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Never Let Me Go starts out unassumingly enough as your typical English boarding school drama. But before long the characters begin talking obliquely of "donations" and "deferrals" and of finding their "possible" and you realize that there is something going on here that even the children of the story do not fully understand.

Somehow I knew the secret of this book before I began it, I guess from reading about it online somewhere, so I'm not sure how much of a surprise it is meant to be. In fact the true nature of the children of the Hailsham boarding school is revealed offhandedly at a certain point in the story, avoiding the shocking revelatory moment that we are expecting. It happens after some time has passed in the lives of Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, the three main characters of the novel. After they have grown up and moved to the next stage of their lives, sharing a cottage away from the school but not quite integrated into the real world. By this point they just know what had been kept secret from them for so long and they have accepted it very readily.

I won't spoil the secret, in case it is meant to have an impact, but I think it is meant to be more of a background element for Ishiguro to use as a way of examining humanity through the lives of people that are slightly different from us. Ishiguro builds a sense of mystery by slowly revealing the background of the world his characters are living in but he never really lets it build to a crescendo. Even the climactic scene towards the end is deflated purposefully by a character that is expected to hold a helpful secret but her answers to everyone's questions are not really all that helpful.

This all makes Never Let Me Go more interesting than other books of its kind might be, but also more frustrating. Ishiguro is the writer of such literary novels as Remains of the Day and the subject matter he tackles here seems too sci-fi for him, though it really isn't that far off from reality when you think about it. I wish that he delved further into his concept as there were some things I was left unsure about and I still feel left with a sense of being let down by it all but I can't say that I wasn't captivated the whole way through.

Posted at November 22, 2005 10:46 AM