Never Let Me Go
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human. Never Let Me Go follows Kathy as she grows from schoolgirl to young woman at Hailsham, a seemingly pleasant English boarding school. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.
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Community Reviews
This was an interesting story. Since I have the habit of not reading synopsis beforehand, I wasn't really sure what to expect. This is a bit of a Dystopian worldview and damn, it was depressing.
Kathy is our 30-something narrator. She tells us she is a carer, which at the time means not much more than it's context, and she travels back in her memories to Hailsham, a private school in England. At first, I did start thinking it was going to be about uppity children growing up into obnoxious adults.
Boy, was I wrong.
Spoilers are ahead so beware!
Kathy's main friends at Hailsham are Ruth and Tommy. Throughout their time there, they are strongly encouraged to create art. So encouraged, they have events called Exchanges, where they pay for other students art via tokens they've earned. They also have Sales, where they can actually purchase items from outside the school. Both of these events allows the student to create their own collections. Around this point, I was finding it odd that parents were not mentioned. Oh, naive Amanda.
As they got older, Ruth and Tommy become a couple, even though it is Kathy that Tommy seems to gravitate towards. Sex is a hot topic and taught, with props, by the Guardians. But, the students are reminded they cannot make babies and MUST keep themselves free of disease and stay healthy.
From Hailsham, they move into the Cottages. Ruth is essentially the type of girl I would not like. Kathy, as a narrator, seems to get off her point quite often and tends to take the long way to her initial thought. And Tommy, poor dear, he doesn't seem to fit very well anywhere. After a rift between Ruth and Kathy, where Tommy is in the middle, Kathy goes off to training to become a carer.
It made me ill around this time to learn that all of these kids-growing-to-adults are clones. Their sole purpose in life is to live until they are required to make donations of their organs for their "original'. Sometimes the donations kill them, sometimes they recover enough to come upon their fourth donation, where they are kept alive and harvested as needed.
What is most horrifying is that none of the students seem worried about their fate. No one rails against donating. They just do. We learn that Hailsham was an experiment, a way to prove that the clones had souls and were human. It didn't take and Hailsham was eventually shut down. It's described that other clones live in deplorable conditions until they are harvested. People are not willing to bring back diseases into their life just because clones can feel.
I sincerely hope we never get to this type of future. But dystopia seems closer and closer some days, doesn't it?
Kathy is our 30-something narrator. She tells us she is a carer, which at the time means not much more than it's context, and she travels back in her memories to Hailsham, a private school in England. At first, I did start thinking it was going to be about uppity children growing up into obnoxious adults.
Boy, was I wrong.
Spoilers are ahead so beware!
Kathy's main friends at Hailsham are Ruth and Tommy. Throughout their time there, they are strongly encouraged to create art. So encouraged, they have events called Exchanges, where they pay for other students art via tokens they've earned. They also have Sales, where they can actually purchase items from outside the school. Both of these events allows the student to create their own collections. Around this point, I was finding it odd that parents were not mentioned. Oh, naive Amanda.
As they got older, Ruth and Tommy become a couple, even though it is Kathy that Tommy seems to gravitate towards. Sex is a hot topic and taught, with props, by the Guardians. But, the students are reminded they cannot make babies and MUST keep themselves free of disease and stay healthy.
From Hailsham, they move into the Cottages. Ruth is essentially the type of girl I would not like. Kathy, as a narrator, seems to get off her point quite often and tends to take the long way to her initial thought. And Tommy, poor dear, he doesn't seem to fit very well anywhere. After a rift between Ruth and Kathy, where Tommy is in the middle, Kathy goes off to training to become a carer.
It made me ill around this time to learn that all of these kids-growing-to-adults are clones. Their sole purpose in life is to live until they are required to make donations of their organs for their "original'. Sometimes the donations kill them, sometimes they recover enough to come upon their fourth donation, where they are kept alive and harvested as needed.
What is most horrifying is that none of the students seem worried about their fate. No one rails against donating. They just do. We learn that Hailsham was an experiment, a way to prove that the clones had souls and were human. It didn't take and Hailsham was eventually shut down. It's described that other clones live in deplorable conditions until they are harvested. People are not willing to bring back diseases into their life just because clones can feel.
I sincerely hope we never get to this type of future. But dystopia seems closer and closer some days, doesn't it?
This novel has a lot of cool concepts and character ideas, but they all seemed half-baked. When reading this, instead of being engrossed, I found myself thinking, "The author seems to have daydreamt about this section," or, "This seems like filler for the cool bits." Meh.
I feel overwhelmed. I didn't know how to stop crying towards the end. It hurt so bad.
It's kind of an autobiography of Kathy, a human clone. The story revolves around her upbringing at Hailsham. I didn’t know the plot beforehand. So at first I thought Hailsham is a British boarding school. The more I delved into the story, the more I got speechless. Hailsham works like a boarding school, but whom does it protect and give shelters? To human clones. They try to prove that these clones have souls by encouraging them to practice arts and discuss literature, although they are treated like machines and their only purpose of life is to be part of organ donations.
This story is unforgettable. The story might feel monotonous sometimes, but it's worth sticking to. The concept Ishiguro planned to establish is mind-boggling. Human clones to be used in organ donations, the establishment of their souls, the inhumanity behind the world's view of them- it all worked so well, so beautifully. Although the book is written in the simplest way, it is definitely a piece of literature. There was nothing easy about this book. It made my heart ache over and over.
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