"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro | Book Review

Elegant, elegiac, and gothic. Rarely have I read anything so plain, simple, yet haunting like this before. But at the same time deeply flawed and quite boring at times which goes hand in hand with its plain nature, and simplicity.

During the first half of the book, I wrote this thought down:

"Perhaps it was my depreciating attention span, or perhaps it is the research paper brain always trying to pick out the essential parts of the story that I found many parts of the non-linear storytelling to be boring. The retrospective POV makes the story even wordier and often spoils a block of the story by summarizing it first, though it helps with organizing the story in the brain. There is no clear tension or challenges, and it makes it slightly boring. Like Stephen King said, most people don’t care about literature, they just want a good story to read on the plane."

However, by the time I closed the book, I developed a fondness for the writing while still acknowledging its flaws deeply. With its perceptive and nuanced emotional depth and elegant, simple language, this book left me feeling melancholic and anguish. My high school English teacher once said that arts and literature remind us that we are human. The search for truth, purpose, and meaning; the dreams and disillusionment; the fussing over trite things in our short lives; the unstoppable forces that imprison us -- this book is a compressed version of real life.

Because while yes I can find it heavily boring following Kathy’s musings on her life, it is precisely the mundanity and fond memories she finds within her quiet and mundane upbringing and adulthood in which we are to find so tragic. Because she isn’t like us. But yet as we see in her head, she is just a girl, she’s not just relegated to being lesser than us just because of the meaning for which she is brought into the world for. I write this quite vaguely because of the spoilery nature of this book.

While some may say that the exposition heavy dump of a scene near the end was anticlimactic, I find that it more so serves its purpose not for the reader but for the characters. I only wish that its results had shown more emotional rawness and fallout in the remaining pages after. Most readers should pick up way early on I think around page 60 or so on what the true happenings of this world is going on. And it’s about the minute details in Kathy’s recollection of her life that we are forced to sit within and understand the devastating themes that Ishiguro was trying to convey.

All this is to say, Never Let Me Go serves as a profound reflection of our own time. Deeply unsettling to read, hard to get through, both for its annoying and drab characters, perfunctory memories but all of it important and serving its greater purpose with superb prose. The novel forces us to confront the inhumanity embedded within our social systems, exposing the dystopian reality we often overlook in our everyday lives. It challenges us to face the crude and hideous nature of mere survival and the quiet death of hope. Reading this book alongside the news leaves us feeling uncomfortably implicated in this institutionalized violence and the cruelty of inaction. And perhaps that is precisely the point: the novel urges us to confront this brutality so that we might dare to hope and imagine the alternative futures its bleak ending couldn't.