Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

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.