Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

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.