NOBEL PRIZE WINNER•From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes “a Gothic tour de force" ( The New York Times ) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic.
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
Review
ONE OF THE ATLANTIC' **S 15 BOOKS YOU WON'T REGRET RE-READING
"A page turner and a heartbreaker, a tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish.” —** Time
“A Gothic tour de force.... A tight, deftly controlled story.... Just as accomplished [as The Remains of the Day ] and, in a very different way, just as melancholy and alarming.” — The New York Times
"Elegaic, deceptively lovely.... As always, Ishiguro pulls you under." — Newsweek
“Superbly unsettling, impeccably controlled.... The book’s irresistible power comes from Ishiguro’s matchless ability to expose its dark heart in careful increments.” — Entertainment Weekly
Amazon.com Review
All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go , is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.
Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day , only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of five previous novels, including The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize and became an international best seller. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1995 he received an Order of the British Empire for service to literature, and in 1998 was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He lives in London with his wife and daughter. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn’t necessarily because they think I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I’m not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as “agitated,” even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying “calm.” I’ve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it.
Anyway, I’m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful—about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I’m a Hailsham student—which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record. I’ve heard it said enough, so I’m sure you’ve heard it plenty more, and maybe there’s something in it. But I’m not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt if I’ll be the last. And anyway, I’ve done my share of looking after donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, I’ll have done twelve years of this, and it’s only for the last six they’ve let me choose.
And why shouldn’t they? Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural. There’s no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I’d stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I’d never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years?
But these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who I remember, and so in practice, I haven’t been choosing that much. As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you don’t have that deeper link with the donor, and though I’ll miss being a carer, it feels just about right to be finishing at last come the end of the year.
Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose. She already had a carer assigned to her at the time, and I remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part. But in the end I managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre in Dover, all our differences—while they didn’t exactly vanish—seemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that we’d grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did. It’s ever since then, I suppose, I started seeking out for my donors people from the past, and whenever I could, people from Hailsham.
There have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham. He’d just come through his third donation, it hadn’t gone well, and he must have known he wasn’t going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: “Hailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place.” Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where he’d grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised then how desperately he didn’t want reminded. Instead, he wanted to hear about Hailsham.
So over the next five or six days, I told him whatever he wanted to know, and he’d lie there, all hooked up, a gentle smile breaking through. He’d ask me about the big things and the little things. About our guardians, about how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning. Sometimes he’d make me say things over and over; things I’d told him only the day before, he’d ask about like I’d never told him. “Did you have a sports pavilion?” “Which guardian was your special favourite?” At first I thought this was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough. What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that’s what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they’d really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his. That was when I first understood, really understood, just how lucky we’d been—Tommy, Ruth, me, all the rest of us.
.
Driving around the country now, I still see things that will remind me of Hailsham. I might pass the corner of a misty field, or see part of a large house in the distance as I come down the side of a valley, even a particular arrangement of poplar trees up on a hillside, and I’ll think: “Maybe that’s it! I’ve found it! This actually is Hailsham!” Then I see it’s impossible and I go on driving, my thoughts drifting on elsewhere. In particular, there are those pavilions. I spot them all over the country, standing on the far side of playing fields, little white prefab buildings with a row of windows unnaturally high up, tucked almost under the eaves. I think they built a whole lot like that in the fifties and sixties, which is probably when ours was put up. If I drive past one I keep looking over to it for as long as possible, and one day I’ll crash the car like that, but I keep doing it. Not long ago I was driving through an empty stretch of Worcestershire and saw one beside a cricket ground so like ours at Hailsham I actually turned the car and went back for a second look.
We loved our sports pavilion, maybe because it reminded us of those sweet little cottages people always had in picture books when we were young. I can remember us back in the Juniors, pleading with guardians to hold the next lesson in the pavilion instead of the usual room. Then by the time we were in Senior 2—when we were twelve, going on thirteen—the pavilion had become the place to hide out with your best friends when you wanted to get away from the rest of Hailsham.
The pavilion was big enough to take two separate groups without them bothering each other—in the summer, a third group could hang about out on the veranda. But ideally you and your friends wanted the place just to yourselves, so there was often jockeying and arguing. The guardians were always telling us to be civilised about it, but in practice, you needed to have some strong personalities in your group to stand a chance of getting the pavilion during a break or free period. I wasn’t exactly the wilting type myself, but I suppose it was really because of Ruth we got in there as often as we did.
Usually we just spread ourselves around the chairs and benches—there’d be five of us, six if Jenny B. came along—and had a good gossip. There was a kind of conversation that could only happen when you were hidden away in the pavilion; we might discuss something that was worrying us, or we might end up screaming with laughter, or in a furious row. Mostly, it was a way to unwind for a while with your closest friends.
On the particular afternoon I’m now thinking of, we were standing up on stools and benches, crowding around the high windows. That gave us a clear view of the North Playing Field where about a dozen boys from our year and Senior 3 had gathered to play football. There was bright sunshine, but it must have been raining earlier that day because I can remember how the sun was glinting on the muddy surface of the grass.
Someone said we shouldn’t be so obvious about watching, but we hardly moved back at all. Then Ruth said: “He doesn’t suspect a thing. Look at him. He really doesn’t suspect a thing.”
When she said this, I looked at her and searched for signs of disapproval about what the boys were going to do to Tommy. But the next second Ruth gave a little laugh and said: “The idiot!”
And I realised that for Ruth and the others, whatever the boys chose to do was pretty remote from us; whether we approved or not didn’t come into it. We were gathered around the windows at that moment not because we relished the prospect of seeing Tommy get humiliated yet again, but just becaus... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy come to terms with their destinies as Never Let Me Go slowly unveils its secrets to readers. Not before, not after—though readers may return to certain passages after experiencing the "a-ha!" moment that’s sure to come. Many of Ishiguro’s works have a purposeful ambiguity to their plots, but his sixth novel’s play on memory, experience, and design may be the strangest yet. Despite its Twilight Zone -meets-Kafka sensibility, Never Let Me Go is heartbreaking, powerful, and chillingly possible.
The title, taken from a folk song Kathy imagines to be about an infertile woman’s miracle baby, suggests the novel’s troubling themes: how we define human, accept our station in life, forge a better future for some of us, and interpret memories. Answers surface slowly in the alternative reality Ishiguro pieces together from Kathy’s distorted recollections. His approach is deceptively simple; each tightly controlled piece of information contributes to a portrait of an ethically questionable society. As Ishiguro explained to London’s Daily Telegraph , the novel "offers a version of Britain that might have existed by the late 20th century if just one or two things had gone differently on the scientific front."
While a few critics questioned the characters’ acceptance of conditions they might have challenged, others assumed the system Ishiguro introduced precluded even pondering escape. In fact, a few found this world more interesting than the characters themselves. If some thought the scientific/technological premise polemical, others considered it highly provocative. In this age of major scientific debate over the future of humankind, Never Let Me Go will captivate you.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From The Washington Post
Kazuo Ishiguro's strange, and strangely affecting, new novel revolves around three people whom we first meet as children and whose fates are decided in early adulthood. It is an exceedingly difficult novel to review because essential aspects of it are also essential to the complex mystery at its core, so discussing it almost immediately becomes a delicate balance between what can and cannot be revealed. Believing as I strongly do that readers must be allowed to discover a book's secrets for themselves, guided by the author's hand, rather than have those secrets gratuitously spilled by a reviewer, I shall err on the side of silence, so please bear with me.
Never Let Me Go is set in an undisclosed time -- not in the future, though the novel pays more than a slight bow to science fiction, perhaps between the 1950s and the 1970s -- at a place in the British countryside called Hailsham. It is a school, but a school unlike any other. It was intended to be "a shining beacon, an example of how we might move to a more humane and better way of doing things." The teachers are called "guardians" and the students, though that is what they are called, are neither ordinary students nor ordinary children. They come to Hailsham at a very early age and stay there until, as older teenagers, they are permitted to live in "the Cottages" or "the White Mansion" or "Poplar Farm," halfway houses from which they make tentative steps into the real world.
The narrator of the novel is Kathy, or Kath, and the two other principal characters are her close friends and occasional rivals, Ruth and Tommy. She is "thirty-one years old, and . . . a carer now for over eleven years." What is a carer? One of the novel's mysteries, not really to be solved until two-thirds of the way through; suffice it to say that it's a difficult, emotionally and physically wearing job. Ruth and Tommy, approximately her own age, are "donors," but that mystery, too, must be left to Ishiguro to solve.
In any event, for most of the novel Ishiguro is primarily concerned with the three as children and with the odd world they inhabit at Hailsham. The school, or institution, or whatever one cares to call it, is located on a large parcel of beautiful land, isolated from the outer world. Its students are made to understand that "we were all very special," that "we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside." Their futures are hinted at but not faced head-on: "We hated the way our guardians, usually so on top of everything, became so awkward whenever we came near this territory. It unnerved us to see them change like that." They have a "special chance," but they have only the vaguest idea what that might be.
They are so caught up in the rituals and routines of Hailsham, though, that they have little time for speculation about the distant time of adulthood. They excitedly await "Exchanges," for example: "Four times a year -- spring, summer, autumn, winter -- we had a kind of big exhibition-cum-sale of all the things we'd been creating in the three months since the last Exchange. Paintings, drawings, pottery; all sorts of 'sculptures' made from whatever was the craze of the day -- bashed-up cans, maybe, or bottle tops stuck onto cardboard." Each child is given "Exchange Tokens" with which he or she can "buy work done by students in your own year," from which they form collections that become precious mementos of their time at Hailsham.
The very best products of their creative labors go to "the Gallery." None of them has ever seen it or even knows where it is, but the pieces for it are regularly chosen by a woman whose name they do not know -- "we called her 'Madame' because she was French or Belgian -- there was a dispute as to which -- and that was what the guardians always called her" -- and having one's work selected is regarded as a great honor. They also know that Miss Emily, the head of Hailsham, told one student "that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul."
Besides the Exchanges, the children look forward to the Sales, which "were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside." Every month "a big white van" brings the flotsam and jetsam of the outside world:
"Looking back now, it's funny to think we got so worked up, because usually the Sales were a big disappointment. There'd be nothing remotely special and we'd spend our tokens just renewing stuff that was wearing out or broken with more of the same. But the point was, I suppose, we'd all of us in the past found something special at a Sale, something that had become special: a jacket, a watch, a pair of craft scissors never used but kept proudly next to a bed. We'd all found something like that at one time, and so however much we tried to pretend otherwise, we couldn't ever shake off the old feelings of hope and excitement."
Too, the Sales are a way of connecting to the world outside: "at that stage in our lives, any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land; we had only the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn't possible there." Hailsham is a closed circle beyond which they are not permitted to venture, with the result that the larger world becomes the subject of apprehension as well as curiosity: The children are "fearful of the world around us, and -- no matter how much we despised ourselves for it -- unable quite to let each other go."
That theme, which recurs throughout the book, is summarized for Kathy by a long-playing record she owned for a while -- eventually, and mysteriously, it vanished -- called "Songs After Dark," by a singer named Judy Bridgewater (fictitious, as best I can determine), one track of which is a song titled "Never Let Me Go." The students have been told "it was completely impossible for any of us to have babies," but even as a very young child Kathy dreams of having one:
"What was so special about this song? Well, the thing was, I didn't used to listen properly to the words; I just waited for that bit that went: 'Baby, baby, never let me go. . . .' And what I'd imagined was a woman who'd been told she couldn't have babies, who'd really, really wanted them all her life. Then there's a sort of miracle and she has a baby, and she holds this baby very close to her and walks around singing: 'Baby, never let me go. . .' partly because she's so happy, but also because she's so afraid something will happen, that the baby will get ill or be taken away from her. Even at the time, I realized this couldn't be right, that this interpretation didn't fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn't an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance."
One time Kathy is alone in her room, playing the song, "swaying about slowly in time to the song, holding an imaginary baby to my breast." Then "something made me realize I wasn't alone, and I opened my eyes to find myself staring at Madame framed in the doorway. . . . She was out in the corridor, standing very still, her head angled to one side to give her a view of what I was doing inside. And the odd thing was she was crying. It might even have been one of her sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream." When she tells Tommy about this, he says: "Maybe Madame can read minds. She's strange. Maybe she can see right inside you."
What Madame thinks she sees will not be revealed for many pages, but it gets right to the essence of this quite wonderful novel, the best Ishiguro has written since the sublime The Remains of the Day. It is almost literally a novel about humanity: what constitutes it, what it means, how it can be honored or denied. These little children, and the adults they eventually become, are brought up to serve humanity in the most astonishing and selfless ways, and the humanity they achieve in so doing makes us realize that in a new world the word must be redefined. Ishiguro pulls the reader along to that understanding at a steady, insistent pace. If the guardians at Hailsham "timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information," by the same token Ishiguro carefully and deliberately unfolds Hailsham's secrets one by one, piece by piece, as if he were slowly peeling an artichoke.
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human. Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is. Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.
"From the Hardcover edition.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Review
"'Ishiguro is the best and most original novelist of his generation.' Susan Hill, Mail on Sunday" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Back Cover
From the acclaimed author of "The "Remains of the Day and "When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory. And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed-even comforted-by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now. A tale of deceptive simplicity, "Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and" takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Review
"A page turner and a heartbreaker, a tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish.” — Time
“A Gothic tour de force. . . . A tight, deftly controlled story . . . . Just as accomplished [as The Remains of the Day ] and, in a very different way, just as melancholy and alarming.” — The New York Times
"Elegaic, deceptively lovely. . . . As always, Ishiguro pulls you under." — Newsweek
“Superbly unsettling, impeccably controlled . . . . The book’s irresistible power comes from Ishiguro’s matchless ability to expose its dark heart in careful increments.” — Entertainment Weekly
From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Description:
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes “a Gothic tour de force" ( The New York Times ) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic.
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
Review
ONE OF THE ATLANTIC' **S 15 BOOKS YOU WON'T REGRET RE-READING
"A page turner and a heartbreaker, a tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish.” —** Time
“A Gothic tour de force.... A tight, deftly controlled story.... Just as accomplished [as The Remains of the Day ] and, in a very different way, just as melancholy and alarming.” — The New York Times
"Elegaic, deceptively lovely.... As always, Ishiguro pulls you under." — Newsweek
“Superbly unsettling, impeccably controlled.... The book’s irresistible power comes from Ishiguro’s matchless ability to expose its dark heart in careful increments.” — Entertainment Weekly
Amazon.com Review
All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go , is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.
Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day , only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of five previous novels, including The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize and became an international best seller. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1995 he received an Order of the British Empire for service to literature, and in 1998 was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He lives in London with his wife and daughter. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Booklist
Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth were once classmates at Hailsham, a private school in the English countryside. "You were brought into this world for a purpose," advised Miss Lucy, one of Hailsham's guardians, "and your futures, all of them, have been decided." The tightly knit trio experienced love, loss, and betrayal as they pondered their destinies... The novel is narrated by Kathy, now 31 and a "carer," who recalls how Hailsham students were "told and not told" about their precarious circumstances. (Why were their writings and paintings so important? And who was the mysterious Madame who carted their creations away?) Ishiguro's provocative subject matter and taut, potent prose have earned him multiple literary decorations, including the French government's Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an Order of the British Empire for service to literature. (His Booker Prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day, was adapted into a critically acclaimed film). In this luminous offering, he nimbly navigates the landscape of emotion--the inevitable link between present and past and the fine line between compassion and cruelty, pleasure and pain. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn’t necessarily because they think I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I’m not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as “agitated,” even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying “calm.” I’ve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it.
Anyway, I’m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful—about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I’m a Hailsham student—which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record. I’ve heard it said enough, so I’m sure you’ve heard it plenty more, and maybe there’s something in it. But I’m not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt if I’ll be the last. And anyway, I’ve done my share of looking after donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, I’ll have done twelve years of this, and it’s only for the last six they’ve let me choose.
And why shouldn’t they? Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural. There’s no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I’d stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I’d never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years?
But these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who I remember, and so in practice, I haven’t been choosing that much. As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you don’t have that deeper link with the donor, and though I’ll miss being a carer, it feels just about right to be finishing at last come the end of the year.
Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose. She already had a carer assigned to her at the time, and I remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part. But in the end I managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre in Dover, all our differences—while they didn’t exactly vanish—seemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that we’d grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did. It’s ever since then, I suppose, I started seeking out for my donors people from the past, and whenever I could, people from Hailsham.
There have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham. He’d just come through his third donation, it hadn’t gone well, and he must have known he wasn’t going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: “Hailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place.” Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where he’d grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised then how desperately he didn’t want reminded. Instead, he wanted to hear about Hailsham.
So over the next five or six days, I told him whatever he wanted to know, and he’d lie there, all hooked up, a gentle smile breaking through. He’d ask me about the big things and the little things. About our guardians, about how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning. Sometimes he’d make me say things over and over; things I’d told him only the day before, he’d ask about like I’d never told him. “Did you have a sports pavilion?” “Which guardian was your special favourite?” At first I thought this was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough. What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. He knew he was close to completing and so that’s what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they’d really sink in, so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his. That was when I first understood, really understood, just how lucky we’d been—Tommy, Ruth, me, all the rest of us.
.
Driving around the country now, I still see things that will remind me of Hailsham. I might pass the corner of a misty field, or see part of a large house in the distance as I come down the side of a valley, even a particular arrangement of poplar trees up on a hillside, and I’ll think: “Maybe that’s it! I’ve found it! This actually is Hailsham!” Then I see it’s impossible and I go on driving, my thoughts drifting on elsewhere. In particular, there are those pavilions. I spot them all over the country, standing on the far side of playing fields, little white prefab buildings with a row of windows unnaturally high up, tucked almost under the eaves. I think they built a whole lot like that in the fifties and sixties, which is probably when ours was put up. If I drive past one I keep looking over to it for as long as possible, and one day I’ll crash the car like that, but I keep doing it. Not long ago I was driving through an empty stretch of Worcestershire and saw one beside a cricket ground so like ours at Hailsham I actually turned the car and went back for a second look.
We loved our sports pavilion, maybe because it reminded us of those sweet little cottages people always had in picture books when we were young. I can remember us back in the Juniors, pleading with guardians to hold the next lesson in the pavilion instead of the usual room. Then by the time we were in Senior 2—when we were twelve, going on thirteen—the pavilion had become the place to hide out with your best friends when you wanted to get away from the rest of Hailsham.
The pavilion was big enough to take two separate groups without them bothering each other—in the summer, a third group could hang about out on the veranda. But ideally you and your friends wanted the place just to yourselves, so there was often jockeying and arguing. The guardians were always telling us to be civilised about it, but in practice, you needed to have some strong personalities in your group to stand a chance of getting the pavilion during a break or free period. I wasn’t exactly the wilting type myself, but I suppose it was really because of Ruth we got in there as often as we did.
Usually we just spread ourselves around the chairs and benches—there’d be five of us, six if Jenny B. came along—and had a good gossip. There was a kind of conversation that could only happen when you were hidden away in the pavilion; we might discuss something that was worrying us, or we might end up screaming with laughter, or in a furious row. Mostly, it was a way to unwind for a while with your closest friends.
On the particular afternoon I’m now thinking of, we were standing up on stools and benches, crowding around the high windows. That gave us a clear view of the North Playing Field where about a dozen boys from our year and Senior 3 had gathered to play football. There was bright sunshine, but it must have been raining earlier that day because I can remember how the sun was glinting on the muddy surface of the grass.
Someone said we shouldn’t be so obvious about watching, but we hardly moved back at all. Then Ruth said: “He doesn’t suspect a thing. Look at him. He really doesn’t suspect a thing.”
When she said this, I looked at her and searched for signs of disapproval about what the boys were going to do to Tommy. But the next second Ruth gave a little laugh and said: “The idiot!”
And I realised that for Ruth and the others, whatever the boys chose to do was pretty remote from us; whether we approved or not didn’t come into it. We were gathered around the windows at that moment not because we relished the prospect of seeing Tommy get humiliated yet again, but just becaus... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–The elegance of Ishiguro's prose and the pitch-perfect voice of his narrator conspire to usher readers convincingly into the remembered world of Hailsham, a British boarding school for special students. The reminiscence is told from the point of view of Kathy H., now 31, whose evocation of the sheltered estate's sunlit rolling hills, guardians, dormitories, and sports pavilions is imbued with undercurrents of muted tension and foreboding that presage a darker reality. As an adult, Kathy re-engages in lapsed friendships with classmates Ruth and Tommy, examining the details of their shared youth and revisiting with growing awareness the clues and anecdotal evidence apparent to them even as youngsters that they were different from everyone outside. [...] Ishiguro conveys with exquisite sensitivity the emotional texture of the threesome's relationship, their bonds of personal loyalty that overcome fractures of trust, the palpable boundaries of hope, and the human capacity for forgiveness. Highly recommended for literary merit and as an exceptional platform for the discussion of a controversial topic. –Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy come to terms with their destinies as Never Let Me Go slowly unveils its secrets to readers. Not before, not after—though readers may return to certain passages after experiencing the "a-ha!" moment that’s sure to come. Many of Ishiguro’s works have a purposeful ambiguity to their plots, but his sixth novel’s play on memory, experience, and design may be the strangest yet. Despite its Twilight Zone -meets-Kafka sensibility, Never Let Me Go is heartbreaking, powerful, and chillingly possible.
The title, taken from a folk song Kathy imagines to be about an infertile woman’s miracle baby, suggests the novel’s troubling themes: how we define human, accept our station in life, forge a better future for some of us, and interpret memories. Answers surface slowly in the alternative reality Ishiguro pieces together from Kathy’s distorted recollections. His approach is deceptively simple; each tightly controlled piece of information contributes to a portrait of an ethically questionable society. As Ishiguro explained to London’s Daily Telegraph , the novel "offers a version of Britain that might have existed by the late 20th century if just one or two things had gone differently on the scientific front."
While a few critics questioned the characters’ acceptance of conditions they might have challenged, others assumed the system Ishiguro introduced precluded even pondering escape. In fact, a few found this world more interesting than the characters themselves. If some thought the scientific/technological premise polemical, others considered it highly provocative. In this age of major scientific debate over the future of humankind, Never Let Me Go will captivate you.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From The Washington Post
Kazuo Ishiguro's strange, and strangely affecting, new novel revolves around three people whom we first meet as children and whose fates are decided in early adulthood. It is an exceedingly difficult novel to review because essential aspects of it are also essential to the complex mystery at its core, so discussing it almost immediately becomes a delicate balance between what can and cannot be revealed. Believing as I strongly do that readers must be allowed to discover a book's secrets for themselves, guided by the author's hand, rather than have those secrets gratuitously spilled by a reviewer, I shall err on the side of silence, so please bear with me.
Never Let Me Go is set in an undisclosed time -- not in the future, though the novel pays more than a slight bow to science fiction, perhaps between the 1950s and the 1970s -- at a place in the British countryside called Hailsham. It is a school, but a school unlike any other. It was intended to be "a shining beacon, an example of how we might move to a more humane and better way of doing things." The teachers are called "guardians" and the students, though that is what they are called, are neither ordinary students nor ordinary children. They come to Hailsham at a very early age and stay there until, as older teenagers, they are permitted to live in "the Cottages" or "the White Mansion" or "Poplar Farm," halfway houses from which they make tentative steps into the real world.
The narrator of the novel is Kathy, or Kath, and the two other principal characters are her close friends and occasional rivals, Ruth and Tommy. She is "thirty-one years old, and . . . a carer now for over eleven years." What is a carer? One of the novel's mysteries, not really to be solved until two-thirds of the way through; suffice it to say that it's a difficult, emotionally and physically wearing job. Ruth and Tommy, approximately her own age, are "donors," but that mystery, too, must be left to Ishiguro to solve.
In any event, for most of the novel Ishiguro is primarily concerned with the three as children and with the odd world they inhabit at Hailsham. The school, or institution, or whatever one cares to call it, is located on a large parcel of beautiful land, isolated from the outer world. Its students are made to understand that "we were all very special," that "we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside." Their futures are hinted at but not faced head-on: "We hated the way our guardians, usually so on top of everything, became so awkward whenever we came near this territory. It unnerved us to see them change like that." They have a "special chance," but they have only the vaguest idea what that might be.
They are so caught up in the rituals and routines of Hailsham, though, that they have little time for speculation about the distant time of adulthood. They excitedly await "Exchanges," for example: "Four times a year -- spring, summer, autumn, winter -- we had a kind of big exhibition-cum-sale of all the things we'd been creating in the three months since the last Exchange. Paintings, drawings, pottery; all sorts of 'sculptures' made from whatever was the craze of the day -- bashed-up cans, maybe, or bottle tops stuck onto cardboard." Each child is given "Exchange Tokens" with which he or she can "buy work done by students in your own year," from which they form collections that become precious mementos of their time at Hailsham.
The very best products of their creative labors go to "the Gallery." None of them has ever seen it or even knows where it is, but the pieces for it are regularly chosen by a woman whose name they do not know -- "we called her 'Madame' because she was French or Belgian -- there was a dispute as to which -- and that was what the guardians always called her" -- and having one's work selected is regarded as a great honor. They also know that Miss Emily, the head of Hailsham, told one student "that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul."
Besides the Exchanges, the children look forward to the Sales, which "were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside." Every month "a big white van" brings the flotsam and jetsam of the outside world:
"Looking back now, it's funny to think we got so worked up, because usually the Sales were a big disappointment. There'd be nothing remotely special and we'd spend our tokens just renewing stuff that was wearing out or broken with more of the same. But the point was, I suppose, we'd all of us in the past found something special at a Sale, something that had become special: a jacket, a watch, a pair of craft scissors never used but kept proudly next to a bed. We'd all found something like that at one time, and so however much we tried to pretend otherwise, we couldn't ever shake off the old feelings of hope and excitement."
Too, the Sales are a way of connecting to the world outside: "at that stage in our lives, any place beyond Hailsham was like a fantasy land; we had only the haziest notions of the world outside and about what was and wasn't possible there." Hailsham is a closed circle beyond which they are not permitted to venture, with the result that the larger world becomes the subject of apprehension as well as curiosity: The children are "fearful of the world around us, and -- no matter how much we despised ourselves for it -- unable quite to let each other go."
That theme, which recurs throughout the book, is summarized for Kathy by a long-playing record she owned for a while -- eventually, and mysteriously, it vanished -- called "Songs After Dark," by a singer named Judy Bridgewater (fictitious, as best I can determine), one track of which is a song titled "Never Let Me Go." The students have been told "it was completely impossible for any of us to have babies," but even as a very young child Kathy dreams of having one:
"What was so special about this song? Well, the thing was, I didn't used to listen properly to the words; I just waited for that bit that went: 'Baby, baby, never let me go. . . .' And what I'd imagined was a woman who'd been told she couldn't have babies, who'd really, really wanted them all her life. Then there's a sort of miracle and she has a baby, and she holds this baby very close to her and walks around singing: 'Baby, never let me go. . .' partly because she's so happy, but also because she's so afraid something will happen, that the baby will get ill or be taken away from her. Even at the time, I realized this couldn't be right, that this interpretation didn't fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn't an issue with me. The song was about what I said, and I used to listen to it again and again, on my own, whenever I got the chance."
One time Kathy is alone in her room, playing the song, "swaying about slowly in time to the song, holding an imaginary baby to my breast." Then "something made me realize I wasn't alone, and I opened my eyes to find myself staring at Madame framed in the doorway. . . . She was out in the corridor, standing very still, her head angled to one side to give her a view of what I was doing inside. And the odd thing was she was crying. It might even have been one of her sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream." When she tells Tommy about this, he says: "Maybe Madame can read minds. She's strange. Maybe she can see right inside you."
What Madame thinks she sees will not be revealed for many pages, but it gets right to the essence of this quite wonderful novel, the best Ishiguro has written since the sublime The Remains of the Day. It is almost literally a novel about humanity: what constitutes it, what it means, how it can be honored or denied. These little children, and the adults they eventually become, are brought up to serve humanity in the most astonishing and selfless ways, and the humanity they achieve in so doing makes us realize that in a new world the word must be redefined. Ishiguro pulls the reader along to that understanding at a steady, insistent pace. If the guardians at Hailsham "timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information," by the same token Ishiguro carefully and deliberately unfolds Hailsham's secrets one by one, piece by piece, as if he were slowly peeling an artichoke.
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From AudioFile
From the beginning, Ishiguro seems more intent on teasing listeners than pleasing them. The story simulates but never really delivers action. The characters, Kathy, from whose point of view the story is told, Tommy and Ruth, never seem fully real; even their sex is made to feel tentative, almost abstract. Why does no one in this coming-of-age story ever come of age? Rosalyn Landor's reading floats magically through this world of curiously brittle mannequins with her soft, dreamlike British accent, never quite forceful enough to touch earth. Its finely cultivated but celluloid crispness, like a movie that uses half the number of requisite still frames, constantly teases us to puzzle why her narration is as it is. Gradually we realize that her airily nuanced reading is key to Ishiguro's world, parallel to and frightfully much like but, clearly, not yet our own. P.E.F. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Inside Flap
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.
Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it's only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.
Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.
"From the Hardcover edition.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Review
"'Ishiguro is the best and most original novelist of his generation.' Susan Hill, Mail on Sunday" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Back Cover
From the acclaimed author of "The "Remains of the Day and "When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed-even comforted-by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, "Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and" takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Review
"A page turner and a heartbreaker, a tour de force of knotted tension and buried anguish.” — Time
“A Gothic tour de force. . . . A tight, deftly controlled story . . . . Just as accomplished [as The Remains of the Day ] and, in a very different way, just as melancholy and alarming.” — The New York Times
"Elegaic, deceptively lovely. . . . As always, Ishiguro pulls you under." — Newsweek
“Superbly unsettling, impeccably controlled . . . . The book’s irresistible power comes from Ishiguro’s matchless ability to expose its dark heart in careful increments.” — Entertainment Weekly
From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.