Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

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.