I finished Never Let Me Go , perhaps not the best way to begin New Year’s Eve revelry, but a perfect ending to a year, a perfect setting to a new beginning. The book, told in it’s placid way, is unsettling even from the beginning, before the reader even has a sense of why it is unsettling. Vague references keep cropping up, the most mundane and ordinary things are described in such luminous detail so as to seem out of touch with this world. The tensions, the vague sense of growing awareness, almost as if the readers are experiencing the same childhood mystery of the protagonists, the “knowing without knowing” that is described in the book, creeps into the reader’s psyche. It is a book beautiful and terrifying, horrible and heartbreaking, filled with great humanity while at the same time reminding us what a fragile thing that humanity is.
The book is tender and touching: One becomes wrapped up the lives of these characters, the protagonists of this story, who are not really the protagonists at all. This book is not about what it appears to be about. It professes to be about three friends, and on this level it is touching and poignant. But truly this is a book about innuendo, about reading between the lines, about the little details of our lives and the things we don’t want to know It is a book about life and what we take for granted, about what we accept and what we keep hidden; it is about the banalities of the small things and how we can be so wrapped up in our secure private worlds that we never see or contemplate the big picture. Indeed this is a book caught up in small things. Big issues are never addressed, and yet they are present. It is also about the nature of humanity and the soul and the nature of evil and conscience. The skill of this author is that he has written a novel of great beauty which is really an allegory for a bigger and more terrifying thing. He leads us into thought without our really being aware of where we are going until it is too late to escape.
Although the characters in the book are clones, created to be used as organ donors for ordinary people, the book is not really about the dangers of science, or morality or religion. It is a call to conscience however, a call to responsibility, a reminder that evil can creep in the most unassuming of ways.
Perhaps equally as disturbing, to me at least, as the idea that this novel is about a world in which clones “students” they are called, are raised in isolated rural schools apart from society, isolated in knowledge, limited in their interactions with others, is the idea that they accept their fate so unconditionally. The protagonists are fully developed characters, as caring, warm, and human as any person we might meet, and yet they blindly and accept their fate like sheep or cattle, herded to their hospitals to make their “donations”. It is sad and frightening that they so willingly accept their fate, and it is also profoundly disturbing that the society of caring humanity which they serve also accepts their fate so blindly, removing itself from any recognition of what is being done in its name.
Kathy’s question, near the end of the book “Why should we not have souls?” echoes through my mind. It will continue to do so for quite some time.