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| View Larger Image | Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
| | List Price: | $14.00 | | Price: | $11.20 | | You Save: | $2.80 (20%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 1521 | | Studio: | Vintage | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 304 | | Publication Date: | March 14, 2006 | | Publisher: | Vintage |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day comes a devastating new novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special–and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving, beautifully atmospheric, Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of The Remains of the Day |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 191 reviews)
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Will stay with you for days 
Haunting, yet devoid of gratuitous gruesomeness one would expect given the subject matter. Ishiguro plays all the emotional chords very well: this is possibly the least British (and most Japanese) of his books, and I think the comparison with Murakami's "Norwegian Wood" mood setting is inevitable. Original, masterfully done: I don't give him five stars just because the setting is one bit too artificial, and the author does not care about responding to some obvious questions any intelligent reader would come up with.
September 06, 2008 | |
Sensitive, ultimately credible 
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a compelling portrait of people on the downside of a dystopia. Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale or J G Ballard's Kingdom come, Never Let me Go is built around an abhorrent aspect of social organisation. Crucially, in all three books, the focus of the subject matter is merely an extension of a facet of our own society. Fertility issues provide the material for The Handmaid's Tale, while brainless consumerism fuelled Kingdom Come. Kazuo Ishiguro's subject matter has a medical focus that provides an essentially more credible idea than either of the two other works mentioned. Eventually Ballard's vision cannot be maintained by his scant material, whereas Margaret Atwood's is strengthened by the credibility of its own downside. Ishiguro's story line is strong enough in itself to maintain interest, credibility and drama from start to finish. There is real humanity in this story.
The book begins in Hailsham, an obviously special school set in an idyllic corner of the English countryside. But this is clearly no ordinary education. We follow the fortunes of three of its students, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. We see them grow up, make their fumbling transformation from childhood to adolescence and then embark upon the stuttering unpredictability of young adulthood. Hailsham's students have to learn how to deal with their own shortcomings and how to manage their talents. They must cope with sometimes strained relations with their teachers, especially in the area of reconciling what they want to do versus what seems to be demanded of them, and thus what they are allowed to attempt. They become aware of sex and introduce themselves to its world in their own ways at different times, each of them reacting differently to their experience.
So what makes these people so special? Well, for a start they live protected lives. They never appear to need any money, nor possessions, for that matter, what little they do have being recycled ad infinitum via a system of almost formal barter. They seem to be protected from fashion, consumerism, family break-up, mass media and even street life. Surely there is something strange about them, despite their apparently normal physical, mental and psychological characteristics.
Not until about half way through the book does the reader start to fill in the blanks. But by the end the dreadful picture is complete, and rendered even more frightening by its complete credibility. To find out the nature of the plot, you will have to read the book, but, though I have stressed the importance of the overall concept's contribution to the book's success, it is not the subject matter that makes this a superb novel. It is the characterisation, the empathy that the reader develops with Kathy and Tommy and the sympathy that their tragedy eventually engenders. The context served to amplify these responses, not blur or confuse them. It is this quality that makes never Let Me Go a completely memorable and highly moving read.
August 20, 2008 | |
it's actually a horror story; 
just a warning: if you don't like horror stories (as I do not), don't read this book, because that's what it is. I love Remains of the Day, so I don't know what happened to Ishiguro here. Writer's block, or a book contract to be fulfilled with something, probably...
August 15, 2008 | |
Stunning.
My goodness, what can I say about this book? It is gloomy, sometimes funny, comtemplative, but no matter what emotion you have when reading this book, even the positive ones, it is tinged with a deep sense of sadness.
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are students at an elite school in Hailsham and it is constantly stressed to them how special they are. Their school is also spoken of with great esteem and appears to be very well regarded. The students lives are characteristic of most boarding school kids. They study, fight with each other, gossip about their classmates and teachers and dream of the careers they will have when they leave school. But in all of this you will sense something odd that for a long time you can't quite put your finger on. One of the most puzzling things to me as I read, was the lack of mention of parents or guardians coming to visit. There was never really talk of "home", a common theme with kids at boarding school. Very, very slowly you begin to realize what is actually happening and then you are filled with horror. Indeed these children are special but not in the way we were all led to believe.
I do not want to say too much because I do not want to reveal anything important but I was left reeling after reading this book. Though I have not read any of Ishiguro's writing before this, I will definitely seek his work out because he is a brilliant writer. There were many times,I felt like I was physically in the book, as if I was experiencing the situations myself.
When the truth of the situation dawned on me, I kept wondering why the people involved never seem to contemplate the idea of escaping. The characters seem to be unaware of the idea of freewill, its like they have been programmed to accept their fate and never resist it. Kathy, our guide through this tale is sympathetic and tragic at the same time. At the end of the day regardless of the actual facts on the table, this book is about the unique relationship between these three friends and how it evolves over the years.
I HIGHLY recommend this book but be warned, its depressing.
August 13, 2008 | |
Let's Get Real 
I cannot share the enthusiasm for this novel that some have expressed here. In my view, Ishiguro's plot is thin, his characters are flat -- take a look at the large-eyed young woman represented on the cover: is she a robot, a Stepford wife of the English variety perhaps? -- to the point that they come across as mostly inhuman, and the author barely explores the ethical issue -- are there limits on the uses of science that society should respect? -- which he raises.
Let's start with the open secret that this is a novel about cloned human beings. You will realize that long before the word "clones" is ever used, about twenty pages before the end, and that suggests a problem with the author's pacing or foreshadowing. The story is told from the point of view of Kathy, a young graduate of Hailsham (does that Dickensian name indicate the author's take on the ethical issue: will any good ever come from a sham?), an English boarding school now closed. Hailsham's students and graduates are unusually compliant souls. They do what they're told, which is strange considering that there is no mention of how they were socialized prior to their arrival at Hailsham. They accept their lot with a minimum of struggle or angst. Meanwhile, their "guardians" -- the teachers at Hailsham -- impose various rules, collect samples of the students' artwork for mysterious purposes, and wrestle with inner demons of their own.
The elegiac mood which some have praised in this work stems from the inevitability of its central characters' barren lives. There is little dramatic tension or movement in the novel. Once the secret is formally revealed, the book just fades away. To me this is a weakness, not a strength.
Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day was widely hailed -- there's that word again -- as a semi-outsider's rejection of the English class system and of its underlings' clinging to their place in society long after their place achieved any benefit for them. Never Let Me Go can be read for a similar subtext. Only a cruel and dying society would create human beings, with or without souls, to be exploited. For me there is too little insight in that vision, and Ishiguro's literary style is too unadorned to make up for his paucity of ideas.
August 12, 2008 | |
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