#neverletmego — Public Fediverse posts

On Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and the Particular Cruelty of Goodbye

My second Kazuo Ishiguro novel was Never Let Me Go. The first was The Remains of the Day, a book I admired more than I loved. I thought it was beautifully written, impeccably controlled, but Stevens and his regrets never quite got under my skin. I appreciated the novel. That is not the same thing as being moved by it. There is a difference, sometimes an enormous one.

So I did not come to Never Let Me Go expecting to weep. I did not even know what it was about. Perhaps that was the ideal way to read it. Perhaps not, because I nearly failed to read it at all.

The first hundred pages were a struggle for me. Not because Ishiguro writes badly. Quite the opposite. His prose is smooth, almost unnervingly smooth. The sentences move easily. The pages do not present the kind of linguistic resistance I encountered in, say, Blood Meridian, where I felt as though I needed a machete and a dictionary merely to get through a paragraph. Never Let Me Go is perfectly readable. And yet I could not get through it.

I was in a reading slump, or, as I called it at the time, a reading slop. I would pick the book up, read a few pages, put it down. Days passed. Then weeks. The story did not seem to be going anywhere sufficiently interesting for me. Kathy H. was telling me about her childhood, about school, about friendships, about little resentments and jealousies and romances. Fine. All right. But where was this going?

Then there were these words. Carer. Donor. Guardian.

They appeared with a peculiar casualness, as though I were supposed to understand what they meant. The characters certainly did. Nobody stopped to explain them to me. Ishiguro does not put up a sign saying, Attention, reader. Here is the premise of the novel. Instead, he lets the vocabulary of this world drift past you, almost innocently.

I was confused. And, regrettably, I cheated. I asked Google.

There are moments when one should exercise more patience as a reader. This was one of them. Google, that great destroyer of narrative surprises, promptly informed me what was going on. The plot was revealed. I knew what Hailsham was. I knew what Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were. I knew what “donations” and “completion” meant. I cannot blame Ishiguro for this. This was entirely my own impatience. And yet, even knowing what was coming, Never Let Me Go devastated me.

That, I think, says something about the novel’s power. A plot twist can be spoiled. The emotional experience of a story cannot always be. Knowing that a person is going to die is not the same as watching him or her walk toward death. Knowing the destination does not spare you the journey. Sometimes it makes the journey worse.

The strangest thing about Never Let Me Go is that the horror of its premise is almost never presented as horror. There are no laboratories filled with cackling scientists. No dystopian rebellion. No grand revelation followed by revolution. No protagonist standing on a barricade, screaming that the system must be destroyed. The characters simply live. They go to school. They make friends. They quarrel. They fall in love, or think they do. They become jealous. They remember small humiliations with astonishing clarity. They cling to objects and songs and private jokes. They misunderstand one another. They want to be special. In other words, they are human.

That is the terrible joke of the novel, if one can call something this sad a joke. The society of Never Let Me Go has created human beings for a purpose, assigned them a fate, and then proceeds as though that fate settles everything. But the novel itself quietly asks a more difficult question: if these people can love, grieve, desire, remember, envy, hope, and fear, then what exactly are we denying them when we deny them a future?

The answer is almost too obvious to say. Everything.

Kathy’s narration is central to why the novel works so well. She tells her story retrospectively, in a voice that is calm, conversational, occasionally meandering. She doubles back. She corrects herself. She remembers one incident and then suddenly recalls another that complicates it. At times, her narration feels almost like someone talking to you during a long drive, saying, “Actually, before I get to that, I should probably explain something else.” I loved this. It is a deceptively simple style. Ishiguro makes memory feel like memory. Not memory as a perfectly organized archive, with neat labels and chronological order, but memory as something porous and unruly. One recollection opens another. A trivial detail acquires importance years later. Something that seemed insignificant becomes, in retrospect, unbearable. Kathy does not narrate like a person delivering a thesis on her own life. She narrates like someone trying to make sense of it. And perhaps that is all any of us are doing.

There is also something heartbreaking about the limits of her rebellion, if rebellion is even the right word. Kathy is not stupid. Neither are Tommy or Ruth. They understand, eventually, what their lives are. But understanding does not necessarily produce resistance. That is one of the novel’s most uncomfortable truths. You like to imagine that knowledge makes you free. If you knew the truth, you would act. You would fight. You would refuse. Wouldn’t you?

The characters in Never Let Me Go are shaped by the world before they are old enough to question it. Their vocabulary, expectations, ambitions, even their fantasies have been constructed within the boundaries of their existence. They do not dream of becoming kings or astronauts or old men and women surrounded by grandchildren. Their hopes are smaller because the world has made them smaller. This is not entirely science fiction. It is not even entirely dystopian. Most people live inside assumptions they did not choose.

You inherit ideas about success, beauty, love, work, family, nation, morality. You are born into systems already functioning, rules already established, expectations already waiting for you. Perhaps some people escape them. Others do not. Most of us, probably, spend our lives negotiating with them and congratulating ourselves for choices that were not as free as we would like to believe.

The tragedy of Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy is extreme. That is why it reveals something more ordinary. They know they are going to die. So do you. Their lives have an expiration date attached to them. So do yours. The difference is that their deaths have been organized into a system, given a sequence, a purpose, and polite euphemisms. They will become carers. They will become donors. Eventually, they will “complete.”

Complete. What a monstrous word.

There is a particular cruelty in euphemism. To “complete” is not to die, at least not linguistically. Language tidies up what reality would otherwise force you to confront. And the people in the novel have inherited this language. They use it because it is the language available to them.

Ishiguro understands something important about cruelty: it does not always announce itself with violence, yet when it arrives, it is final. Sometimes it becomes most efficient when everyone has learned how to speak about it gently. But for all the philosophical implications of the novel, what destroyed me was not the premise. It was the people. I felt their friendship. I felt the love between them. I even felt the ugliness of their relationships, because friendship is not always noble. Ruth can be infuriating. She manipulates. She lies. She creates little fictions around herself. She wounds people because, perhaps, she senses that there is so little available to her that she must possess whatever she can, even if only emotionally. She can be a cunt, and yet I could not hate her.

That is another thing Ishiguro does brilliantly. He allows his characters their pettiness without reducing them to their pettiness. Ruth is not merely the villain standing between Kathy and Tommy. She is frightened. She wants to be loved. She wants to believe that she matters. She wants a life that she cannot have, though she does not always know how to articulate this desire.

Tommy, too, is more than the awkward boy with the temper. Kathy is more than the sensible, observant narrator. Their relationships shift because people shift. Love arrives too late. Understanding arrives too late. Apologies arrive too late. That is life, unfortunately. A great deal of life consists of timing.

There are things you could have said earlier. There are people you could have loved better. There are apologies that become meaningful precisely because there is no longer enough time for them to repair anything.

Ishiguro’s restraint makes these things hurt more. He does not wrench emotion out of you through grand speeches. He does not shout. The novel is often almost quiet. And because it is quiet, the sadness has room to accumulate. Then, suddenly, you realize what you have been reading. A story about people being prepared, from childhood, to say goodbye. A story about people who are told, in one way or another, that they do not belong to themselves. A story about how love cannot save everyone.

That last part is important. Love does not save Kathy and Tommy. It does not produce the miracle they hope for. There is no hidden loophole in the machinery of the world. No exception granted because their love is especially pure. The world is not moved by the fact that two people finally understand what they mean to each other.

How could I not be devastated by that?

I have always been susceptible to goodbyes in stories. Apparently, I can fancy myself stoic. I can imagine that I have been desensitized by enough books, enough films, enough fictional deaths. Then a story places two people before me and tells me, quietly, that this is the last time. That they have to part. That one of them will go on and the other will not. And I am finished.

There is something especially painful about the goodbyes in Never Let Me Go because the characters have so little control over them. Every goodbye is connected to the larger goodbye waiting ahead. Even happiness becomes fragile because you know, or eventually know, that it cannot last. But then again, whose happiness can?

Perhaps this is where the novel becomes more than its premise. Strip away Hailsham. Strip away cloning. Strip away the donations. What remains is recognizably human. We all live among people we will lose. We all experience periods of life without knowing, while we are living them, that they will one day become memory. A school. A room. A song. A friend you assume you will always know. Then time moves. The thing is over. And nobody announces the final moment while it is happening.

Kathy’s memories are painful because they are all she has left. But perhaps memories are all any of us have left eventually. You move forward, and the past becomes increasingly inaccessible. People disappear. Places change. The version of yourself who inhabited a particular moment ceases to exist, too. There are many deaths in a life before the body finally catches up.

This may sound excessively gloomy. It probably is. But Never Let Me Go does not leave me with despair exactly. I would not call it hopeful either. Hope is too easy a word to throw at a book like this. The novel leaves me with something more complicated: an awareness of the terrible value of ordinary life. The characters are not remarkable because they are destined for greatness. They are remarkable because they care about ordinary things. A cassette tape. A gesture. A memory of a field. A person sleeping beside them. The possibility of more time. Is that not enough?

Perhaps the novel’s deepest cruelty is that it makes you understand the preciousness of life through people who have been systematically denied the right to live one fully. Their tragedy illuminates your own good fortune, if that is what you should call it. You are not guaranteed anything either, but you are at least permitted the illusion that the future is open. Kathy and Tommy are not. And still they love. Still they hope. Still they try to imagine a little more time together.

I had misgivings about Never Let Me Go when I began it. I thought the story would not move me much. I nearly abandoned it in the first hundred pages. I spoiled the plot for myself because I was impatient and confused. Honestly, this was not my finest hour as a reader. But once I returned to it, the novel kept me turning the pages. The storytelling is patient and deliberate, and Ishiguro’s writing is wonderfully smooth. Of the two Ishiguro novels I have read, this is the one that reached me. The Remains of the Day made me admire Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go made me feel him. And feeling, I suppose, is the more dangerous thing. By the end, I wept.

Then, apparently deciding that I had not suffered enough, I went ahead and watched the 2010 film adaptation. And I wept some more.

Perhaps watching the film immediately after finishing the novel was not the wisest decision. I had barely recovered from the book, if “recovered” is even the appropriate word, before willingly subjecting myself to the same story all over again. There is something different about seeing those goodbyes made visible, about watching Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth embodied rather than merely imagined. The film could not replace the novel, nor should it. Ishiguro’s voice, Kathy’s digressive memories, that gradual accumulation of dread, these belong especially to the book. But the film gave the tragedy another form, and I was apparently susceptible to that too.

So there I was, devastated by the novel, and then devastated again by the adaptation. I really should learn to leave well enough alone.

But perhaps that second round of tears confirmed something for me. The story was not merely effective because Ishiguro had surprised me, and certainly not because I did not know the plot. I knew exactly what was going to happen by then. I had read it. I had watched the characters walk toward the inevitable. The inevitability remained inevitable. And it still hurt.

Not because Ishiguro tricks you into sadness. Not because the novel manipulates you with cheap tragedy. I wept because I had come to care about these people, their ridiculous little jealousies, their memories, their failed timing, their affection for one another. I wept because they had to say goodbye.

Because ultimately Never Let Me Go is a novel about letting go, about goodbyes. The goodbye to childhood. The goodbye to friendship as it once was. The goodbye to the person one loves. The goodbye to the fantasy that there will always be more time. And finally, the last goodbye, the one waiting for everyone.

Ishiguro gives his characters a world in which death is scheduled and unavoidable, then asks you to watch what they do with the little life allowed to them. The answer is almost unbearably simple. They live it. They love badly and well. They remember. They lose one another. They say goodbye. And apparently, no matter how stoic I fancy myself, that is still enough to break me.

55+ Thai BL Dramas On Viki

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.soompi.com/article/1852540wpp/55-thai-bl-dramas-on-viki

Movie TV Tech Geeks #Movie #ScienceFiction #NeverLetMeGo 8 Forgotten Sci-Fi Movies Better Than Most Blockbusters You've Already Seen http://dlvr.it/TT1hqm

Movie TV Tech Geeks #Movie #ScienceFiction #NeverLetMeGo #Books 10 Greatest Sci-Fi Books of the Last 50 Years http://dlvr.it/TT0qvc

I finished #NeverLetMeGo by #KazuoIshiguro this morning, and honestly have been thinking about it all day.

The strangest thing, is that I'm usually able and willing to understand how I feel about a book, but I just don't know with this one. I can't say I really _enjoyed_ it, but then I'm glad I read it. It could have ended differently, but then that wouldn't make it better, or even more satisfying.

As ever, when something puts a splinter in your mind, that's probably a good thing.
#bookstodon

25 Modern Classics That’ll Actually Wreck You (In the Best Way)

https://findsbydavidblog.wordpress.com/2026/03/30/25-modern-classics-thatll-actually-wreck-you-in-the-best-way/

𝑳𝒊𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒓𝒚 𝑵𝒐𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒔 - 𝑼𝒕𝒐𝒑𝒊𝒂’𝒔 𝑺𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝑷𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒔: 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒓 𝑻𝒓𝒆𝒌 & 𝑰𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒈𝒖𝒓𝒐 -

The “Hideous Bargain” moves from metaphor to the operating table.

https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/utopias-spare-parts-star-trek-ishiguro/

#podcast #literature #books #bookworm #book #read #readreadread #bookpodcast #literarylovers #bookboost #booklover #bookclub #necropolitics #bioeconomy #clinicallabor #organharvesting #startrek #startrekstrangenewworlds #liftuswheresufferingcannotreach #kazuoishiguro #neverletmego

Heiliger Sankt Nikolaus, segne dieses Haus!

#Sternsinger #habichbezahlt #bismillah #neverletmego

Last night we watched #NeverLetMeGo which is a very engaging movie asking about the ethics of cloning. Is it more ethical to give a clone a life and an upbringing then just use them for their organs, or should they just be there when needed? The medical scenes still tugged at my heart but that’s from memories that aren’t leaving me anytime soon.

The mornings are nice and cool these past couple of days. May it continue

The 10 Best Standalone Sci-Fi Books

Who has time for a Dune-size epic? Check out these standalone sci-fi instead.
https://www.themarysue.com/the-10-best-standalone-sci-fi-books/

#Books #BraveNewWorld #childrenoftime #NeverLetMeGo #scifi
@indieauthors

Christmas book haul. Have you read any of these?
- August: Osage County by Tracy Letts
- Parable Of The Sower by Octavia E. Spencer
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

#octaviabutler #tracyletts #kazuoishiguro #parabelofthesower #augustosagecounty #neverletmego #books #bookstodon #bookish

#TakingABreakFromFilming
#NeverLetMeGo (1953)
An American reporter stationed in post-war Moscow marries a ballet dancer, but their relationship is threatened by the country's political volatility.

#ClarkGable #GeneTierney on set.
#FilmMastodon 📽️ 🎬