Anne Enright
Booker-winning author and professor of fiction at University College Dublin
My writing students all know and love Never Let Me Go. Year after year, they choose to discuss it more than any other suggested title. These students are all ages but mostly young, so their affinity may have something to do with how tenderly Ishiguro writes about youth, innocence and friendship. The novel contains some of the tropes popular with readers of young adult fiction; there is an elite boarding school with beautiful grounds, various styles of guardian and no sign of any parents. Narrated by Kathy, who tells us about her friends Ruth and Tommy, the style is accessibly conversational and it contains a melancholy seriousness that young people value and sometimes use. The characters seem orphaned. They believe love might save them, and they die tragically early. They will never grow old.
If the story works close to folktale, the concept satisfies an anxious interest in speculative and dystopian fiction. The world on the page seems like our own, but it contains a huge and cruel secret, one that involves sinister doubling and the terrifying disposability of characters who are full of love and hopefulness. As I describe it here, the book sounds worse and worse, but there are reasons why this finely written novel should be treasured by readers who sometimes prefer fiction that is not so subtly done. With breathtaking focus and elan, Ishiguro uses the pleasures afforded by other genres and ignores them at the same time. The dystopia is etherised, it is everywhere and nowhere, waiting to be named. The rush of plot is replaced by steady storytelling and slow heartbreak. This is an impossibly sad novel, it offers no escape.
