Yesterday, my sister Becky and I, along with my parents, went swimming at our other sister's backyard pool. Our talk turned, as it almost always does, to books, which reminded me that I'd forgotten to bring the book I'd just finished, Never Let Me Go, to loan to her. So I started to explain to her what it's about, being sort of vague because this is a book that is difficult to explain without uncovering the thing the characters spend most of the book looking for. "Well," I said, "It's about these kids in England, growing up in a sort of boarding school. And everyone tells them they're special, and they spend the whole book trying to figure out why their education was so devoted to learning to how to make art, and why their art is special."
And Becky said, "It sounds like a book I just bought. Never Let Me Go." Yep, that'd be the one. It made me laugh to think that both of us, without any input from the other, were reading the same book. I guess it shows how similar our taste in writing is!
I've wanted to read this book for a long time. It sounded sort of dystopian-ish, which is one of my favorite genres. And I was intrigued by the book flap teasers. Just why were these students told they were special? And why was their art so important? So I was thrilled to find it at Costco (which really has a surprisingly good book selection, with better prices and less hassle than Amazon, but unfortunately none of the book reviews!). I've never read anything by Kazuo Ishiguro, so I didn't know what to expect from his writing style. It's different. This isn't a language book---I didn't finish it and think "wow, great imagery and metaphor." I didn't underline anything. In fact, it reads like someone telling an oral story, the sort of rambling type that jumps backwards and forwards a bit. No, it's not about the language. Instead, it's a book about story. And about ethics. And about what makes us human.
I've had this little internal debate with myself: should I write this Book Note and give away all the book's secrets? I almost didn't. But, my point in writing these is to explore my readerly thoughts. So, if you want to read the book---and in doing so force yourself to think about some intriguing and disturbing concepts---then stop reading this now! (That means you, Becky. Unless you've finished, of course. If you've finished, I want to know what you think!)
In this book, shortly after WWII, scientists figure out how to clone human beings. The cloning isn't done to, say, help infertile couples have babies. Instead, people are cloned in order to donate their organs. The biological stuff that's needed for the cloning is taken from a wide variety of people, so that the fully-grown cloned donors have more chances to be a match for donating. These cloned people are created, then grow into adults, at which time they start donating organs until they have donated enough that they can no longer live. Then all their organs are taken. At the beginning of this program, the cloned people---they are called donors---live in horrible conditions, because the world doesn't want to think of them as human beings. No one knows if they have souls or not, so they are treated like they don't.
Enter Miss Elizabeth and her friend, Madame, who have other ideas. They help build a small system of boarding schools for the donors, where they live from their birth. They are educated, comforted, nurtured, and in all ways treated like regular people. Kathy, the protagonist, grows up with a group of donors who are very close to her, and who have a seemingly larger-than-normal curiosity about themselves. Through the course of the book, she and her friend Tommy, with Ruth's help, discover the truth about their lives and about Hailsham, the school where they grew up.
Remember---people don't think that the donors have souls. They view them as walking, breathing organ farms. Miss Elizabeth teaches them art because, to use her words, "we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all."
And this is why I love dystopian novels. They point out the way our society could go. And they make you think: what do I believe? When is the human form more than just cells doing what cells do, when does it become human consciousness? When does the soul enter the body? Is a scientifically-created human being less human than a biologically created one? And does art prove the existence of the soul? Like any good novel, Never Let Me Go doesn't fully answer the questions. But I do think the novel suggests that it isn't only art that proves the existence of our souls. Were the donors simply organ farms and nothing more, they wouldn't fall in love. They wouldn't experience anger, betrayal, frustration, sadness, or joy. Yet they do. The cloned people are just as human as you or I.
Yet I also don't think that Ishiguro is chiming in with a cloning-human-beings endorsement. He's saying "look at the road we are traveling. Do we really want to go this way?" If I could, I'd make every genetic scientist read this book. Just like Kathy had no control over her destiny, I feel very powerless at stopping this sort of science---there's not much I can do. So while Ishiguro is warning us to be careful, I don't think his warning will be heard. And that's a sorrow.
