Book Report Friday: Never Let Me Go (Spoilers!)

Ok, let me preface this by saying that if you are somehow unaware of the big “secret” in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and you have no wish to find out what it is without reading the book? Stop reading this review right now, pick up a copy for yourself and get to reading. My four word review for you is this: it’s a fantastic book. For the rest of you? It’s Spoiler City up in here. Population: You. I mean, they said what the “secret” is in the first few minutes of Ishiguro’s interview on Fresh Air. And it’s impossible to talk about the book without getting into at least a couple of details.

So, I’m putting it all out there. This book is about a bunch of kids who turn out to be clones. Clones who are being raised for their internal organs. As in, the squishy parts inside all of us that we need to live. They’re basically a boarding school of human spare parts. And they are remarkably calm about their fate. Me? I’d be busy trying to drink my liver into a state where nobody else would want it and/or trying to figure out a way to swim to France. Oh yes, did I mention that this book takes place in merry England? Remind me to never send my hypothetical future children to boarding school in England. As far as I can tell, from books and movies, nothing happens there but Sue Sylvester-style horror.

Never Let Me Go is the most laid back book about clones and organ harvesting that you are ever likely to read. It’s written by the author of The Remains of the Day, so you can probably imagine that this would be the case. Ishiguro isn’t exactly known for writing books featuring large explosions and large-breasted aliens. The movie, which recently came out in limited release, stars Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley and not Megan Fox and Cameron Diaz. In other words, this is not your 40-year-old-cousin-who-still-lives-in-his-parents’-basement’s Sci-Fi.

(Not that I don’t love me some classic Sci-Fi. Please allow me to take this moment to come out of the closet as being a total Trekkie.)

(That was only slightly embarrassing.)

Never Let Me Go is a slow-developing read. Ishiguro is the master of giving you a tiny bit of information and then letting you wait five chapters to find out what it actually means. Five chapters if you’re lucky. And some questions are never really answered. We never find out the gory details about how this whole “giving other people your organs” business really works. Like I said, this is not your typical Sci-Fi. The process of giving up your organs is called “donating” and when the “donors'” bodies give out from lack of internal organs, they “complete” which is a euphemistic way of saying that they die and (presumably) then give up their remaining organs. Which, once gain, raises the question of why they don’t all just swim to France.

This book raises all sorts of questions, the least of which is the whole France question. For all I know, the France of this book has a similar program. A program with an even shorter cycle due to the French tendency towards wine and cigarettes. Our hapless protagonists might wash up on a beach in France only to be told that their livers and lungs are needed “tout du suite.”

Just one of many questions that came to my mind as I read this book: What would I do if I were a non-clone and needed a transplant of some sort? Presumably, the England of this book doesn’t bother with the old-fashioned type of organ donation where people donate theirs after they don’t need them anymore. If you can grow all of the organs that you could ever possibly need, it wouldn’t make sense to take them out of car crash victims. I wouldn’t want a new kidney or heart if it came at the expense of someone else’s life. At the same time, I wouldn’t exactly want to die from organ failure if I had options. The book makes it clear that most people of this dystopian society see clones as being much less than human. But there are also people in this society who think that this whole donation/completion business is flat out wrong. I’m guessing that whatever organization wants to give clones a chance doesn’t do a lot of recruiting at the local dialysis clinic. What would I do? I guess I’m glad that I live in a society that doesn’t harvest organs from living people (for oh so many reasons) and that I’m not in any need of spare parts at the moment (talk about your understatements).

This is why I kindof want to join a book club that doesn’t just sit around drinking wine and not talking about books.

This also probably why any decent book club would probably never let me join.

In short, I think that you should all go out and read this book. Unless you’re squeamish. Or feeling particularly fragile. The book was, to get all punny for a moment, a total punch in the gut. But in a good way.

Next week? I’ll review something a little fluffier.