NEVER LET ME GO

I just finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, Never Let Me Go, and can’t quite decide what I thought of it. Most of the book was slow and quiet, with the narrator reminiscing about her youth at boarding school, and I didn’t really care for the characters—the narrator’s voice rubbed me the wrong way, her best friend seemed like a huge jerk, and the male component of their friendship/love triangle never had much personality. But there were these dark hints and undercurrents that made me keep reading as fast as I could, because the book takes place in a dystopian version of the present and *SPOILER ALERT* the characters are all clones who have been created solely as organ donors. After a brief and happy time at school, they become donors in their 20s and perform repeated donations until they die. This is of course an extremely chilling and disturbing thing to read about, but it’s always in the background of the book, rarely in the foreground—the characters never actually try to question or escape from their fates, which I think bothered some of the readers whose reviews I read on Amazon, but to me that’s the point of the book, like all Ishiguro books, that the narrator has internalized the norms of a repressive society and is to some extent deluding him/herself and the reader. I think Ishiguro is trying to portray the characters and their lives as ordinary, except for the One Big Thing, which is cool, except as a reader you keep thinking the One Big Thing is such a cool concept, you wish there was a lot more of that in the book and less about the petty schoolyard drama with the jerky best friend. Still, it’s beautifully written in parts, sad and moving, and there’s a lot to think about. I need to read something happier now.