Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

“I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things steadying the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on the sea shore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles, before finally coming up against these trees and their two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming accross those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all.. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyesand imagined that this was the spot where everything I’d lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it..”

These are the words of Kathy H., the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. She reflects on her solitude after the demise of her lover Tommy, and her progression towards the gruesome destiny defined by society for her and her closest friends. When I lived on that same Norfolk coast, at the time believing that this place indeed was where I also had washed up,  I knew they had to belong, at least geographically, to this Miscellany.

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

This novel by Kazuo Ishiguro has details of boarding-school existence which captures some truths for those who have gone through the experience. The formation of cliques, the petty rivalries, the attachment to benevolent teachers, the management of feelings in a parent-free environment are all in the mix, and it is this mix that key individuals discover and explore their core humanity, in spite of the controlling regimentation of daily life. But the novel is not, of course, only or even at all about boarding school existence.

Kathy is a thirty-one year old carer. Those for whom she cares, as we soon discover, are a special set of people, of whom she is one. She is good at her job – she has been doing it for eleven years. But now she is about to give it up for what is, it turns out, to be the beginning of the last phase of her life.  We find her now, reflecting back over that life, and its unique experiences. She calls to mind her days at Hailsham, the idyllic boarding school she went to and which had a major influence on her later years.

But we soon find out, through arcane references and the odd vocabulary that peppers Kathy’s narrative, that Hailsham was no ordinary school, in fact not quite a school at all. It is recogniseable as a boarding school, but differs from the norm in fundamental ways.  A key difference, we soon learn, is that the children here have no parents to go home to, and so that important rhythm of mixing different worlds, is lost to them.

Some of the teachers are distant, uncomfortable with the children. The unspoken secret between controllers and controlled weighs heavy. The punishment for Miss Lucy, who one day reveals all to the class, is immediate dismissal. The class, however, is strangely muted at the revelation. It is a secret which remains unwelcome and quiety shelved as life, of a kind, continues.

But in this mix, Kathy’s friends Tommy and Ruth want to discover more about their destiny. As they grow older, they find themselves working through their emotional bonds which grow from the seeds planted in their time at Hailsham, and it is this love story of possessiveness and then self-sacrifice that provides the background to our exploration of the parallel political, social and emotional world of the novel.