“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro
2006
288 pages. Audio: 9 hours and 40 minutes
Fiction

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Kazuo Ishiguro has won every award worth winning as a writer. He won the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day and more recently received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born in Japan, his family moved to England when he was just five, so he is a British writer with a unique perspective on the world.

Never Let Me Go is a brilliant novel. TIME named it the best novel of the year and one of the best 100 English language novels written between 1923 and 2007.

When I first started teaching 32 years ago, it wasn't long before a course in biomedical ethics became part of my load. In those days, cloning had gone well beyond bad science fiction, but we were far from understanding all of its possible implications. Would I be able to clone that favorite pet so the new version would make it feel as if old Rover had never really died? A more ominous question, which I was unable to take as seriously as I should have back then, was whether we might clone human beings in order to have ready-made compatible replacement parts for ourselves. It turns out that, technologically, this possibility is very much within reach.

But if we were to clone human beings for spare parts, what would be the status of the clones? Would they too be human beings with all of the rights and owed all the obligations of natural born human beings even though they had been created for no other reason than to supply body parts?

Enter Ishiguro with his elegiac and melancholy novel. I suppose I've given a bit of a spoiler here since it’s not clear at the beginning of the book that we are dealing with cloned human beings. But that happens early enough that I feel little guilt here. At some point the clones will cease to be merely organ donors and will have to give their lives for the sake of the originals.

This sounds like the setup for really bad B movie, but we are dealing with one of the world's best writers. All the questions surrounding cloning fall upon us here, yet this is not an ethics essay. The deeper questions about what it means to be a human being and what it means to love and be loved are what drive the book. Ishiguro, as always, is interested in the personal, relational aspects of the big questions. This book is not about the issue of cloning. It is about clones we get to know personally as human beings. As it turns out, those two things are not the same at all.

The book holds up extraordinarily well after 15 years, and while it is not exactly a “feel good” book, it is uplifting in the way that great literature often is. I don't know if it is one of the 100 best books of the last century, but it is well worth the time you will spend with it.