Check out my list of Seven Science Fiction Novels to Expand (and Blow) Your Mind.

…and this is why Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Never Let Me Go is hauntingly beautiful and eerily disturbing.

The novel begins at a boarding school somewhere in the English countryside. On the surface, it seems like it will be a standard coming of age novel in a school setting.

But gradually we understand that something is not right at this school. Some of the teachers seem to pity the students. Some are even afraid of them. And why don’t they seem to have any families?

I won’t give away any further details about the plot, as it’s best to go into this one cold. This will let you enjoy Ishiguro’s storytelling power, which is in peak form in Never Let Me Go.

Everything in this book is so well done: the beautiful writing, the character development, the emotional impact on the reader, and the big questions it raises. Never Let Me Go is matched only by Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun, in terms of expertly written science fiction that will expand your mind. I highly recommend both.

Nie wiem czemu książki tego autora tak głęboko mnie dotykają, ale chyba w prostocie tkwi geniusz.

2 ½ stars. I’m kicking myself for going into this expecting a fast-paced novel I’d rocket through. Because this book may be post-apocalyptic and all depending on The Twist [which comes like a third of the way through, by the way] but it is certainly not fast-paced. Basically, even though I appreciated things about Never Let Me Go, my reading experience of this was 99% awful.

I’ve split this review into several parts, but my overarching opinion falls into one category: this book has clever ideas, but they’re not the focus. Instead, Never Let Me Go becomes a long list of memories. There is such a thing as taking show, not tell, too far - it’s when what you’re showing is beginning to bore the reader. Listen, if there are three thousand reveals or a deep character arc running through the book, we’re fine, but there are approximately two reveals and a bunch of character memories that failed to make me feel attached.

n  → the characters ←n
I want to say that I like the idea of Cathy’s character. She has been so torn down, so forced to be one thing that she has never considered being anything else or finding a different path in life. It is awful and horrifying. And yet, two things: one, she has no character voice, and two, the focus is not on developing Cathy. That is absolutely fine. Unless you’re me and literally only care about character development.

n  → the romance ←n
I’m so sorry, but this book did an utterly awful job with character chemistry. Tommy and Cath… I’m sorry, I just didn’t believe it. After spending an entire book screwing around and being just friends, they decide they’ve been in love for years because his ex girlfriend tells him they are. And then they start having sex and it is described so goddamn clinically. They clearly care about each other, but where’s the romantic side to this? I don’t even really attach to them as best friends. Neither of them are all that likable or even all that relatable.

n  → the worldbuilding ←n
A good idea, but I really don’t think this works when we see nothing about the rest of the world. I had sort of hoped the world would get expanded, we’d see the true context of normalcy juxtaposed to what the leads go through, and it just does not happen.

n  → the morality conflict ←n
It’s as if authors of 2005 think they can bring up a topic, offer zero new insight into said topic, and hope the audience thinks about the book in the future. Which, okay, I admit this strategy can work. If you’re attached to the characters enough to feel your heart break in tandem. I was not.

n  → the audio format ←n
I think, in general, listening to an audiobook of a book like this was a mistake. This is a book that required my skimreading technique. If I had read this in physical copy, I am quite confident I would have turned pages in a rush, read the whole thing in two hours skipping half the sentences, and liked it quite a bit more - I’m sure some of my thoughts would be similar, but the few reveals could’ve bumped this to a three or four at least. But by the end of this book… I was just waiting for it to end. I could no longer connect to Cathy because the book just needed to end. And that’s something to know for the future - about my reading style and about this book.

Oh well. I guess we can't win them all, right?

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My very first Kazuo Ishiguro's work. Certainly not the last.

This book aggressively provoked emotions in me without ever being that emotional at all. It didn't whine; didn't scream at me, just smoothly narrated the story to me, very matter-of-factly, even at times in a detaching way. And yet, the sadness I felt after finishing it, and even before that, was so disproprotionate, it took me wholly by surprise.

It wasn't a love at first sight by any means, I needed a whole month to finish it. The first time I got stuck in the middle of the first half and put it aside for months. *gasp*

So even with my 5 stars rating, I understand it's far from perfect and is certainly not a book for everybody.

A few reviewers mentioned that it depends on your personal experiences how much you can appreciate this book. And by god truer words have never been said. Yes! I'm positive that I would not have loved it as much if I read it prior to 2009 / when I still had my 'good health'. I would even venture to say I'd probably have hated this book when I was still one of the normal healthy population. But as it happens, I met Never Let Me Go in 2013 and that fact directly impacted how I conceive the premise and the characters' thought process.

The thing was n  I get Kathy.n

I get why she was so passive. I get why she resisted believing there was a 'way out' for them. Because to lose that kind of hope, that staunch a believe could be extremely devastating. And I understand why Kathy wanted to avoid that kind of heartbreak. I think, in a way, it sort of became her defense mechanism to not be passionate, about anything. To avoid all the disappointments.

I felt so sorry for her. So sorry for them all. For their 'fate', for their ruined friendships, for everything.

It's hard for me just writing about this book and these 'cursed' characters...
It just hit me like a brick to the chest. That is all I can say...

‎دوستانِ گرانقدر، این داستان بسیار غم انگیز و ناراحت کننده، از آن دسته از داستان هایست که وجدان هر انسانِ آگاهی را به درد می آورد... داستان کودکانِ بی گناهی که در یتیم خانه و یا پرورشگاهی دور از شهر به نامِ "هالشیم" بزرگ میشوند و عده ای موجوداتِ پست و کثیف که من آنها را لایق نام انسان نمیدانم، از کودکی به این کودکان، به نوعی القا میکنند که هیچ حقی برای زندگی ندارند و زمانی که بزرگ شدند، اعضای بدنشان را در مراحل مختلف به عده ای پولدار کثیف اهدا کنند و آنها را از دنیای بیرون از پرورشگاه یا همان یتیم خانه ترسانده اند... من نمیدانم یعنی زندگی این انسانهای بیچاره که جرمشان بی سرپرست بودن بوده است، ارزشش از زندگی دیگران کمتر است!!!؟.. به نظر من اهدای عضو یک حرکت غیر انسانی و کثیف است و نباید واژهٔ زیبای هدیه و یا اهدا را بر رویِ آن گذاشت
************
‎شخصیت های اصلی داستان، دو دختر به نامِ <کثی> و <روث> و همچنین پسری به نامِ <تامی> میباشند... کثی از کودکی عاشق تامی است و دوستِ او روث این را میداند، امّا از روی حسادت تامی را از دست کثی میرباید و عشق آنها را نابود میکند و امّا کثی هیچگاه اعتراضی نمیکند و عشق پاک و راستین خود را تا پایان در دل نگه میدارد
‎آنها بزرگ میشوند و کثی هنوز عضوی از بدنش را اهدا نکرده است و روث و تامی دو عضوِ بدنشان را اهدا کرده اند و دیگر با یکدیگر رابطه ای ندارند
‎اگر بخواهم در مورد این داستان بیش از این بنویسم، از جذابیتِ آن کاسته میشود
‎عزیزانم، بهتر است خودتان این داستان را بخوانید و از سرانجامِ غم انگیزِ آن آگاه شوید
************
‎به امید آن روزی که انسانها برای زندگی دیگران ارزش قائل شوند و زندگی هیچ انسانی ارزشش بالاتر از زندگی انسانِ دیگر نباشد و همه بدانند که حقِ زنده ماندنِ هر انسانی به دست خود اوست و برای زندگی کسی تصمیم نگیریم و حتی اگر کسی به کما میرود برای اعضای بدن او تصمیم نگیریم و اعضای بدنش را اهدا نکنیم.... امیدوارم این را درک کنید و زندگی انسانها در این دنیا را به زندگی موهوم و خیالی و دروغینِ زندگی دیگر در آن دنیای موهوم و خیالی و آخرت و هرچه که نامش را میگذارید، نفروشیم... خرد انسانی به ما میگوید که ما تنها این دنیا را داریم.. و سخن گفتن از دنیای موهومِ پس از مرگ و بهشتِ موهوم و خیالی، تنها برای سواستفاده کردن از انسانهای ساده در تاریخ بوده و میباشد
--------------------------------------------
‎امیدوارم از خوادندنِ این داستان لذت برده و کمی در آن بیاندیشید
‎<پیروز باشید و ایرانی>

If you read this book while also listening to Morrissey and watching American politics, you might become so depressed that you would require clinical intervention.

Without giving too much away, this is a dystopian novel where children are raised with a nefarious purpose . There is a whole system built up around this and there are questions about how best to live in such a world.

Best read as an allegory, we explore themes of love and kindness and the meaning of existence. Ishiguro develops complicated dynamics around the strange setting and fills in the gaps with friendships and sexual relationships.

This started very slow, up to around the middle of the book, so much so that I considered a DNF. But this was written by a Nobel prize winning writer and hundreds of thousands of people have liked it and so I soldiered on. As more of the sad dystopian elements are revealed at the end, it does pick up, but DAMN! this is a downer.

Inconsequential
It is a highly acclaimed best-selling novel, dramatised as a film, and a highly acclaimed author, so my expectations were pretty high. The concept from Kazuo Ishiguro is intriguing, with a slight twist from other science fiction books in this space. The focus is on Kathy and primarily her relationships with Tommy and Ruth, her childhood friends. They all attended Hailsham Boarding School, with no reference to their parents or any family connections. Life was peaceful and gentle; however, not everything seems normal. Kathy and her friends' knowledge and experiences of the real world were biased until they came of age and journeyed into the wider world.

The story's premise is that each child has been cloned and brought up as an organ donor or donor carer to provide backup organ replacement for the original person. In her early thirties, Kathy reflects on her childhood and early adulthood, trying to make sense of life and where she belongs. The old headmistress may have some answers if she can track her down. Can she ever let go of her destiny and the world she was born into at Hailsham?

I spent most of the book waiting for the action to kick-off, for the graduates from Hailsham to forcefully want answers, hold to account their guardians, and demand a human individual's rights over their bodies. It all seemed incredibly sedate and accepting, and I thought there may have been more investigation and refusal to accept the lives they had mapped out. The characters were one dimensional, and largely disappointing with no energy or depth.

Fundamentally a story of humanity, what it means to be human. How sacred each of us is, with the dreams and ambitions and freedom to live the best life we can rather than live a life as an organ catalogue. The concept and plot offered so much potential, even if it was a simple love story, but it all felt inconsequential. I was deeply moved by the idea but highly disappointed in the execution of the story. I would struggle to recommend it.

This is a great book to read if you want to feel really fucked up about some things.

Never Let Me Go is a book that itches beneath the skin. It left me uneasy, and on a less acknowledged level, deathly afraid. I didn’t so much finish reading it as emerge from it, gasping like I was breaking the surface of a deep sea. I've been going back and forth about what to say about this story, and I think that to divulge more than a handful of details would be a disservice to the reader. Therefore, this review gestures to some of the themes and plot beats, but seeks to avoid spoilers as much as possible.

Standing years from the page, our narrator Kathy, who is now thirty-one, returns to the scene of her childhood, back to Hailsham School, where she grew up, and where the inconclusive tides of memory, which would not stop, were always going to carry her.

Never Let Me Go’s form mirrors the difficult process of remembering. Kathy is determined to tie the loose cords in her mind, to weave something coherent out of the lost and recovered spaces of her childhood. In the story, the past is closely, obsessively observed; its pieces arranged and rearranged. Kathy is methodical, and she seems to cultivate a certain studied ambivalence and a strong sense of remove. She is careful not to let the past overtake her, to remain always in control. Yet, at points in the narrative, an errant memory might flood her, interrupt her; at which point Kathy’s story abandons its linear progression, becoming vulnerable to detours, digressions, and displacements. Kathy goes back over events to try to make sense of them again, re-examines her own claims, tries to find a clearer angle of approach, to engage every contradictory and countervailing perspective. The resulting narrative is porous and self-conscious, pointing to a sense of glassy fragility. From time to time, the private correspondence of an unspecified second-person “you” also crops up, adding a disconcerting level of intimacy. Exactly who is the “you” being summoned and addressed here? The answer is unclear. One rather feels slightly disarranged by the whole thing, scoured from these intimations of vulnerability. Like watching a solitary ghost host a vigil for forgotten things.

Memory is thus a central theme in the novel. Never Let Me Go offers a searing look at the vexed relationship between the past and the present, and the difficulty of recovering innocent lives from the annihilating forces of stigma and oppression. There are so many silences in this book. Some things are never referred to, never recalled for the reader. How did everything become so apocalyptically wrong? How is no one trying to stop it? How is any of this allowed? The enormity of the answers exists in its own absence of expression.

In Never Let Me Go, silence is the refusal of violence as violence. Kathy’s story, in other words, exists within and against the overwhelming superstructures that demand she unsees the violence that has become normative. In the repeated staging of Kathy’s encounters with the past, one senses a mind too numbed by terror, to accustomed to rupture. Kathy’s voice brings to the surface a conspiracy of silence that is already there, that has travelled with her into the present. At Hailsham, Kathy learned that there are things better left untouched by words: she was “told and not told,” but she knew, nonetheless, that to speak the unspeakable is to stray across a line that is invisible but inviolate. With time and effort, she learned too to move through the silence until it became native to her, a language on its own. It is the method everyone at Hailsham, one way or another, eventually evolves for their survival.

This is not to say that Kathy’s childhood world was entirely circumscribed by silence and its violences. In the midst of so much unfreedom, in this place where hope is so tenuous you want to dig your nails into it just to hold it tighter, Never Let Me Go imagines love and friendship as a fledgling and fugitive enterprise. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy made a collectivity out of their motley crew. Joined together in a kinship of fear and uncertainty, they helped each other endure. But our attachments to each other are never uncomplicated in times of great rupture. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are shaped then ruined by dispossession, by their banishment from the category of “human,” and later, by their belief in belonging to a world where their destinies are always already circumscribed by predetermined social scripts. It is brutally hard to see them repeatedly reach out to one another across space and time and an abundance of history and such a weight of responsibility and perpetual loss—and never quite grasp one another. Only a gorge remains, stretching on and on between them, gaping open like a slash in fabric.

What I’m saying is—Don’t expect this book to light up your insides with hope. Never Let Me Go does not end with lightness, resistance, or even the spectral possibility of healing. By the end, Kathy’s access to a story of resilience and agency is irretrievable. This is not the story of the heroic individual or individuals on a mission against the perverse, rotten world, of justice prevailing in a saga of survival. Instead, at the close of the novel, Kathy simply “drive[s] off to wherever it was [she] was supposed to be.” The finality, the absoluteness of this last line—“supposed to be”—is haunting.

The silences, gaps, and absences—the sheer irresolution of the narrative—make Never Let Me Go a difficult novel, and a demanding one. What it demands of the reader is that we think: about our positions of distance, of non-implication, vis-à-vis the senseless and seemingly unstoppable atrocities in the world, and about the power of silence itself. The moral contrast between the horror of what it is being done to Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy and the absence of urgency to prevent it does a great deal of work in this book. Ishiguro raises a host of questions about how complicity gestates and develops, how unexamined fear leads to non-recognition, and worse, to hatred of the other, and how habit and memory can keep our bodies moving in the right directions, playing pretend, desperate to slip back into some version of normality. In that sense, Never Let Me Go is a powerful, cognitive mapping of our time. It holds a mirror to the face of our own society, and demands we let ourselves be upended by the inhumanity and rottenness of our social systems, by the institutionalized dystopia of the everyday, where survival is never valiant, only crude and hideous, and where hope too often dies without a whimper. I can’t imagine anyone reading the news and reading this book and not feeling deeply, horrifically implicated.

But I suspect that is the point. Never Let Me Go demands we let ourselves be hit by the violence and sadism of inaction, so it might dare us to hope, to manifest the otherwise worlds the novel's ultimately bleak ending could not imagine.

This is my third book by Ishiguro and I am starting to see a pattern. The man writes beautifully and he has these fantastically clever ideas for his books, BUT he never quite achieves total fulfilment. Not for this reader any way!
The premise for this book was outstanding and I kept waiting to be blown away, but it never happened. I was not able to feel much for the characters and felt almost as blasé about what was going to happen to them as they did. The narrator was dull and the constant tripping backwards and forwards for no good reason in the story line was irritating.
That all sounds as though I hated it. I did not. It was a good story and one which I had to pursue to the end. The reveal was good if not totally unexpected. My disappointment is only that it should have been SO good but missed the mark.

I have no words…that’s my review
*sobs heavily*

A novel like an understated, wrapped in velvet iron fist right in the feels.
When I was 16 I focussed on the parse, plain prose, on world building and implausibilities; now I cried repeatedly because deep down, in a sense I feel our lives are how main character Kathy H. describes hers
But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.

Probably the first review here that I start with a youtube link, but this song (based on the book instead of the other way around) really does capture the style of this tale quite well: https://youtu.be/4UX6tzE7P44

This is one of those books that in a sense work (much) better while rereading it and knowing more of the main premise. I read this story first in 2006, and I think I cried when the movie came out with Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield, but now all the subtle foreshadowing really tugs on heartstrings. Till chapter 7 as a reader you are kept as much in the dark as the 10 till 13 year olds at the special boarding school Hailsham Never Let Me Go is set.

Growing up special...
None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you.

The skill how Kazuo Ishiguro paints the experiences of growing up on a boarding school, capturing the essence of schoolkids Tommy (repressed anger mixed in with a desperate wish to fit in) and Ruth (seemingly strong willed and a leader but at times lying and bluffing to get this impressions to stick), is excellent.

How he uses a small aside sentence, focussing on how every student of Hailsham wants to be favoured by a guardian, to feel special besides the confines of their small drawer with personal belongings, procured from secondhand shops and each other’s creative output, draws the slightly menacing atmosphere so well.
Or the magic realistic child thinking of Norfolk as a lost corner of England, where everything one has lost can be found back, like the lost corner in the school.
All absolutely heartbreaking when you know more of the purpose of the school.

The fickleness of memory (especially when it concerns a narrator whose role is potentially morally ambiguous while looking back on the past) is another aspect that is done masterfully by Ishiguro, and will be familiar to readers of the The Remains of the Day and the An Artist of the Floating World.

... ending up universally touching
‘But think of it. You were lucky pawns. There was a certain climate, and now its gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in the world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just do happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.’
‘It might be just some trend that came and went’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.’

Self determination and free will, nature vs nurture, mortality as something that is told to everyone but also not told in a profound manner, comes back more and more in part 2 and 3 of the book.
Part 2 is still in many senses a bildung novel, with a lot of ambiguity of feelings and intentions, characters wanting to be liked versus liking oneself: the staple for any teenager growing up. Here Ishiguro even outdoes Michael Cunningham in depicting three way relationships in all their complexity.

What was special for me on rereading was how for the first time I started to realise that the H. and E. as surname might not be to anonymous talk about classmate, but just a designation.
We all know it. We’re modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long they aren’t psychos. That’s what we come from. We all know it, so why don’t we say it.
Would that be true and explains Ruth lying, Tommy’s anger, Kathy’s urges?
In the end this theory seems to be invalidated, but still that was a new perspective in rereading the book as well.

There is a dark promise of what happens when humanism fails with advanced technology at hand, with the Hailsham students alienated from regular society
I realized, of course, that other people used these roads; but that night, it seemed to me these dark byways of the country existed just for the likes of us, while the big glittering motorways with their huge signs and super cafés were for everyone else.

Part 3 is in its core mainly focussed around the realisation of mortality.
How we, as the Hailsham students, will lose everything in the end, but keep on living on nonetheless, with this knowledge:
I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold on to each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how I think it is with us. It’s a shame because we loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.

Very disappointing, despite a promising opening. It is a ridiculous story that is increasingly badly told. If you don't want to know the key plot point, beware of reading the back cover of some editions. :(

GENRE
Although often classed as sci-fi, I think that's more because dystopian fiction is often categorised that way, rather than anything inherently sci-fi in the book itself. In fact, it doesn't even feel dystopian for a while. In many ways, it's more of coming-of-age novel: coping with loss of innocence and accepting responsibilities.

STYLE
The narration is very conversational (which is fine).

SETTING AND PLOT
It is initially set in a co-educational English boarding school, in a country house. There are the usual friendships and fallings out, and it has children as young as 5 (maybe younger), but in many ways it seems quite idyllic. However, there is an understated menace from the outset, and the school is oddly obsessed with creativity.

The pupils' vagueness about their eventual fate perhaps shadows that of the reader. Mention is made early on about carers and donors and they are told of "people who shudder at the very thought of you - of how you were brought into the world and why", but it's only towards the end that the details are made explicit. I think I might have enjoyed the book slightly more if I'd had to work it out for myself (rather than read it on the cover).

The middle section is set in "the cottages" where the leavers go to live for a couple of years or so, and the story narrows to be more specifically about Kathy (the narrator), Ruth and Tommy. This exaggerates the contrast of the first part: they can indulge their hobbies (reading and sex, mostly), living comfortably without the need to work, but they are increasingly aware that soon things will change.

LOSING CREDIBILITY
The final section follows the three of them when they leave, and this is where the book completely lost any trace of believability for me. The underlying story is too full of holes, even within its own dystopian world. I just do not believe anyone would have the means to go to such extraordinary lengths when there are far simpler, quicker and cheaper solutions. I was reminded of this when I read Under the Skin, which is also set in an apparently normal contemporary world, but has a similarly far-fetched, overly complex, expensive and time-consuming way of solving a problem.

Also, why have carers travelling round the country to be with different donors, rather than each carer being based in one location? That is implausible and not even necessary for the story!

I was also a little surprised that they were as accepting as seemed to be the case (not totally accepting, but pretty much), but I suppose being born and raised in what was effectively a brainwashing cult is very powerful means of making people accept their fate. Any that did successfully and permanently break away would be hushed up and not necessarily mentioned in the novel.

Finally, it goes from bad to worse, with the cheap James Bond/Blofeld trick of having one character near the end explaining everything in a rush.