Heart-shaped boxes

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel “Never Let Me Go” has recently enjoyed a revival after being adapted for the big screen in 2010 by director Mark Romanek. The novel was a risky venture for one of literature’s most subtle voices, as its subject matter draws heavily from the science fiction thriller genre. Yet, just as Graham Greene fashioned the crime thriller framework of “Brighton Rock” into a novel that challenged the Roman Catholic doctrine on the nature of sin and morality, Ishiguro has done something marvelous with “Never Let Me Go.”

The premise, unfortunately, cannot be left unstated in any review of “Never Let Me Go.” Kathy, the novel’s 31-year-old narrator, is introduced to us as a “carer” who works in a recovery center, where she assists “donors.” It is not long, however, before Kathy’s mind wanders, taking us back to the privileged upbringing she enjoyed at the boarding school Hailsham.

Along with best friends Ruth and Tommy, our narrator received an education and upbringing that is perhaps best described as Dickensian via Aldous Huxley. Rather than nuns, there are “guardians,” whose extreme concern for the children is countered by a professionalism and distance that comes across as slightly odd. Kathy, Ruth and Tommy spend their childhood absorbed in art projects and other enjoyments, and are encouraged to stretch the duration of their early years for as long as possible.

Once revealed, their post-graduate duty gives harmony to the discordant notes that came before. Hailsham is a school for clones, created and raised to adulthood exclusively for the use of their organs. Here is where it becomes important to distinguish Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel from the world of science fiction, with its simple moral paradoxes.

From any other author, this would almost certainly be a trite commentary on the ethics of science, but the man who authored “The Remains of the Day” doesn’t tend to make such middling statements. Ishiguro’s characters offer us either the highly personal or the wildly vast when it comes to statements on the human condition.

If one goes looking for the personal, what one discovers in “Never Let Me Go” are those things that Ishiguro might say are innately human. That there are things so much a part of human nature as to be experienced even by quasi-humans, reared in an environment that is merely a grotesque caricature of childhood. At the same time, we also catch glimpses of the consequences in rearing focused on developing a personality that can tolerate one’s fate.

This, of course, has nothing to do with personality-deficient clones or moral debates in science and medicine. It has everything to do with what it means to be human, and the limits to which we can abuse the privilege. The tolerances of humanity, it would seem, are great in the personal as well as the collective.

Ultimately, “Never Let Me Go” is a novel about our collective ability to persevere in spite of an existence that is utterly meaningless. Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are merely living an accelerated and tightly focused form of the existence that all experience in alleged chaos. Reason would suggest that the three of them should resist, but instead they simply live each day conditioning their self to accept the constraints of their lives. They struggle, but it is a struggle toward acceptance, not against it.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s wonderful novel doesn’t ask us why we want to clone, or whether it is morally correct. Neither is his decision to use clones to illustrate his point accidental. It is, in fact, an ironic one—man’s only means of achieving immortality is fashioned into a story that asks us why we don’t each walk off a cliff the moment we realize the futility of existence. ?