Quick Hit: Never Let Me Go (2003)

Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro captures the self-deception of men who grapple with personal responsibility amidst forces beyond their control. The perfect English butler in The Remains of the Day learns that his lord sympathizes with the Nazis. A Japanese propaganda painter fears that his wartime sympathies have damaging consequences in An Artist of the Floating World.

It would seem that his Never Let Me Go is in the same vein of blinkered, subtle narration. A trio of students at an exclusive school in the English countryside turn out to be clones. Their mundane, teenage interactions are set against a backdrop of muffled angst that, despite their love, their poetry and their sense of having souls, they exist only to donate their organs for medical purposes.

The book won a smattering of awards in 2003 and made Time Magazine‘s list of best novels. A film version starring Keira Knightley is in the works. Yet to me, it read as though a literary author who didn’t read much science fiction suddenly discovered cloning. The delicacy and restraint of the writing, which intensified the submerged emotion of the British and Japanese narrators in previous novels, only served to obscure a rather predictable and well-trodden story with paper-doll characters. (The Guardian makes much the same point in one of its irresistable “digested reads.”) High themes and an accomplished novelist do not a great novel make.