I saw this trailer recently and found it unsettling. There something ominous about the trailer, and while it hints at the students’ fates without elaborating on them, leaving me desperate to know just what these characters are in for. Since I’d read one of Ishiguro’s books before (When We Were Orphans, which I remember loving in high school), I read Never Let Me Go in anticipation of the film.
Taking place in the late 1990s in an 
alternate version of England, 31-year-old Kathy spends her time caring for other people, while anticipating the time when she’ll make her first “donation.” Most of the time, she looks back at her childhood, which she spent at boarding school called Hailsham, an idyllic place where doting teachers (called “guardians”)encourage the students to keep themselves healthy and create art. Hailsham students are completely cut off from the outside world until the age of 18, when they were released into the world, to spend a few years caring for fellow boarding school graduates before starting their own “donations.” Then, as one of the teachers warned in the trailer, their lives would be over.
The trailer basically gives away most of the film/book, but this isn’t a plot-driven novel. (Still, stop reading here if you don’t want to know exactly what happens.)
It’s more a collection of anecdotes that build to a deeply disturbing conclusion. This slowly reveals itself as Kathy recalls her days at Hailsham: they knew from a young age that they were clones, being raised for their organs. They have no parents and they can’t have children. Because this was the only life they had ever known, it never occurred to them that they could do anything else. It’s not until they’re out of Hailsham that Kathy realizes she loves Tommy, though their friend Ruth threatens to get in the way. Kathy and Tommy hear rumors that there might be a way for them to live together for a few years before they start their donations, and they try to find their old Hailsham teachers to ask them.
The outside world is difficult for the Hailsham students to navigate—while the rest of the population is grateful to them for their medical help, they have trouble confronting the donors and carers because of the dubious morality of the whole thing. Are they human? Do they have souls? Is this whole business ethical? People, Kathy knows, want as little to do with it as possible, preferring to think that their organs appeared neatly from nowhere.
Kathy’s narration is winding and colloquial, and while it makes her seem more real and believable, it can be frustrating. She meanders through anecdotes, pausing, hinting at things that will happen in later chapters, and, sometimes maddeningly, not elaborating on them. She says things like “But that’s not really what I want to talk about right now.” All she knows about society is her role in it, a role she accepts almost unquestioningly. And perhaps the biggest problem with the book was that I never got a clear sense of why or how she fell in love with Tommy. It’s true, love isn’t usually that simple, but for all Kathy’s rambling, I never got a clear idea of her romantic feelings.
Even though I never quite connected with Kathy, it’s still devastating to read about her and her friends as they head toward their deaths. (Maybe I wasn’t meant to relate to her—I’m just as bad as the rest of society who doesn’t view her and the other Hailsham students as fully human.) It raises ethical questions, both specific ones about bioethics and vaguer ones about living the life we’re planned to live. But despite its limitations, this is a jarring, haunting book, and it’s one I’m looking forward to seeing on film.
*My original title for this review was When We Were Organs, which, while punnier, gave away a little too much about the book.
