Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

“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.