Holding back the years

NEVER LET ME GO
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber and Faber, 263 pages
Available at Powerbooks

There’s an anachronistic air to Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel Never Let Me Go (which was short-listed for the UK’s Booker Prize). Even though it’s basically a science-fiction story, it dwells in the past as much as it does in an imagined future.

It supposedly takes place in "the late 1990s," but as events develop, we get the sense this is a slightly different century from the one that just passed; history is a little altered, though many of the same simple comforts – and anxieties – exist for mankind.

Mostly, Ishiguro’s novel tells a strangely moving story about a trio of students from a school for "special" kids called Hailsham. We don’t learn just how special they are until about midway through the book, but we hear all the details about Ruth, Tommy and the school from Kathy, a precise narrator who nevertheless likes to digress, taking up and sifting through her memories of the past, using her skills to lasso the poignant detail, the meaningful moment.

Kathy’s a carer, we learn. She looks after donors, though what they donate and how she cares for them are details better left for the curious reader to discover. She has a great capacity for looking after the ill, though she’s far from perfect. Her imperfections are part of the weave of Never Let Me Go, which follows a love triangle between the principal characters from adolescence to late adulthood. Is she a reliable narrator? Part of Ishiguro’s skill here (and this latest novel has a cumulative emotional power to it, much as his masterful Remains of the Day did) is to reveal only bits and pieces of the puzzle, to sort of drop them onto the landscape casually so that when the truth is finally uncovered, we have by then become fully enveloped in his invented world.

Questions arise from the opening pages. Who are these Hailsham students, and why is their artwork being meticulously collected by a certain "Madame" who, rumor has it, displays the pieces in the so-called "Gallery"? Why are some students brighter, quicker and cleverer than others? And what is the mysterious destiny of the "carer"?

In a way, Ishiguro’s novel relies on a few twists and tricks, and in that it may recall Twilight Zone episodes of the past, or M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. Clearly Ishiguro has a moral point to make, though he never allows it to overwhelm the texture of his storytelling. And none of this detracts from the truth – Ishiguro has crafted a very touching novel, and a story that gains resonance as you read on.

Kathy can be a bit old-fashioned as a narrator. She feeds us details, only to interrupt herself regularly to say things like, "I never got to assess what impact my talk with Tommy had had, because it was the very next day the news broke." She’s good at the cliffhanger details, pushing us on to find out what happened next – though it’s clear everything in Kathy’s narration has occurred in the past.

The past and the future are the important portals in Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro deftly mixes his futuristic theme with a timeless England that is still very much in touch with nostalgia and its own lost past. Sometime in the story, the characters visit Norfolk on a mission to find Ruth’s look-alike: one of their friends had said the woman was working in an office there, and to the Hailsham students, Norfolk is "the lost corner of the world." Everything you thought had gone missing in your life could be found in this strange little burrough of record stores, curio shops and art galleries. Indeed, Kathy and Tommy find themselves searching for a missing music cassette tape – and it’s typically anachronistic of Ishiguro that it’s a tape, not a CD they look for – in the odd bins of the five-and-dime shops along Norfolk’s streets.

Slowly, time has a way of drawing these characters apart. They graduate from Hailsham, of course, and launch themselves into uncertain futures, though in a way their fates are predestined. In this way, Never Let Me Go is about the future – or rather the imagined future, the one that people would prefer to believe in, rather than the present reality occupied by the narrator. It’s an escape hatch for a batch of students who dearly need an escape.

The title of the novel refers to a tune by the fictitious singer Judy Bridgewater, though the song actually does exist: it’s been covered by a number of pop and doo-wop bands since the late ’50s. The song may be about a forlorn lover, but to Kathy, the lyrics of Never Let Me Go spawn their own peculiar meaning, and much of Ishiguro’s novel is about how people search for their own ways of viewing life – ways that are often in conflict with cold reality. Like fellow Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, Ishiguro is obsessed with the hidden meanings and the transcendent resonance of pop songs. But the comparison must end there: while Murakami’s fiction takes its routinely deadpan journeys down the rabbit-hole, Ishiguro’s narration is like an older English gentleman, telling his stories from beneath the comfort of a blanket before a fireside.

At the end of the day – the remains of the day, as Ishiguro has previously put it – there is a cold chill in the air, and a sense of loss and longing, and it is this emotion that lingers with the reader long after you close the pages of Never Let Me Go. True to the title, you wish you could will these characters a little more life, a little more happiness, a few more pages.