Never Let Me Go

A weekend of fun, and apparently I have no memory of certain parts of it, but feeling really good after all that craziness. Once in a while you need a little laugh-your-head-off and shout-your-lungs-out refreshment.

Finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go”. I couldn’t put it down. I always loved his other book “Remains of the Day” but this one is even better. Cried myself a river at the end, but I am one of those morbid creatures that prefer Gothic sad stories.

The place is England, the time is 1990s. Kathy, Tommy and Ruth had been best friends since infancy. They shared an amazing childhood together. There were intense drama and good humor in their little clique of friends and between rival groups. They were competitive at sports, struggled in art classes, and obsessed endlessly about sex. Now that they are older and have gone on different paths, the thing that still holds them together is no more than the belief that the only way to change their tragic destiny is to prove a couple is truly in love, but there are three of them. As they reminisce and discover more about their mysterious upbringing in the exclusive boarding school, they came to realize that the belief they have held so dear is false. Nothing can change their fate, not even true love.

Now a little bit about the setting, which is fictional. It distinguishes the book from a chick-flick. It’s actually a science fiction with a futuristic tone but set in the past. Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are actually three among thousands of cloned babies that have been brought up for the sole purpose of donating vital organs to cure diseases such as cancer and dementia. Since WWII, the world has come to depend on these cloned babies to provide organs, and because so many people’s lives depended on the donation program, the whole society justifies it by believing the clones are just test tube creatures without souls. These cloned babies have been told and accepted their fate, because the conditions in which they were kept alive merely to provide organs were so horrible they have no desire to live anyway.

What’s special about Kathy, Tommy and Ruth is that they grew up in Hailsham, which is a boarding school that used to be part of a humanist movement to prove that these cloned babies do have souls and that they are human (not unlike the Civil Rights Movement). They were provided the best education and care. The first part of the book mainly described the wonderful childhood they all shared without alluding to the fact that they are any different than you and me. In fact, they had been sheltered, kept away from the truth of their fate. They knew they had to go through a life of donating organs, but they always believed that you can get out of it by proving that you are really in love. That belief held them together, but it was shattered as they came to find out in the real world. The second part of the book is in elegiac suspense as they put the pieces to the puzzle together.

In the end, Tommy said to Kathy, “And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how I think it is with us. It’s a shame, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever.”

The not-letting-go sentiment is multifold. On one level, it’s holding on to people and things we love. On the second level, it’s hanging on to feelings and beliefs. And at a bigger picture, it’s the society keeping grip on its morals and ethics. If you are preserving something that you know in your heart could not remain, what will fill that empty spot once it’s gone? Isn’t it enough to have memories of how it used to be? What exactly is lost, when you come to find out you will never have something you thought you were able to obtain? Blissful expectancy or deceptive ignorance?