Here are two reviews from Amazon:

Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant new book, NEVER LET ME GO, returns the author to the themes and approaches he first addressed in THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Just as Stevens the butler devoted himself unthinkingly and uncritically to the minutiae of daily life on behalf of his Nazi sympathizing master, Lord Darlington, the main characters in Ishiguro's latest book focus on the irrelevant small details and minor tribulations of their lives without ever once contemplating the bigger picture. In both cases, the author not only conjures the question of the meaning of life, he asks us to contemplate the tragedy of wasted lives.

On its surface, NEVER LET ME GO tells the story of three special young people - Kathy H., Tommy D., and Ruth - all of whom meet as students at an idyllic private school called Hailsham. Kathy H. is the narrator, now 31 years old, telling her story in hindsight. She recalls her student days at Hailsham fondly, filling her tale with numerous minor anecdotes about the most mundane affairs that slowly reveal the nature of the school and its students' place in the world. (...) Ishiguro creates a convincing vocabulary, milieu, and mythology for this setting: guardians, carers, donors, completing, Exchanges, Sales, the Gallery, Norfolk, and an eerie sense of the students having "been told and not told."

NEVER LET ME GO accomplishes the remarkable challenge of presenting 288 pages' worth of reading between the lines. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are not the real main characters of this story, only the visible ones. The real main characters are invisible, the ones who have not only facilitated the use of cloning as a form of organ farming, but who have created a conditioning environment in which their victims accept their fate without question, as the natural order of things. Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and their ilk live among normal people yet virtually never approach them, willing segretating themselves from the rest of society as though they were lepers. They live in Skinner boxes without boundaries, conditioned to believe they exist only to sacrifice their lives for the continued life of others. We never see the bioengineers or social scientists who create and maintain this horrifying use of humanity. Instead, they are represented (only on a limited scale) by Hailsham's headmistress, Miss Emily, and the mysterious, art-collecting Madame Marie-Claude.

In 1963, after attending the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel, the renowned Hannah Arendt wrote a profound and controversial book entitled EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: THE BANALITY OF EVIL. Arendt went to the trial expecting to see a monster. Who else could be responsible for such evil as the Holocaust? Instead, she found an accounting clerk. Not only were the most normal of people apparently capable of mindless cruelty, but their evil was senseless, meaningless even to themselves. In this way, their evil was banal. Ishiguro creates a similar feeling, using the triteness of Kathy H.'s reminiscences and Miss Lucy's behaviors and rationalizations to illustrate the banality of their own peculiar form of evil: science practiced for its own sake, without the application of moral standards. NEVER LET ME GO is neither preachily anti-science nor moralistically pro-religion. It is simply a call to include our consciences in the application of science. Perhaps the fact that the first identified character in the book to speak other than Kathy and Ruth is a student named Hannah (who never appears again in the text) is Ishiguro's way of telling us to beware the dangers of banality, that sliding over the edge from ordinariness to "Ruth-less" evil is easier than we think.

I puzzled for a while over the setting - England in the 1990's - until I realized that the first sheep clone, Dolly, was created in England in 1996 and died prematurely a few years later. In a sense, all of Hailsham's students are sheep, raised in out-of-the-way rural settings, separated from society and isolated from knowledge of both the practical world and the world of ideas, limited in their human interactions except with one another, and, of course, bred to be consumed (for their vital organs). On several occasions, I was reminded of the cowlike creature in Doug Adams's RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE who greets diners by declaiming the tasty virtues of his best parts and declares: "..it was eventually decided to ... breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am." Adams presented his creature for comic effect; Ishiguro presents his "poor creatures" (as Madame repeatedly calls them) for a low key but nightmarish effect.

NEVER LET ME GO is a transcendent novel, an astonishingly powerful work of literature. The pace is slow and the details seem trivial, but patient readers will be rewarded for their efforts with a thought-provoking exposition on whose life is worth living and who, if anyone, has the right to set the terms and conditions. Arendt contemplated the banality of evil - Ishiguro warns us of the evils that lurk behind banality.

Steve Koss - Amazon Review

Set in the 1990's, Kazuo Ishiguro's quietly disturbing novel aims to make us question the ethics of science even though the author never directly raises the topic. The narrator of Never Let Me Go is Kathy H., a woman who introduces herself as a "carer" mere months away from becoming a "donor," as though we should know what these terms mean. This nearness to ending one stage of her life to entering another causes her to reminisce about Hailsham, the school in the English countryside where she grew up with her two closest friends, Tommy D. and Ruth. The three form an unlikely trio: Ruth is headstrong and imaginative; Tommy has an uncontrollable temper; and Kathy is steady and observant in the subtleties of human behavior. It is this last quality belonging to Kathy H. that sets the tone of the novel. Everything is precisely told in an even, matter-of-fact voice that never questions the strange terminology and conversations that alert the reader to something more grave lurking under what seems, on the surface, to be an ordinary story about three childhood friends. As the three grow up, they begin to face moments more important than the minor disagreements of childhood.

Ishiguro's richly textured description of the relationship among the three supplies all the details without confronting the larger issues. As Kathy tells us, the guardians at Hailsham both tell and not tell the students the truth about Hailsham and their lives--exactly what Ishiguro does to the reader. The truth is doled out in increments, over the course of the entire novel, requiring the reader to understand what is implied as much as what is told. The frightening side to all this is that the characters never question the course of their lives. No one runs, or questions why they are the ones to make the ultimate sacrifice. One of the most poignant moments comes near the end when Kathy says, "Why should we not have souls?" By this point, it has been apparent to the reader that Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth are human in every sense of the word, with talents and intelligence and foibles and complex emotions, and yet are regarded as both freaks and disposables by the "normals." For the reader, these characters are anything but expendable.

Ishiguro's literary style of examining small moments might disappoint readers who expect a strong plot. Although the premise may belong to science fiction, this novel is more concerned with characterization and theme. If you like writers in the tradition of Ian McEwan, Marilynne Robinson, Chang-Rae Lee, and Margaret Atwood (whose The Handmaid's Tale creates a different dystopia), you'll be immediately swept into this alternate world where the past is also the future.
Debbie Lee Wesselmann

As the reviewers quoted above noted, one of the most curious and noticable features of this novel is the telling of a terrible and important story using virtually complete banality. Kathy chatters on about the details and minutiae of everyday life, and grows more and more horrified at the actual tale she is (not) telling. How do you feel about the author's use of first person? Is Kathy really the main character? Is this her story?

Why is Kathy so blind to Ruth's faults?

Why do the girls feel guilty about having sexual desire, or about enjoying sex? (Don't get sent to Disney.)

Are Kathy, Tommy and Ruth really so different from any of us in the way that they accept their fate? How many of us "run away?" How many of us have the courage or the will to do other than what is expected of us?

I really look forward to hearing everyone's comments. After finishing this book, more than any other, I wanted to discuss it with others. Alas, my book club turned it down flat!

First, I almost immediately knew what was meant by "carer" and "donor" but hoped I was wrong. It continues to nag at me that I've read something like this before but I can't put my finger on it. Maybe an excerpt of the book was published in a magazine, although I would be surprised that this book would be excerpted.

My continual frustration was that the characters, seemingly intelligent and aware of other people outside their "world," would so blindly accept their fate. They had opportunities to live a more normal life but there was no indication they even considered it. Were they brainwashed at Hailsham? It doesn't seem likely because they weren't really told what was happening with them, although at some point they did know and accepted their fate. They looked for their models, so they had to have been given an explanation of some type.

Why didn't Kathy and Tommy, after being told they couldn't get an extension because they were in love, just drive off into the real world and start a new life? Maybe Madame proved they had souls, but what about their minds and ability to reason? Kathy said to Tommy that maybe his bad fits of temper in school were because he always "knew," so why didn't they leave once they finally understood there was no other way out?

My next frustration was why, when they became donors, were their organs taken on a gradual basis? Since it is obvious they were intended to "complete," why not take them all at once? Why make them suffer? Because of the way the book is written, it is very easy to care about the characters and then for them to have to suffer while carrying out the purpose for which they were created is just unacceptable.

It may be obvious that I really despise this book in many ways. I tend to be very literal about what I read and I may be missing some not obvious point that would make it all okay, but I can't imagine what that would be.

I'm guessing that the moral of the story is that the scientists who came up with this idea assumed that the lives they created would not be like real people -- that they would have no souls -- and Madame and some of the others at Hailsham were so dismayed at what was happening that they wanted to have the practice stopped. That is a fine moral, but there is too much that doesn't add up for me.

Okay, I could go on and on, and I haven't answered any of Siobhan's questions, but since we are dealing with creations who can't think well enough to escape a horrid fate, I can't come up with logical explanations as to why they think as they do about each other's actions and faults and sex, etc. Maybe we do react in the way we are expected to in some ways but self-preservation is an inherent trait in people and animals, isn't it? Maybe that trait can't be cloned.

I want to attempt to tackle just one question that's been raised here. I once saw a transcript of a BBC radio discussion about this book - and one of the guys just couldn't get beyond the question "Why didn't they just leg it?" So why didn't they?

Remember that this is a world where the idea of clones being bred for donations is entirely acceptable. The breakthroughs in medical science happened in the fifties. Imagine if the sort of investment our society has put into technology was instead put into medicine - and imagine also that we had quickly and easily solved (for example) the problems of organ rejection. Now, for whatever reason, the world was a lot less sophisticated in the fifties than it is now. You didn't hear so much about "human rights" - certainly nothing about "animal rights". I don't think it's so far beyond the realms of possibility that we could have brought ourselves to a society where the idea of cloning humans for the purposes of a decent supply of organs was considered to be a good thing - so long as you carefully persuade yourself that these people aren't really human.

But Ishiguro makes it clear that these clones are indeed people. So the question is - why do these otherwise intelligent people accept their lot so pathetically? Well, to me there are at least three possible answers. One is that as part of the cloning process, the creators have inserted something - a gene? - which prevents much else than acceptance. Another is the rather appalling idea that if you are careful with the way you bring up people, you can ensure an unthinking acceptance even in the most intelligent people. A third is that they weed out rebellious children when they are very young - a society which is able to tolerate the production of clones for the purposes of organ donation would not worry much about culling them. They're not human, remember?

And whatever the reason is, I don't think it's important; the point is that this is just the way they are. We are able to see a blind acceptance in everything they do. Did you ever see such a well-behaved bunch of schoolkids? Did one of them ever answer back or cheek their teachers? Tommy is the only one who showed any rebelliousness - and even he learned eventually to control his temper. You hear about quarrels - but no-one ever actually had a fight. Even once they are carers - they just get on and do what they are expected to do, and accept their fate at the end. It doesn't cross Tommy and Kathy's mind to do a bunk at the end. That would have been an obvious ending to the book - but it would have been inconsistent. It doesn't cross their minds to do a bunk because it's just not in their natures. The best they hope for is a "deferral" - and when that is taken away, blind obedience to their fate is all that's left.

Did you notice too that no-one seemed upset by anything? You would have expect Kathy to mourn Tommy after he "completed", but there seems to be no sign of it.

The more I think about it, the more I realize what a chilling world Ishiguro has created. Are Kathy and Tommy really in love? Are they even capable of any real depth of feeling? Everything seems on a superficial level - though, of course, we only have Kathy's word for that. Maybe she can feel deeply, but isn't good at writing about it.

Frances - "I may be missing some not obvious point that would make it all okay..." - I don't think you are missing anything. It's an awful world, which to our modern society is completely unacceptable. But I disagree with you about one thing - I don't think Madame and Miss Emily and the others wanted the practice stopped any more than anyone else did - they still wanted clones so that they themselves could live a better life - but they felt that the clones themselves should be treated better than they were, nonetheless.

Enough for the moment. But I'll return to some of the other questions later.

Ishiguro earned a bachelor of arts degree with honors in philosophy and literature in 1978, and then completed his master of arts in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 1980. He worked as a social worker for a number of years (during and after college) until he was able to make a living as a writer. During his years as a social worker, he met Lorna Anne MacDougall, whom he married in 1986. They have a daughter named Naomi, who was born in 1992. Ishiguro’s interests include music and the cinema.

Despite his youth, Ishiguro has already built an impressive literary career. Each of his first three novels won awards—the third, The Remains of the Day won the prestigious Booker Prize—and all five of his novels to date have earned critical acclaim. Ishiguro’s novels deal with self-deception, regret, and personal reflection. His narratives are carefully wrought first-person accounts with a controlled tone that does not deter from the speaker’s deep soulsearching. Ishiguro is credited, alongside such highprofile writers as Salman Rushdie, with breathing new life into contemporary British fiction. In 1995, Ishiguro was named to the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to literature."

Adam

I did almost instantly figure out the main concept of the book.

For some reason I am early on reminded of The Harrod Experiment.

Am I too old for this book?

I didn't feel that Kathy was "looking back on my miserable whiny teen years" in the slightest. In fact, she says that her years at Hailsham were the best times. And the book refers to other donors who wanted to hear about Hailsham and what it was like to be there.

What I did find fascinating about this book was the way it was written as if it was going to be read by other donors. Phrases like "I don't know how it was where you were, but...." and "I don't know if you had 'collections' where you were." Hence, there is no need to justify or explain the way people behaved - if you were a donor or a carer, you'd understand. But we, the actual readers, have to work it out, bit by bit...

Siobhan, after thinking it over for a couple of hours I can honestly say that I don't know anyone who is miserable in their lives as you describe. I do know people who for health or financial reasons are not especially happy but if my friends or acquaintances are miserable in the way you describe they sure don't tell me about it. Maybe that is why I don't so much see the parallel to society today, but I don't doubt that you are right.

Would this book be considered science fiction? I never read science fiction (or time travel) books because I really want to read fiction based in reality. If I look at it from a science fiction point of view, then I could agree with Martin that an "acceptance" gene could have been inserted and the self-preservation gene removed, if there is such a thing. When it comes to science fiction, I guess anything is possible but then there is no need to try to understand or analyze it.

There are so many more things I want to say about the book but the possible science fiction bit has made me re-think saying them.

The nagging feeling I had has finally pushed its way through. I believe I read a review of the book when it first came out and then went to sleep and dreamed about the donors and the carers, and I still have a vivid picture in my mind of part of that dream. I remember thinking when I woke up that I would never read that book -- I just didn't remember the name of the book.

Why didn't Kathy and Tommy, after being told they couldn't get an extension because they were in love, just drive off into the real world and start a new life?

I've discussed this to some extent earlier. But one further practical point - we have no real idea what the "real world" is like. But one might suspect that there would be a concern that clones might try to do exactly that. So surely it is likely that people in the real world would have something like an ID card which was completely unavailable to a clone, or a clone's ID would be completely different. Without this, it might be impossible to get a job or accommodation. The sheer practicalities would make it more-or-less impossible to go into the real world.

My next frustration was why, when they became donors, were their organs taken on a gradual basis? Why make them suffer?

Quite possibly, you don't get a call until someone needs your organ; potentially the recipient is on the next operating table to the donor. Remember, to this society, these people aren't human, after all - why do they have to worry about them suffering?

I really think it's possible that an apparently civilized society could learn to depend on clones like this. Is it so different from slavery? People justified slavery by suggesting that the slaves were only a bit above animals - it's not so different from the attitude towards clones that we have deduced from this book.

I had evidently picked up enough from earlier mentions of it that I knew right away what was going on, but I am fascinated by the book. I didn't even question whey Kathy and Tommy didn't just go off together. I didn't think about an implanted gene; I just assumed they were too conditioned to their lot to rebel. I do like what Martin said about identity problems in the outside world.

I was aggravated with Ruth throughout and glad when Kathy and Tommy finally got together.

Forgive me if this sounds a little strange but the following was my first reaction: We were planning a bbq steak dinner the next day and I felt very uncomfortable when I looked at those packages of meat. We spent a week camping in range country, big ponderosa pines, clear lakes filled with rainbow trout and we shared the environment with some free-range cattle during the summer. We were surprised one time to see a herd of about 20 turn and, as a group, chase a coyote that had come a little too close for their comfort. I actually admired them. But I still eat them. However, I know that if I visited an abattoir and saw how these terrified animals were rounded up and driven and then killed, I would become a vegetarian . I like steaks occasionally; therefore I don’t visit an abattoir because I not want to know. I prefer to find my food packaged and displayed nicely in the grocery store. Yes, I’m a hypocrite. Although not on the same level as the society in Never Let Me Go , I share some of those qualities or perhaps, faults, is the better word. I do draw the line at veal since I can’t stomach the thought of what is done to those calves. But I am still considering becoming a vegetarian and this book is niggling at my conscience.
The clones were very much like cattle I thought. Where was that instinct for survival? Why were they so passive? The only sensible answer was that they had been either genetically modified or chosen for passivity. The genetic manipulation could have been done during the cloning process. They weren’t donors, they were being harvested. Tom was an aberration in the passivity aspect but even he was controlled. And then I also wondered if the clones had been marked in some way so that other members of society would look at them and know what they were. There was so little interaction with the general population. I kept waiting for a "normal" person to fall in love with one of them and perform a "rescue". Didn't happen. How did they know to avoid them?

Enough for now, I’ll read your comments then continue.

Re: Siobhan's Qs

Why is Kathy so blind to Ruth's faults?
Maybe it was that passivity that I discussed above. I was going to say that none of them had a strong sense of self but Ruth was certainly a strong person.

Why do the girls feel guilty about having sexual desire, or about enjoying sex? (Don't get sent to Disney.)
Maybe the sex impulse is a strong animal reaction and their natures made them feel uncomfortable with strong reactions.

Are Kathy, Tommy and Ruth really so different from any of us in the way that they accept their fate? How many of us "run away?" How many of us have the courage or the will to do other than what is expected of us?
Yes, I thought they were different. We all have a strong survival instinct and that was muted in them.

***
Frances -- Regarding your deja vue experience: there is a movie playing at the moment called The Island which has a very similar concept. Trailers for it were on tv. NOTE, Spoiler follow: It's a business whereby you can pay to have a clone grown and then the organs harvested when you need them. The difference there is that the clones don't know they are clones and think they've won a vacation when their lottery number is drawn. Actually they are then killed. The difference is that this is a secret business run by a pharmaceutical company, which knows if the general population or government were to find out, they would be shut down and charged. So that might also be the reference that is nagging at you.
You said: "I'm guessing that the moral of the story is that the scientists who came up with this idea assumed that the lives they created would not be like real people -- that they would have no souls -- and Madame and some of the others at Hailsham were so dismayed at what was happening that they wanted to have the practice stopped."

I think the scientists knew they were human - of course they were! But it's a lot more palatable (sorry,I can't seem to get rid of the steak dinner from my mind) if everyone pretends that they aren't human and society is prepared to accept that because of the ahem, benefits. So everyone turns a blind eye because they want to. The school was just trying to improve conditions in the same way the animal rights movement is operating.

Veronica -- It could be that this kind of novel just isn't your cuppa tea. If I remember correctly you really disliked The Handmaid's Tale. If I were to categorize novels, these two would be grouped together.

I generally do like science/medical/technology books like this...it's just these characters I don't like.

Maybe working in a setting where I do work with donors, and it is referred to as being harvested...maybe that aspect of my life has me looking at the donor thing in a different light than someone who has never accompanied the donor to the OR - and helped a family through that decision. Very different situations...but maybe that's the thing.

I'm a little puzzled about this. I don't see any real feeling of guilt about this anywhere. There was the one bit where Kathy was concerned that she occasionally seemed to feel as if she wanted to do it with just anyone - but she didn't seem to feel guilty about it - just scared. But isn't that a normal adolescent feeling - you're not really in control of your body and it can get quite scary how much your sexual desire can take over. But only Kathy described it as scarey - Ruth just said later that she'd felt the same, but didn't say that she'd felt upset or guilty. The only guilt she was feeling was having not sympathised with Kathy, letting her believe that Tommy wouldn't want her if she had slept with several men - and in general doing everything she could to prevent Kathy and Tommy getting together.

Actually, Ruth was a horrible person really, wasn't she? Everything she did was for her own benefit. You even get the impression she only persuaded Tommy and Kathy to get together so that she could get rid of what little guilt she might have had, when there was no real future left for herself.

In a way, Kathy reminds me a bit of the heroine (Offred) in The Handmaid's Tale. They both tend to go along with the world as it lays itself out, without in any way trying to change anything much.

The reason I thought of this was because, as I said above, I felt there were some parallels with The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. I've now re-read The Handmaid's Tale discussion - and one of the points that was made was that men were impressed by the novel, but with women it resonated on a personal level, which was (understandably, perhaps) missed by men. Has Ishiguro succeeded in writing a novel which impresses men but resonates with women?

The Handmaid's Tale had all those mother/children issues which, of course, really resonated with me. The strength of feeling you have for your children always amazes me.

Thanks for saving that discussion by the way. It's definitely a keeper.

I feel Ishiguro did a remarkable job of speaking in a woman's voice, especially given the difficulty of the task he set for himself, using first person and choosing a conversational, chatty style that is so difficult to keep going throughout an entire novel. As I paged through the book just now, I was again struck by the ordinariness of the prose which hides the horrors just beneath the surface.

What enabled Kathy to be a carer for so long? Wasn't it 12 years and she was still doing it, rather than putting herself in the donor program. Most of the others only lasted a few years before they voluntarily became donors. Didn't Ruth give her a hard time about it -- not tht anyone seemed really anxious to become a donor, rather they seemed to dislike being a carer. Sorry, but the book went back to the library a month ago so I can't check the details...

Perhaps, as I suggested above, it's a matter of compatibility? If a particular kidney tissue match is required, and the only one available happens to be a carer who has only worked two years, he or she will get called. Just a possibility.

Why do the girls feel guilty about having sexual desire, or about enjoying sex? My thought is that they were subtly and sometimes overtly discouraged from having sexual relationships because in most people, sexual relationships sometimes instantly and almost always eventually lead to strong emotional attachments to one's partner. These individuals were being "groomed" to fulfill a pre-ordained purpose, and the fewer emotional ties the better.

This is a very simplistic way to look at it, but I think of it in this way when I consider the staff at Hailsham. Many of us have pets, such as a dog or cat. We form a bond with these animals and they become precious to us, to the extent that we will do our best to keep them from harm. However, if you've ever lived in a farm setting, you know that you don't form attachments to livestock, particularly livestock that is going to be slaughtered for food, etc. Dogs, cats, and cows are all animals, yet we place more emotional value on dogs and cats. Rhetorical question: Don't we realize that a cow's lot in life is to be slaughtered for the betterment of society? We avoid assigning human emotions to them because it's easier to accept that this is their lot in life if we don't see them as human, whereas with our housepets, we coo and laugh about how intelligent they are, how much they adore us, how they miss us when we're away, and how they are attuned to our every mood.

This is how I see that the faculty at Hailsham (for the most part) felt about the children there. And while I'm off on a wild tangent, consider the widespread extermination of the Jews during the Nazi regime. The Nazis didn't see the Jews as being human, or as being inferior humans at any rate, so with a clear conscience they were able to carry out mass murder.

And I'm really surprised that some don't see why Kathy and the others didn't just run away. They were groomed from birth to accept their fate. Sure, we all like to think that we would be brave or intelligent enough not to accept our lot in life. I feel we are fooling ourselves. I think this is the human condition, and the majority of us would have done exactly the same as Kathy and company because we do it every day, whether we realize it or not, carrying out lives filled with "quiet desperation" in many cases. Sure, nobody wants to admit it, but doesn't anyone else ever feel a certain futility in every day life?

Sometimes I wonder if Ishiguro was simply holding up a mirror to our society and showing us how little we value human life and how we ALL are residents at Hailsham, afraid to break out of the mold as we live out our lives of acceptance. We all like to believe that we and our family and friends are special (and I'm not denying that we are), but in the larger scheme of things, we're just part of the masses.

Okay, you all think I'm nuts now. :-)

What if these people weren't clones? Who's to say they weren't sold or taken or were unwanted babies? And then they were just told they were clones....and other people were told that to to help make them acceptable as donors.

Another example would be someone who has been indoctrinated in an extremist religion since birth, and there ARE religious organizations that say that if you will allow them to have a child through the age of 12, that child will never leave that religious faith. We all realize how hard it is for most people to break free from cults once they have been isolated from outside influences and "brainwashed" into accepting the cult's teaching as supreme truth.

I just feel that in this novel particularly, one can see how difficult it would be to break away from a way of life when, since birth, they have been taught to accept and embrace their "fate." And I suspect that most people would have no desire to break away if they didn't know the difference.

Interesting thought on whether they were actually clones, though. I hadn't thought of that.

I think the idea of stealing/selling/obtaining unwanted babies and then using them for organ donation - and don't forget, this would be state-sponsored, too - wouldn't wash for one minute. Remember too, the reference to the Morningale scandal - or some name like that - haven't got my copy in front of me - where someone started breeding a race of super-intelligent children - and THAT caused an outcry - and eventually the closure of Hailsham and others like it.

Q: What was your starting point for Never Let Me Go?

A: Over the last fifteen years I kept writing pieces of a story about an odd group of "students" in the English countryside. I was never sure who these people were. I just knew they lived in wrecked farmhouses, and though they did a few typically student-like things—argued over books, worked on the occasional essay, fell in and out of love—there was no college campus or teacher anywhere in sight. I knew too that some strange fate hung over these young people, but I didn’t know what. In my study at home, I have a lot of these short pieces, some going back as far as the early ‘90s. I’d wanted to write a novel about my students, but I’d never got any further; I’d always ended up writing some other quite different novel. Then around four years ago I heard a discussion on the radio about advances in biotechnology. I usually tune out when scientific discussions come on, but this time I listened, and the framework around these students of mine finally fell in place. I could see a way of writing a story that was simple, but very fundamental, about the sadness of the human condition.

Q: This novel is set in a recognizable England of the late 20th century. Yet it contains a key dystopian, almost sci-fi dimension you’d normally expect to find in stories set in the future (such as Brave New World). Were you at any point tempted to set it in the future?

A: I was never tempted to set this story in the future. That’s partly a personal thing. I’m not very turned on by futuristic landscapes. Besides, I don’t have the energy to think about what cars or shops or cup-holders would look like in a future civilization. And I didn’t want to write anything that could be mistaken for a "prophecy." I wanted rather to write a story in which every reader might find an echo of his or her own life.

In any case, I’d always seen the novel taking place in the England of the ‘70s and ‘80s–the England of my youth, I suppose. It’s an England far removed from the butlers-and-Rolls Royce England of, say, The Remains of the Day. I pictured England on an overcast day, flat bare fields, weak sunshine, drab streets, abandoned farms, empty roads. Apart from Kathy’s childhood memories, around which there could be a little sun and vibrancy, I wanted to paint an England with the kind of stark, chilly beauty I associate with certain remote rural areas and half-forgotten seaside towns.

Yes, you could say there’s a "dystopian" or "sci-fi" dimension. But I think of it more as an "alternative history" conceit. It’s more in the line of "What if Hitler had won?" or "What if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated?" The novel offers a version of Britain that might have existed by the late twentieth century if just one or two things had gone differently on the scientific front.

Q: Kathy, the narrator of this book, isn’t nearly as buttoned-up as some of your previous narrators (such as those of The Remains of the Day or When We Were Orphans) and seems more reliable to the reader. Was this a deliberate departure on your part?

A: One of the dangers you have to guard against as a novelist is repeating things you’re deemed to have done well in the past, just for the security of repeating them. I’ve been praised in the past for my unreliable, self-deceiving, emotionally restrained narrators. You could almost say at one stage that was seen as my trademark. But I have to be careful not to confuse my narrators with my own identity as a writer. It’s so easy, in all walks of life, to get trapped into a corner by things that once earned you praise and esteem.

That’s not to say I won’t one day reprieve my buttoned-up unreliable narrators if that’s what my writing requires. You see, in the past, my narrators were unreliable, not because they were lunatics, but because they were ordinarily self-deceiving. When they looked back over their failed lives, they found it hard to see things in an entirely straight way. Self-deception of that sort is common to most of us, and I really wanted to explore this theme in my earlier books. But Never Let Me Go isn’t concerned with that kind of self-deception. So I needed my narrator to be different. An unreliable narrator here would just have got in the way.

Q: Was it a different experience writing from the female perspective, and also writing in a modern-day vernacular rather than the more formal language of past eras?

A: I didn’t worry much about using a female narrator. My first published novel, A Pale View of Hills, was narrated by a woman too. When I was a young writer, I used narrators who were elderly, who lived in cultures very different from my own. There’s so much imaginative leaping you have to do to inhabit a fictional character anyway, the sex of the character becomes just one of so many things you have to think about–and it’s probably not even one of the more demanding challenges.

As for the more vernacular style, well, she’s someone narrating in contemporary England, so I had to have her talk appropriately. These are technical things, like actors doing accents. The challenge isn’t so much achieving a voice that’s more vernacular, or more formal, it’s getting one that properly presents that narrator’s character. It’s finding a voice that allows a reader to respond to a character not just through what he or she does in the story, but also through how he/she speaks and thinks.

Q: This novel, like most of your others, is told through the filter of memory. Why is memory such a recurring theme in your work?

A: I’ve always liked the texture of memory. I like it that a scene pulled from the narrator’s memory is blurred at the edges, layered with all sorts of emotions, and open to manipulation. You’re not just telling the reader: "this-and-this happened." You’re also raising questions like: why has she remembered this event just at this point? How does she feel about it? And when she says she can’t remember very precisely what happened, but she’ll tell us anyway, well, how much do we trust her? And so on. I love all these subtle things you can do when you tell a story through someone’s memories.

But I should say I think the role played by memory in Never Let Me Go is rather different to what you find in some of my earlier books. In, say, The Remains of the Day, memory was something to be searched through very warily for those crucial wrong turns, for those sources of regret and remorse. But in this book, Kathy’s memories are more benevolent. They’re principally a source of consolation. As her time runs out, as her world empties one by one of the things she holds dear, what she clings to are her memories of them.

Q: The setting for the first section of this book is a boarding school and you capture well the peer pressure and self-consciousness of being a kid at such a place. Did you draw on your own past for this? Did you have other direct sources, such as your daughter?

A: I never went to boarding school, and my daughter doesn’t go to one now! But of course I drew on my own memories of what it felt like to be a child and an adolescent. And though I don’t study my daughter and her friends, notebook in hand, I suppose it’s inevitable the experience of being a parent would inform the way I portray children.

Having said that, I can’t think of any one scene in that "school" section that’s based, even partly, on an actual event that ever happened to me or anyone I know. When I write about young people, I do much the same as when I write about elderly people, or any other character who’s very different from me in culture and experience. I try my best to think and feel as they would, then see where that takes me. I don’t find that children present any special demands for me as a novelist. They’re just characters, like everyone else.

The school setting, I must add, is appealing because in a way it’s a clear physical manifestation of the way all children are separated off from the adult world, and are drip-fed little pieces of information about the world that awaits them, often with generous doses of deception, kindly meant or otherwise. In other words, it serves as a very good metaphor for childhood in general.

I wonder what Ishiguro is working on right now?

If Ishiguro's society could be that callous towards these donors and turn a blind eye, I don't think recipients of organs would look carefully at the donor to determine if they were a clone or not. None of the kids resembled one another nor did they ever meet anyone else who did. If I were in the business of selling ogans and using clones, I think I'd try and find a super-clone, a universal donor, and make lots of copies. Maybe one from every blood type. It would be far cheaper and efficient and make business sense.

Since this story is told through Kathy's eyes and she was told she was a clone, we'll never know. But I wouldn't put it past the society that Kathy lived in.

My daughter the nurse has talked about donors some, and one can only be grateful for those who sign the cards; but this book does present a picture we may like to avoid. I have signed a donor card; my husband quite definitely did not want to do so. I hope I can help someone, but I surely don't like the thought of "harvesting" organs and emphatically not cloning for use as donors.

I really don't know why the book appealed to me so much, but it did.

One thing that puzzled me was why the trio thought that they were most likely cloned from lower levels of society- almost as if people were solicited to sell their cells for cloning. This seems counter-intuitive--seems as though society would demand the strongest and healthiest, and the process presumably would be less invasive that modern day blood donations.

I really liked that we were not preached to at all, unlike an upcoming discussion. I felt that the book was not intended to be about the socio-ethical issues but more about how human beings, however conceived, can be so easily brainwashed and manipulated. That was the horror of the book to me.

Thanks much for including the interview. I was fascinated by the idea that he had lived with this group of young people before he knew who they were. It reminded me of John Fowles, I think, and the Magus. May have book and author wrong, but he said he kept seeing this group of travelers, dark and shadowy, crossing a hill in the distance and he had to find out who they were and where they were going. I wonder how often a novel comes this way.

Jan - I appreciate (and I am extremely pleased) that the most likely scenario today will be growing new organs from stem cells. (And also that cloning is extremely difficult). But Ishiguro's world is one where, presumably, cloning was something that they found out how to do in the fifties, and hence the research went in that direction - grow clones, and harvest them, rather than growing individual organs. And then everything else follows from that.

I'm not saying that your theory isn't possible - I just think it's an extra layer that isn't necessary. But I think I probably agree that I wouldn't put it past the society that Kathy lived in - I just think the practicalities would be difficult.

An interesting thought crossed my mind. The world does not seem very crowded, does it? I know that Kathy tends to drive the country lanes, but even so...when they go into that seaside town in Norfolk (Lowestoft? Great Yarmouth? It has to be a town, not a village, as it has a Woolworths), you get the impression there is practically no-one else around.

I wonder if this world also practices eugenics?