What is a soul? Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go explores a number of questions, subtly. For most of the book, Kathy, the narrator, systematically relates her memories of growing up at a special school called Hailsham somewhere in the English countryside, as well as her life afterwards.

To begin, Kathy explains that currently, at age 31, she works as a "carer" with responsibility for "donors." That is, organ donors. Many of these donors, the ones to whom she feels the strongest connection, also spent their early lives at Hailsham. As she introduces herself, she makes clear that Hailsham no longer exists, and that in fact she doesn't know exactly where it once stood. 

But it’s evident that she too will soon become an organ donor — and that in fact her entire cohort belong to a class of creatures that were created solely for the purpose of donating organs to the real, natural humans. While those who were brought up at Hailsham were privileged with a traditional education in the arts and humanities, others were not. Thus Kathy and her fellows are a kind of elite, but their looming fate is the same. The intensity and consciousness of the lives of Kathy and her fellow students contrasts to their status in society: not quite human, despite their deep and meaningful relationships and emotional lives. Above all, they cannot choose how to live or what do do with their own lives: they have only one future.

Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in 2017, is renowned for writing simple and direct stories that force the reader to confront painful and profound questions. In this story, the question is what is a soul? Do these clones whose emotional and personal lives are both normal and vivid have souls? Reading this book again for the first time since it was published in 2005, I found it deeply painful. The parallels to actual social outcast groups are clear but it’s left to the reader to think about them — never is there a direct comparison to the world we actually inhabit. 

I chose to reread Never Let Me Go because Ishiguro’s newest book is being published this week, and amazon has promised that my copy will arrive Thursday. I have read several reviews of the new book along with Ishiguro’s small body of work (just 8 novels and a story collection before the new one). I believe it’s very hard to capture just what it is he is doing in his powerful yet seemingly simple novels. The more times I read them, the more challenging I find them. I’m really looking forward to the new one.

This review © 2021 mae sander.