Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Reviewed by Claudine

The story begins innocently enough with Kathy H. who identifies herself as a ‘carer’, narrating stories from her childhood in a boarding school at Hailsham. As she narrates her time spent in this school, you get a feeling that something is terribly wrong with the school, its system and guardians. You wonder why the teachers are called guardians, why the students are reminded of how special they are and what kind of donations these students are to make later in life. No mention is made of parents and you get a feel that these students are herded involuntarily towards something sinister. As you read on, Ishiguro subtly and suspensefully leads you into the horror of the story as you discover who they are and what they are ultimately used for.

At the heart of the story is the question of what makes one human? Is it a series of quantifiable human experiences? To be creative and artistically expressive? To love and be loved? To cherish relationships and time spent with loved ones? The journey that Kathy and her friends take to seek the answers to these questions in the race against time is heartbreaking and you cannot help but hope desperately for them, towards the end, that they could attain their deepest desires - the freedom to live as they wish and to delay the fate set for them, if only for a period of borrowed time.