Published in 2005, Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest tour de force Never Let Me Go emerges as a mesmerizing novel veiled by understated poignancy. Staged in England of the late 1990s, the novel revolves around a school of clones whose bodies are preordained to function as repositories in supply of organs for “normal people.” Though in Hailsham the hermetic school these innocent pupils are informed of their future tasks, they never fully realize how their “career” would be going to fare. The sharp contrasts between the futureless clones and the bright normal people are dramatized with inarticulate bitterness so that the whole novel is enveloped with an impenetrable somberness.
Narrated by Kathy the 31-year-old woman in her point of view, the story unfolds alongside her fragmentary reminiscences. She reflects on the jovial days in Hailsham where students are emotionally attached to the strict “guardians” and entertained with myriads of myths and hearsays circulating on campus. The school education places great premiums on their physical health and artistic creations, the latter in their understanding is to enrich the school “Gallery.” They know donations and they know they are somewhat different from their guardians, whereas they cannot tell exactly what disparities are set in-between. Directed by her occasionally elliptical remembrances, we readers are ushered into a fictional world where things beyond the school seems obscure and floating, and like a tantalized detective we are urged to assemble the pieces and parcels dropped by the speaker to shape out the isolated world. We relish the enchanting ways of life they indulge in, while with the elusive attitude of the guardians we sense that something explosive is looming. Puzzles like who the Madame is and what the Gallery functions for lurk in their mind, yet they live quite easily without deeper questioning. Initiating them to crystallize the haunting puzzles is the distressing speech launched by one of their guardians—Ms. Lucy:
“The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I’m not. If you’re going to have decent lives, then you’ve got to know and know properly. None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you.” (P79-80)
Their golden days are concluded as yet; afterwards, they enroll in Cottage (like our college) accompanied by the unresolved puzzles that begin to entangle their lives only intangibly. Among the credulous students Kathy and Tom are more sensitive and skeptical about those surrounding them. Self-satisfyingly, they forge numerous theories to clarify the disturbing riddles. After graduated from Cottage, Tom and Ruth commence their donation career, while Kathy chooses to work as a carer who attends to the donors. Their efforts to realize their world persist, yet waiting at the termination of their pursuit journey are merely consecutive disillusionments. They come to recognize that the “Gallery” collecting their best works serves simply to attract more capitals, Hailsham the school they cherish in memory is established only to demonstrate how humanitarian the scientists treat the clones, and most heartrendingly, the guardians’ coldness and detachment is to mask their fear of them, once the puerile clones.
I mourn for their incompetence to overturn their dooms. “Which is the better way to lead a life, believing or questioning?” I feel compelled to ask. In the story, Ruth is the one who appears more dominant and adaptable, though more vulnerable in reality, often choosing to believe in whatever she is offered. Before her last donation, she confesses all her calculation around Ruth and Tom the unfortunate lovers, and she passes away before the appalling truth dawns on her. Ruth and Tom, who eventually get together and delve into the myths jointly, end up illuminated yet radically disenchanted. But for their insistence, they could live a brighter life together like any normal couple. It is their relentless aspiration for truth that dissolves their hope. In our confusing world, analogously, it is easier to turn back on those disturbing things and pretend to be blind or dumb. Isn’t it a clever way to lead a merrier life? But as we lose curiosity to probe into the ambient world, what on earth makes humans unique? Further muddying the water is the moral dilemmas triggered by the author—are you willing to sacrifice someone’s life in exchange of that of your beloved one? And how can we, so-called civilized people, cultivate a group of clones by the way we raise poultry?
Their understanding about the real world and even the normal people are much flawed. The guardians, instead of being called “teachers”, are the only normal people in close contact with them, but at the end of the story they can provide no more than outspoken apathy. Separating the two parallel dimensions is a formless yet formidable gulf built by cumulative misconstruction. Ensuing the avalanching epiphany is mounting deaths of their generation. Ruth and Tom “completed” successively; remained is Kathy the paralyzed carer, whose yielding to be a donor at last suggests her taciturn surrender to her prescribed fate. In light of their infertility, the entire generation is going to be buried under the society’s acquiescence, and in the ongoing history no place can they ever find for their tragedies. Their tragedies are the society’s unspeakable guilt. When we turn over the pages of history books, have we ever noticed that some inaudible cries are concealed by the lines?
This is a story about love, about how anomalous people desire to be loved. Helplessness simmered in my heart that was tightly wringed the instant I closed the tiny yet heavy book. There is surely no clone at present, but in our society who are the invisible minority subservient to the majority? What, as well as who, backup our well-being that we always take for granted? Like the clones, we have been told, and taught, about many things, but certainly there are far more things we are untold and untaught. To believe or to question, to explore or to be blind—these are the matters of individual choices. Human life, like a carpet, is knit by manifold choices and dilemmas; each of our decisions contributes to the patterns of our own carpet. While we cannot identify fate the enigmatic manipulator, we are able to direct our own ways by making discrete decisions at every turn of life. This is perhaps what literature serves human life—not physically instrumental, yet from “witnessing” the development of others’ lives, we are occasionally enlightened, and we acquire the opportunities to re-examine our own ways of lives.
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