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Never Let Me Go is a 2005 novel from British author, Kazuo Ishiguro (a movie version of Never Let Me Go was released in 2010). The story is speculative, set in an alternate England whose dystopic elements aren't immediately apparent to the reader.

Kathy, the 31-year-old narrator of Never Let Me Go, recalls her years at Hailsham, a boarding school she attended along with her closest friends, Ruth and Tommy.

Located somewhere in the English countryside, life at Hailsham seemed idyllic - lessons, sports, and creativity were the apparent focus for the youths, but the reader senses from the start of Ishiguro's novel that there may have been something more sinister afoot.

Inklings supporting this suspicion are carefully meted out in Kathy's narration. There is the mysterious absence of any reference to family for these youths, who also seem to have no surnames, and there is a later revelation that none of the Hailsham students will be able to have children or even "normal" lives. The truth remains vague, even to the students themselves, until in an emotional outburst, one of their guardians lays the facts plain. It's a chilling moment in the novel and revealing it here would do a disservice to the author and reader both.

My difficulties with Never Let Me Go begin with Kathy’s narration which, in addition to being painfully slow, has a conversational quality to it that, while stylistically unique, becomes rather annoying, particularly the transitions with which she prefaces each memory:

“I’m looking at them in light of what came later - particularly what happened that day at the pavilion while we were sheltering from the downpour.”

“What happened after that row over the chess illustrates pretty well the point I’m making.”

“But every now and then, a sighting seemed to have substance to it - like the one Ruth told me about that night.”

The dystopic elements of Never Let Me Go give it the cast of speculative fiction, but this book is, more than anything, a literary coming-of-age story.

Ishiguro purposefully draws out revealing the “special” nature of the students in an effert to achieve a climactic revelation towards the novel's close. So the story primarily focuses on the nuances of the relationships between the three teens. Kathy's narration however, with its matter-of-fact omission of essential truths about their lives, leaves the primary characters rather vaguely drawn and makes even their most defining characteristics - Ruth’s betrayal, Tommy’s naivety, and Kathy’s own unwavering nonchalant acceptance - diluted and bland.

Never Let Me Go has a fascinating premise that seemed to me rife with unmet potential. Unfortunately, the novel's narrative arc was more of a straight line, and when Ishiguro finally pulls the curtain aside revealing the characters' fates, I was not only unsurprised. but unmoved.



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.