chai (thelibrairie on tiktok!) ♡'s Reviews > Never Let Me Go

This is a great book to read if you want to feel really fucked up about some things.

Never Let Me Go is a book that itches beneath the skin. It left me uneasy, and on a less acknowledged level, deathly afraid. I didn’t so much finish reading it as emerge from it, gasping like I was breaking the surface of a deep sea. I've been going back and forth about what to say about this story, and I think that to divulge more than a handful of details would be a disservice to the reader. Therefore, this review gestures to some of the themes and plot beats, but seeks to avoid spoilers as much as possible.

Standing years from the page, our narrator Kathy, who is now thirty-one, returns to the scene of her childhood, back to Hailsham School, where she grew up, and where the inconclusive tides of memory, which would not stop, were always going to carry her.

Never Let Me Go’s form mirrors the difficult process of remembering. Kathy is determined to tie the loose cords in her mind, to weave something coherent out of the lost and recovered spaces of her childhood. In the story, the past is closely, obsessively observed; its pieces arranged and rearranged. Kathy is methodical, and she seems to cultivate a certain studied ambivalence and a strong sense of remove. She is careful not to let the past overtake her, to remain always in control. Yet, at points in the narrative, an errant memory might flood her, interrupt her; at which point Kathy’s story abandons its linear progression, becoming vulnerable to detours, digressions, and displacements. Kathy goes back over events to try to make sense of them again, re-examines her own claims, tries to find a clearer angle of approach, to engage every contradictory and countervailing perspective. The resulting narrative is porous and self-conscious, pointing to a sense of glassy fragility. From time to time, the private correspondence of an unspecified second-person “you” also crops up, adding a disconcerting level of intimacy. Exactly who is the “you” being summoned and addressed here? The answer is unclear. One rather feels slightly disarranged by the whole thing, scoured from these intimations of vulnerability. Like watching a solitary ghost host a vigil for forgotten things.

Memory is thus a central theme in the novel. Never Let Me Go offers a searing look at the vexed relationship between the past and the present, and the difficulty of recovering innocent lives from the annihilating forces of stigma and oppression. There are so many silences in this book. Some things are never referred to, never recalled for the reader. How did everything become so apocalyptically wrong? How is no one trying to stop it? How is any of this allowed? The enormity of the answers exists in its own absence of expression.

In Never Let Me Go, silence is the refusal of violence as violence. Kathy’s story, in other words, exists within and against the overwhelming superstructures that demand she unsees the violence that has become normative. In the repeated staging of Kathy’s encounters with the past, one senses a mind too numbed by terror, to accustomed to rupture. Kathy’s voice brings to the surface a conspiracy of silence that is already there, that has travelled with her into the present. At Hailsham, Kathy learned that there are things better left untouched by words: she was “told and not told,” but she knew, nonetheless, that to speak the unspeakable is to stray across a line that is invisible but inviolate. With time and effort, she learned too to move through the silence until it became native to her, a language on its own. It is the method everyone at Hailsham, one way or another, eventually evolves for their survival.

This is not to say that Kathy’s childhood world was entirely circumscribed by silence and its violences. In the midst of so much unfreedom, in this place where hope is so tenuous you want to dig your nails into it just to hold it tighter, Never Let Me Go imagines love and friendship as a fledgling and fugitive enterprise. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy made a collectivity out of their motley crew. Joined together in a kinship of fear and uncertainty, they helped each other endure. But our attachments to each other are never uncomplicated in times of great rupture. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are shaped then ruined by dispossession, by their banishment from the category of “human,” and later, by their belief in belonging to a world where their destinies are always already circumscribed by predetermined social scripts. It is brutally hard to see them repeatedly reach out to one another across space and time and an abundance of history and such a weight of responsibility and perpetual loss—and never quite grasp one another. Only a gorge remains, stretching on and on between them, gaping open like a slash in fabric.

What I’m saying is—Don’t expect this book to light up your insides with hope. Never Let Me Go does not end with lightness, resistance, or even the spectral possibility of healing. By the end, Kathy’s access to a story of resilience and agency is irretrievable. This is not the story of the heroic individual or individuals on a mission against the perverse, rotten world, of justice prevailing in a saga of survival. Instead, at the close of the novel, Kathy simply “drive[s] off to wherever it was [she] was supposed to be.” The finality, the absoluteness of this last line—“supposed to be”—is haunting.

The silences, gaps, and absences—the sheer irresolution of the narrative—make Never Let Me Go a difficult novel, and a demanding one. What it demands of the reader is that we think: about our positions of distance, of non-implication, vis-à-vis the senseless and seemingly unstoppable atrocities in the world, and about the power of silence itself. The moral contrast between the horror of what it is being done to Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy and the absence of urgency to prevent it does a great deal of work in this book. Ishiguro raises a host of questions about how complicity gestates and develops, how unexamined fear leads to non-recognition, and worse, to hatred of the other, and how habit and memory can keep our bodies moving in the right directions, playing pretend, desperate to slip back into some version of normality. In that sense, Never Let Me Go is a powerful, cognitive mapping of our time. It holds a mirror to the face of our own society, and demands we let ourselves be upended by the inhumanity and rottenness of our social systems, by the institutionalized dystopia of the everyday, where survival is never valiant, only crude and hideous, and where hope too often dies without a whimper. I can’t imagine anyone reading the news and reading this book and not feeling deeply, horrifically implicated.

But I suspect that is the point. Never Let Me Go demands we let ourselves be hit by the violence and sadism of inaction, so it might dare us to hope, to manifest the otherwise worlds the novel's ultimately bleak ending could not imagine.