Overview
Ladies and gentlemen, let us look together through our hearts, search engines and our little devices for a more devastating novel.
Perhaps for the first time in my life I avoided writing a review not because of procrastination, but because I was afraid to look at it again, to put myself back in the timeline where I’d been wrapped in blankets during one of the coldest mornings in New York, unsuspecting, just a body in a bed, chilled to the bone as I sat there closing the book, and my eyes also.
The story unfolded gently as if to break some terrible news to me quietly. For several days Never Let Me Go stayed plastered to the insides of my eyes so that every time I blinked I was brought back to some terrible nightmare I’d had to accept had come from inside me, like it was whispering to me that I was the conjurer of terrible things.
Often when I read a sad book where the characters are mistreated by their circumstances, I question not only the author’s motives, but I question why doing this was even necessary. Why think up a story like this, why write at all? Why think of who your characters could be, why love them and let them love?
Why let ourselves imagine what happiness is if it’s going to be taken away? I guess because characters never know their own endings, just like we don’t.
Never Let Me Go in Science Fiction
As a teen, I’d loved 1984 (as anyone does), I’d loved Fahrenheit 451, and The Man Who Was Thursday; these still remain some of my favorite SF books. Ever since knowing about this genre I’ve scoured libraries, bookstores, even favorite professors’ offices for new dystopian novels that could make me truly afraid of the selfish lives we lead. I looked for one that could scoop me out of my little world and into the jaws of a broken one that could teach me to be better.
I have loved science fiction because I believe there is no place greater that can really move us and reflect the horror of what we are.
What’s special about Never Let Me Go is that it’s not just science fiction, it’s not just a warning, or a preview into a saddened world. It’s about the exploration of innocence through some of the greatest, truly human characters I’ve encountered in a while, about how the purest love can be ruined by our circumstances. I used to imagine that characters ruining their own arc and their own chances at happiness was incredibly sad; it turns out that taking happy endings from others will, to the end, remain the saddest storyline of all.
One of the greatest elements of this book that stuck out to me (and out of me, kind of like a little knife) is friendship, and the great loss of it before we’re ready.
Friendship
After finishing the first chapter, I wondered what a male author could offer writing a young girl’s perspective. How could Ishiguro possibly understand what a friendship between two girls was like? Did he understand the love, the hatred, that space where good things and bad things are never spoken but exchanged constantly, without anyone else noticing. The silent forgivenesses, the things we did for each other’s redemption, the tiny resentments, the forgiving and the not ever forgiving.
I understand now, even though I was a writer before this novel and am a writer after, that we must never, as Ishiguro and so many others have said, “write what we know.”
By the end, I was wondering at the life Ishiguro must have lived to be able to write a novel essentially about many things, but also about the complexity of a friendship between two girls, how sickening it was, how sweet, from their young age to their old one. Even as a girl with so many of these friendships, it would be difficult to write about them.
Ordinariness
There was so much about the novel that we could follow and understand easily. Anyone could have lived these lives, attended boarding school, fallen in love or forgiven your best friend.
Because of the novel’s ordinariness in setting and characters, you’re caught off guard by the small fragments of delivered honesty through these small children attending boarding school, just beginning their little lives. Somehow, we don’t expect children to “get it,” or to understand each other as well as they actually do, which is shown so magnificently in the text.
This book could have gone so many different ways, but when it finally starts to carve its destination, you’re left staggered by what it has to say.
Message
What we lose as humans is not even a fraction of the cost of what’s lost for those who don’t have our bodies. When it comes to living creatures, when it comes to anything besides what we are, we suddenly can’t understand compassion, though we feel pain so well we write books about it, and songs, and create art fueled by the love we received or didn’t receive.
What are we if we are not at the front and center of love and evolution? We demand the attention back to us. What are we if not the main characters, the ones not taken care of, the ones cast aside and forgotten? Who are we then, if one day we are the forgotten ones, and no longer the ones forgetting?
I often think of humans as something beautiful but fragile, a broken piece of glass trying to hide that it is vulnerable and no longer conforms. But I know also that we hurt things so much with our will and strong emotion and desires and beliefs about the world.
Never Let Me Go makes you rethink what you are through a story of childhood, innocence, through the realest human people and friendships you could imagine — through love between people so deep that dissolves before we’re ready.
Don’t get me wrong; reading this was a mistake, no matter how many good things I say about it. I hate sad things. I hate when authors go raving about some moral problem they see in the world, that’s unique only to them, and then they find some unique, horrifying way of showing how this thing will eventually destroy the world’s goodness.
As a writer, I understand why it was necessary. As a reader, though, I never want to read something like this again — though my reader self knows, too, that we need books like this more than ever.
“When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn’t really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I’ve never forgotten.” (Ishiguro, 272)
“Why did we take your artwork? Why did we do that? You said an interesting thing earlier, Tommy. When you were discussing this with Marie-Claude. You said it was because your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like inside. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? Well, you weren’t far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.” (Ishiguro, 260)
I’ve just read a magnificent post about where to start with Ishiguro’s novels if you’ve never read him, and now I’ve made it my mission to finish all of his novels before March.
Because after breaking my heart with Never Let Me Go, I just knew I had to do it again.
Final Thoughts: Is Ishiguro a British or Japanese author?
Guys, come on. We shouldn’t still be asking ourselves this.
If you don’t know about Ishiguro and haven’t read his works, then this is completely understandable. What amazes me, though, is how some people will insist on calling this man a “Japanese author” or better yet, a “Japanese born author” (which I saw the other day on a site that didn’t mention him being raised in the U.K. until ten thousand sentences later).
And when I say I have problems with people, I mean I have problems with bookstores.
I am Japanese, and while I would LOVE to snatch this genius and have him represent us and be part of our literature, he is what he is. He is the greatness that he is only because he has this multi-background perspective of never really belonging anywhere.
I have only just hopped on the Ishiguro bandwagon, and even I know that this man has said in interviews time and again that although he is of Japanese descent, he is British. (Also, though, the two can exist at the same time, which is what this whole blog is about. Not needing to give yourself the false sense of security that your body only belongs to one place. There is freedom in being split two ways.)
Now bookstores (like Barnes & Noble, putting Ishiguro with Murakami lol — also is that all we think Japanese literature is? Murakami’s face?), are categorizing Ishiguro with a bunch of well-known Japanese novelists.
If he identified completely as a Japanese writer, even after spending a lifetime growing up in the U.K., and he had dedicated his life to learning Japanese history, connecting with our culture, writing our books — then that would be just as good and just as valid to me, and people would have every right to refer to Ishiguro as one of the greatest Japanese dystopian novelists of our time.
If he decided to market himself as a Japanese author in the literature world, then we would have to put his books with Murakami (as I saw Barnes & Noble do) and to put his work beside Dazai and Sōseki (as I saw Kinokuniya Bookstore did).
However, that’s not the case. Whether he markets himself as a Japanese person, a British person, a Japanese and a British person, a Japanese person on the outside and a British person inside — whatever the case may be, we are blessed to have Ishiguro’s literature, and therefore he deserves the respect to be identified as what he identifies as and knows to be his own truth.
I’m tired of people imposing their own ideas about who people are. We decide. Our own identities. So just because you think Ishiguro’s name sounds Japanese, don’t assume and start saying to random people: “Yeah, so I’ve started reading more Japanese literature lately. Have you heard of Ishiguro?”
Don’t be quick to call him a Japanese author, because that’s not quite how he presents himself to the world.
Last thing — I want to address this idea of Ishiguro being either Japanese or British. Why do we always have to label people, and always feel pressured to label ourselves? What do you mean you’re in an in-between place? As a society, we don’t like that! We need to call you something, to know what you are, where you fit among us and where you stand!
This is exactly what it means to be biracial (which I technically consider him to be since he comes from two backgrounds). I was raised with English, Japanese, Haitian Kreyòl and French all in one household, because of my Haitian father and my Japanese mother. Some people are fascinated by this; others can’t understand how this is possible, or even know or have ever heard of Haitian Kreyól for example, and that’s A-OK. You can be many confusing things, you can have a complicated background and a complicated upbringing, and sometimes those experiences are indescribable.
Some things you’ll never be able to put into words for other people but can only feel and come to terms with inside yourself. These things don’t have to be digestible to anyone else, as long as you accept it don’t try to divide yourself into pieces so that people can understand the ‘American’ part of you, the ‘Black’ part of you, the ‘this’ or ‘that’.
I think that’s finally all I have to say about that. Since I’ve gotten it all out of my system, hopefully I won’t be ranting again anytime soon.
If you’ve made it to the end of this, thanks, you’re a real one.
End Note
Never Let Me Go is one of the best science fiction novels I have read not just this past year, but in my entire life — even out of the hundreds of books I’ve read. It’s so easy to write a good Fantasy novel nowadays, because there are so many examples of what that looks like.
What’s not easy is to put your name among some of the greatest dystopian writers of our time: G.K. Chesterton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell. What’s not easy is to watch yourself watch the world on one particular thing, to take that thing in your hands and to really look at it from all angles, to build up real people and then destroy them.
I think about the sadness it must have taken to write this, to write it deeply and honestly, to not just write a sad ending for a sad ending’s sake, but to write a story so tragic and true that it really makes me want to never look at this again.
But alas, this was definitely five stars for me, even if I didn’t get what I wanted.
You should read it and break your heart too! Let me know how that turns out for you.