Reading21: Never Let Me Go

Long-time readers know I am trying to widen my exposure to fiction from this century (see here and here). So, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, I would read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The novel kept popping up on lists of "essential 21st-century novels" that I came across. The Guardian, Time, a bunch of others had it ranked near the top, and I figured it was time to broaden my fiction intake beyond the classics and nonfiction I usually lean toward. But truth be told, the novel left me cold. I didn’t connect with it. I didn’t care what happened to anyone. I didn’t even feel much when the so-called revelations started unfolding. I was waiting for the novel to rise to the occasion, and it never did.

The story follows a clone (although you don't know it in the beginning) named Kathy H. who grows up in a strange, cloistered boarding school called Hailsham, where students are encouraged to produce art and stay in line, all under a cloud of unspoken rules and quiet dread. Eventually, the truth becomes clear: these children are being raised to have their organs harvested. Kathy becomes a "carer" for other clones who are being slowly dismantled for their organs. Her friends, Ruth and Tommy, become "donors" and eventually "complete" — a term that basically means they die on the operating table, piece by piece. The language is designed to be sterile and soothing, but the reality underneath is deeply brutal.

And yet, none of this lands with any emotional weight. Not for me. The characters are oddly passive. They rarely rage, rarely question, rarely dream beyond the sad limits set before them. Their emotional lives are stunted and indirect, which might be Ishiguro's point—a commentary on internalized systems of control and how we can be conditioned to accept our fate. But as a reader, it made the entire book feel emotionally muffled. The big reveals don’t play like revelations. They play like confirmations of things you probably suspected by page thirty.

Kathy narrates with this weirdly flattened affect. She recounts love triangles, illnesses, deaths, and betrayals with the tone of someone describing minor errands from years ago. There’s a scene early on where one of the school administrators is seen weeping in a doorway, and Kathy doesn’t understand it at the time. That moment gets an explanation hundreds of pages later, when it’s meant to feel poignant and illuminating. But it didn’t, not for me. It felt like retroactive significance stapled onto a vague memory. Ishiguro sets these things up early and lets them sit, quietly smoldering, but they don’t catch fire—they just smoke a little.

This withholding style might work for readers who enjoy the meditative, memory-based structure, but it can also feel like being kept at arm's length. I never once had the sense of being drawn into Kathy’s experience—I just felt like I was watching her politely narrate her own quiet, unavoidable death.  Ishiguro gives us one of the most polite dystopias ever created.

The book is filled with what I’d call soft red herrings. One example is the "art" subplot. Students are encouraged to create drawings and poetry for a mysterious Gallery, which is later revealed to be part of a failed liberal humanist campaign to prove the clones had souls. That thread has the potential for emotional and philosophical weight, but it fizzles out. It becomes one more thing the characters misunderstood about their lives. Another is the vague hope for "deferrals," a rumor that lovers might get more time together if they can prove they’re truly in love. But even that is deflated. It turns out to be nothing more than wishful thinking. The system is absolute. There are no exceptions. And again, the characters absorb this with all the emotional fire of someone discovering their favorite pub is closed.

Stylistically, the novel is interesting. It takes place in a kind of alternate 1980s or early 90s, where cassette tapes and Walkmans still reign, and where the world seems largely like our own except for this one grotesque social institution that everyone accepts. It reminded me of the visual and tonal landscape in Simon Stålenhag's artwork—retro, suburban, low-tech settings with something just slightly and devastatingly off in the margins. That near-past setting makes the story feel eerily plausible. Not the future gone wrong, but the past quietly corrupted.

This is partly where the novel gets its title. Kathy clings to an old cassette tape of a fictional Judy Bridgewater song called “Never Let Me Go,” which becomes this private, symbolic object for her. She imagines the song as a mother singing to her baby, and dances to it alone in her room, cradling an invisible child. It’s her way of imagining intimacy, care, belonging—everything she and her friends are quietly denied. Later, when Madame sees Kathy doing this and weeps, it becomes one of the novel’s few explicitly emotional moments (though delayed, distanced, and reinterpreted).

The title, then, isn't just about romantic longing. It’s about holding onto something—or someone—in a world where everything is disposable, scheduled for removal. It captures that emotional residue that dystopian fiction often uses nostalgia to amplify. The past, even a manufactured or imagined past, becomes the only safe emotional space.  As I have previously mentioned, nostalgia is an underappreciated but essential quality in dystopian fiction.

The world-building is subtle, which I respect. You never get the full picture of how the clone program functions on a societal level. You see just enough to understand how it plays out for the individuals inside it. The novel never widens its lens. No one fights the system. There are no protests, no real dissent. Just quiet compliance and small, human coping mechanisms. A fantasy here, a tape there, some fumbling romances, some beach walks. It’s not bleak in a cinematic way, it’s bleak in a soft, anesthetized way.

Ishiguro's  prose is clean, plain, precise. It creates a kind of hovering atmosphere, this sense of being slightly removed from reality, which works for the themes of memory and denial. But it doesn’t give you anything to hold on to. Looking back through the book, I can’t say that any of the paragraphs are especially quotable. Not in a bad way—just that nothing sparkled. I reread some of the passages I had highlighted and thought, "Yes, that’s well-written," but none of them moved me. They read as interesting but bland. The prose conveyed presence, but never presence plus feeling.

And maybe part of that was just fiction fatigue. I had just read A Thousand Acres, which was intense and rooted and emotionally grounded. This came after I read Stranger in a Strange Land and, of course, Proust for the fourth time in the winter and spring. Then I walked into Never Let Me Go, where everything is muted, interior, and turned slightly away. I was already sliding back into nonfiction mode—starting some history books while finishing this one—and probably just didn’t have the bandwidth for Ishiguro’s featherlight approach.

Still, I wanted it to reveal the depth the novel hinted at. Toward the end, I was open. I was ready for something to hit, for some moment to justify the long, slow build. But it never came. The novel stayed as it was: poised, quiet, technically flawless, and emotionally inert. I watched it go by like scenery through a fogged-up car window.

Ishiguro has proven his mettle by winning a Nobel-prize for his literature as a whole in 2017, with Never Let Me Go certainly contributing to that. The novel was nominated for the 2005 Booker prize as well, no small feat. I had never read him before, however. My take isn't meant to dismiss the book’s accomplishments or resonance with others—just to note that his approach in this case didn't happen to resonate with me.

Honestly, I don’t think I care for the Japanese approach to literature. No offense to all those who think I’m supposed to like it. Blah. Anime, too, while we’re at it. I have tried several times to like Spirited Away.  Okay, okay, this isn’t supposed to be a rant. I don’t regret reading this novel. How’s that?

(Assisted by ChatGPT and Claude.)