Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’d made two previous attempts back in the early 1990s to write the novel that became NEVER LET ME GO. It was then called ‘The Students Novel’. Both times I felt there was a key piece missing to the jigsaw, a piece whose shape and color I couldn’t determine, and I’d moved on to work on a different book. The story eluding me, I knew, would feature ‘students’ who lived in wrecked farmhouses in the rainy English countryside. (But there’d be no sign of a college near them.) They’d be a segregated group whose lives had become strangely shortened. I couldn’t progress beyond that. I couldn’t work out why they were ‘doomed’. I considered viruses, played around with nuclear contamination. But none of that seemed to work. The novel I eventually managed to complete owes a lot to a generation of writers fifteen years or so younger than me who emerged in Britain in the late 1990s. My own generation had always been standoff-ish, often downright snobbish, about employing SF or fantasy tropes, but I saw how writers like David Mitchell and Alex Garland were excited and inspired by them, using them brilliantly in books like CLOUD ATLAS or movies like 28 DAYS LATER and SUNSHINE. They opened up my imagination, giving me permission to explore speculative worlds. When I tried a third time, years after the first, to write my ‘Students Novel’, the dystopian sci-fi dimension fell into place quite naturally, and I was at last able to write NLMG. The novel kicked off what I now recognize as a new phase in my writing life – an extended project to which I’m still adding today. My latest novel, KLARA AND THE SUN, though different in crucial respects, is perhaps a kind of response to NLMG, an attempt to answer convincingly what seems to me a pervasive sadness that hangs over the older book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54120408-klara-and-the-sun

that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.

Humor often revolves around a sudden switch of perspective. Something that seems entirely sensible and logical while you’re embedded in a protagonist’s viewpoint becomes suddenly hilariously weird or surreal when glimpsed from that of a neutral passer-by. Authors like P.G. Wodehouse wrote brilliantly funny books simply by stringing together one sequence after another deploying this kind of sudden revelatory switching. Here I wanted to achieve something related, but provoking not hilarity, but something chilling; a feeling of revelation that feels unfathomed, producing a sense rather like losing balance at the edge of a dark pit.

“when we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel around the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”

I remember finding this whole idea of a nationwide lost property system quite touching; that after the distress of losing some precious item, you could dream of one day travelling to a region of the country to reclaim it; in particular that there could be the sort of innocence in the world to believe in such a thing and take comfort from it. This is also an example of a ‘set-up’. That’s to say, I knew as I was writing this passage that this Norfolk/lost property concept would return at a crucial point, and in an altogether bigger, hopefully shattering way. The impact, I was hoping, would be all the more powerful because the reader had last read about Norfolk many pages earlier in a fairly light-hearted context, then half-forgotten it. Bringing back half-forgotten things in this way can be a very effective way of getting behind the reader’s defence system. You can then blindside the reader with just a glancing reference. No need to milk scenes for emotion.

What made the tape so special for me was this one particular song: track number three, “Never Let Me Go.”

I should point out that Judy Bridgewater is entirely fictional, as is her album. But there are several real songs called ‘Never Let Me Go’, the best-known probably the jazz standard from the 50s, often played instrumentally by pianists like Bill Evans and Keith Jarret. But I didn’t have any specific song in mind here. What appealed to me was the song’s title, the actual phrase ‘Never Let Me Go’. I knew very early that I wanted this to be the title of my novel. I liked not only that it was in the first person, but also that it was a plea. I found the sheer impossibility of the request very affecting. ‘Hold me for a long time’ would be reasonable. ‘Don’t let go of me for the next three and a half hours’ would be possible. But ‘Never let me go’ is preposterous! It’s so poignant because the speaker knows it’s an impossible ask; is aware of the chasm between the yearning and what can be granted. Because sooner or later, however much both parties may cling to one another, something will come along to part them. (But we all understand this request because we’ve probably all made it, if only secretly, at some point in our lives.)

By then, of course, we all knew something I hadn’t known back then, which was that none of us could have babies.

I wanted Kathy to mention this as something that doesn’t greatly move her one way or the other. As a point of information on the way to explaining about the dancing with pillow incident. This is one of a number of truths that the children in NLMG assimilate incrementally over years, rather than as a revelation, as they drift through a hinterland of ‘knowing and not knowing’. I wanted that for Kathy and her friends infertility would never become a huge matter at the fore of their minds. They never consciously anguish about it, never mind protest publicly. And yet I wanted the sense that it would steadily, stealthily, come to have a massive impact on their lives – on their attitudes, their decisions, even their feelings for one another. Cut off from the basic cycle of reproduction, this is another weapon denied to them in the face of mortality.

Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do.

As above, here’s another huge truth about their fate – perhaps the most fundamental one – which the children receive not with horror, but almost like it’s another piece of routine educational knowledge imparted in class. This may echo, I felt, the way many of us first ‘heard about’ mortality; how we assimilated the news that all of us – our parents, even we as young children – were on an inescapable journey to ageing, decline and death. The whole strategy of NLMG was rather like that mirror Kathy refers to, the one that suddenly shows an image of oneself in a strange new light. By creating a world in which young people face the reckonings of people usually much older – who go through the average lifespan in around thirty years instead of seventy, eighty or ninety - I thought readers might glimpse with fresh intensity something which had become so familiar as to be almost invisible.

Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and—no matter how much we despised ourselves for it—unable quite to let each other go.

Kathy implies here that their wish to huddle together at this juncture indicates weakness and immaturity, something worthy of embarrassment if not shame. But even as she says this, she knows this very instinct is the one vital thing they have going for them. That it’s in these ties that she must search for strength and meaning.

Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life.

Cut off in one direction by the inability to have children, our characters appear also to have the path behind them shut off by not having parents, let alone ancestors. But unlike with infertility, Kathy and her peers do give conscious thought to their ‘parents’. I felt that the emotional need for the sense of a parent would exist independently of missing comfort and support on a day-by-day basis: the idea of what one might have inherited; the sense of one’s identity. Shame or pride could derive from confronting one’s parent, and so the idea of actively searching for one’s ‘possible’ is as frightening as it is tempting. It would have been possible to draw out a whole distinct subplot from this aspect of the story: a rich thread about a clone and his/her ‘model’ and the complex relationship that develops between them. It didn’t serve my overall purpose for this novel, so I didn’t go there. But I can see this being a territory that could be explored by someone one day. Maybe it already has.

We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.”

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! Kathy and Tommy’s cherished wish to have some extra time together depends on the correctness of their theory about the Gallery and their artwork. This is the moment when it becomes clear they’ve been mistaken, that they’ve been hoping in vain. What’s more, the truth they now discover tells them something very dark about their real place in the world. It’s interesting to me today that Kathy and Tommy have different responses to what should be a shattering revelation from Miss Emily. Tommy can’t immediately take it in. His touching trust in the idea – against all the evidence – that there are benevolent forces out there looking out for him takes a little while to collapse. Kathy, on the other hand, understands straight away and isn’t surprised. Disappointed, yes, but not devasted. This is something I realized more clearly while watching Carey Mulligan playing this scene in the film adaptation. (Actors often teach me things about my characters I didn’t previously know.) I realized that Kathy isn’t crushed because she already has the one thing she really wanted in life: to know that the person she has always loved since childhood loves her in return. It’s something she didn’t have for a long time, but now is something she feels no-one can take away from her. The question of whether or not a person has a ‘soul’, and what could usefully be meant by that, is something I’ve returned to in KLARA AND THE SUN.

When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn’t really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I’ve never forgotten.”

I have to admit I was never fully committed to the idea expressed here by Madame: that the world of NLMG was ‘more scientific, efficient’, but also more ‘harsh, cruel’ than those that had come before. Less ‘scientific’ eras have produced genocide, slavery, cruelty and horror on a scale Kathy and Tommy would find hard to comprehend. The dystopian aspects of the novel were, I feel, essentially a convenient device – something to allow me to create the metaphor about mortality and the human condition for which I was striving. However, as often happens in the writing of a novel, secondary themes introduced for some practical purpose began to demand attention, and to shade into a genuine preoccupation. By the end of the writing of this book, I’d become far more interested in the big questions about science and technology – and how we might adapt to accommodate their major breakthroughs – than when I started.

“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how I think it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.”

There’s a line I came across years before NLMG in a Leonard Cohen song called ‘I Can’t Forget’ (from the album I’m Your Man). Leonard sings, with weariness and resignation, but also with a certain pride: ‘I’ve loved you all my life/And that’s how I want to end it…’ I think this song may have been running in my mind when I wrote this speech for Tommy. I do wonder today if this isn’t one image too many of two people holding each other against forces pulling them apart. By this point, we’ve already seen Kathy and Tommy holding each other in the dark windy field. We have that title, and the song-and-pillow scene. We’ve had most of the story. I wonder if we really needed yet another image about rivers and strong currents?!

THE AUTHOR

It’s sixteen years since this book was published. Looking back now, it occurs to me there was another reason for my choice of title quite separate from anything I’ve said above. I think I wanted a song title because I was reaching not so much for a set of ideas as for a set of emotions. Of course, in a book like this the ideas have to be clearly in place or no emotion can emerge. But glancing through these pages now, I think that, much more than with many of my other books, my goal was to nail a feeling that I almost knew, but that still remained elusive to me.