardians" and have their best artwork and poems collected by a periodic visitor called "Madame."





In a lot of ways Hailsham seems more or less like a normal boarding school. It isn't however. The kids never seem to leave the school at all and we soon learn that they have no parents and are being groomed to be "donors" - which is just what you think it is. When the kids are grown they are expected to give away their body organs.

Though the premise of the book is intriguing the story moves along excruciatingly slowly. Moreover, it's hard to identify with the characters who are, for the most part, not particularly likable. I really hated Ruth, who was a bitch, a liar, a manipulator, and a thief.



Even the "nicer" characters though, like Kathy and Tommy, don't inspire me to care about them very much.



As Kathy's story continues we see that the students finish their studies at the Hailsham School as teenagers and then move to "cottages" for a couple of years or so. By now the students are less sheltered and go out and about.



They also engage in typical young adult behavior with a lot of hooking up and sex.



After a couple of years or so in the cottages the students generally start their jobs as "carers," after being carers for a while they become "donors."





I kept expecting the author to explain more about what was going on in the story: These kids seem to be clones but where did they come from? Who got the organs (or were they for some kind of research)? Why did the kids go along with this program? Why were the students so casual about death and sex? I never got the answers though.

Though the author explores an interesting concept, the story just doesn't come together for me.

You can follow my reviews at http://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot.com/

What a fascinating book... at the start I had problems getting into the story, but when I picked it up again after some time, I was totally intrigued by the story. In these last times, I have been working long hours and had really little time to read. But when going to bed I read a couple of pages before going to sleep, two, three, four... and more. And I ended up really looking forward to reading these few pages at the end of the day, getting slowly to the end and in some wonderous way taking away my thoughts of work and high pressure. It relaxed me. Apparently this book is suitable for a slow interrupted read. How can anyone invent such a dark, chilling and heartbreaking story? Wow, five stars...!

'When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn’t really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I’ve never forgotten.’

This was quite an upsetting and bleak book. It was utterly compelling and simultaneously awful. It will stay with me for a long time. My next book will need to be rousing and cheerful..

This book absolutely should have won the Hugo award for 2006. It wasn't nominated. Why? Because it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize? Because the author's other novels aren't science fiction? I don't know. But it is definitely the most significant, disturbing, haunting - and enjoyable - recent SF novel that I have read.

In an alternate-reality England of the 1990s, a woman named Kathy reminisces about her childhood at a school called Hailsham. Her experiences, at first, are those that might seem normal – both the joys and travails – to anyone familiar with British boarding schools. And of course, Kathy does perceive her experiences as having been "normal," because, like everyone, she sees her past only in the context of her own experiences. But, as we quickly realize, from our perspective, Kathy's life is not normal at all. She, and all the students at Hailsham, are clones created solely for the purpose of organ donation.

What's exceptional about this book it how Ishiguro created a tense book, with a creeping sensation of growing horror, solely through the voice and perceptions of Kathy – who, although intelligent and creative, is essentially a passive character, a product of lifelong conditioning and training to accept her fate as inevitable duty.

Nearly everything is told to the reader "between the lines" – The characters themselves are naiively unaware of the dreadful pathos of their lives. We never even really see the "villains" in this society (although the reader is led to think of questions of bioethics and what people in our own reality are also willing to do - people in this world do already die because others want their healthy organs).
The title works as a metaphor for the whole book, in a way – if we asked Kathy what "Never Let Me Go" means, she would tell you it was the title of a song on a secondhand tape that she listened to (and misunderstood) as a girl – but as readers, we can see that it refers to the creation of a situation where, even without guards or electrified fences, human beings are trapped so deeply by their own selves that the concept of fleeing a dreadful end (which they do realize is dreadful) doesn't once even occur to them.

It is clear that it has occurred to Ishiguro, however, when he gives us a scene where children are discussing prison camps with electrified fences, and the guardians are explicitly uncomfortable. The fences around these people are not electrified, nor tangible, but they are just as real - and they continue to exist even when physical 'freedom' is granted.

Went into this completely blind after only really seeing the hype behind it… what a heartbreaking surprise.

Con Kazuo Ishiguro me siento un bicho raro: no me gusta, sus iniciales puntos de partida son interesantes pero no bien llevados y la historia termina por desinflarse.

También es el caso de esta. Su principio es intrigante, atractivo, con un sin fin de buenas posibilidades para desarrollar. Y el autor no escoge la mejor de ellas. A partir del momento en el que se resuelve la clave principal del relato la cosa decae, y el descenso va adquiriendo velocidad a medida que vamos descubriendo todas las demás.

Uno de los motivos principales de mi desafecto es la caracterización de los personajes: no me los creí en ningún momento. Me resultó escandalosa su falta de curiosidad y de rebeldía; la fácil y hasta satisfactoria aceptación de lo inaceptable; los lazos sentimentales tan endebles que se establecen entre ellos y hasta la frialdad de sus comportamientos.

"Non mi era mai passato per la mente che le nostre vite, che fino a quel momento erano rimaste tanto strettamente intrecciate fra di loro, potessero disfarsi e separarsi per una cosa come quella. [….] Se allora l'avessimo capito – chissà – forse ci saremmo tenuti più stretti l'uno all'altra.“

Sublime... simply sublime. 31 year old Kathy recounts her life, and those of her friends, from an entire childhood spent at a boarding school, to an adulthood spent as a carer -slowly, page by page, using Kathy as the narrator the shocking reality of the group's lives is revealed.

I give this book all my bookish love, for the slowly revealed horror of the protagonists' existences, the harrowing lives they lead, and most of all for forever haunting me with this exquisite speculative fiction masterclass. How did Kazuo do it? He entwined beautiful and subtle underplayed romances with the horror of their lives - yet, on completion, I realised that these romances were profound, epic and essential to the story! What can I say, other than - Holey Hannah Montana, I am so Happy that I have further Kazuo Ishiguro books to read! 'Ate out of 12..