Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

****Warning: Spoilers ahead. SPOILERS ABOUND!****

You're invited to a book discussion:

Let's talk about Never Let Me Go, because I'm not sure how I feel about this book, and I want to hear what others who read it thought about it and WHY.

I finished Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, my first book by him. I thoroughly enjoyed it for what it is and think the story and characterization are well-conceptualized, but I'm not finding the writing or interiority of it brilliant or elevated in the way I've found some books to be extraordinary. Maybe it's one of those books whose layers would be properly peeled back with a good book discussion.

I'm not sure what differentiates it from some other dystopian/sci-fi books I've read or what qualifies it for greatness. I think it needs to have something beyond thematic shock value for staying power. 

What did you love about it? What did you think of it?

Also, can we take a second to appreciate how achingly beautiful this song is?

Is there another song to pair with the book that you prefer?  Add it in the comments.

Some of my thoughts:

The book's premise is rich with thought-provoking discussion material. On one level, it explores the dark underside of medico-scientific progress in late industrial capitalistic societies and concepts like biopolitics (Foucault), necropolitics (Mmembe), and capitalist bodily expropriation (Sylvia Federici, Nancy Fraser, and others). In the postcolonial context, it brings the horrors of medical experimentation and the human sacrifice of primitive accumulation back inside the colonial power center. It highlights what critical theorists and researchers of medical abuse (see the books Medical Apartheid, The Nazi Doctors), trafficking, and neo-slavery have been arguing all along: that the most egregious (and horrific) externalities, forms of violence, and costs of global capitalism -- black market phenomena like sex/human trafficking and organ harvesting -- are integral, not incidental, to the workings of global capitalism. It's a feature, not a bug. 

What will always bother me about this book is the acceptance of dispossession and dehumanization/ consignment to subhuman status. According to Roman law, what differentiates the free person from the slave is ownership of one’s body (Graeber, Debt). Kant’s moral philosophy also urges a humanist political framework that treats all human beings as ends in themselves and not means to someone else’s ends, or instruments for someone else’s agenda or benefit, thus eviscerating the fallacious justifications for “for the greater good” utilitarianism and all the instrumentalisms, especially fascism, totalitarianism, and various forms of mob rule and of caste societies that create disposable and dispossess-able classes. NLMG imagines a world in which those fundamental debates have been recklessly abandoned and the protagonists resigned to their fate. (In retrospect, after having also read The Remains of the Day, it seems that Ishiguro likes to explore emotionally repressed and slavishly obedient characters (Kathy, Stevens) who will invariably infuriate me.)

Spoiler alert: I hated the ending. If the book is all about this dystopian structure wherein clones are raised in more-or-less gilded concentration camps and narcotized with books and art, only to become sheep to the slaughter, wouldn't the poetic/romantic ending be for them to commit suicide rather than surrender to their fates passively?  

Kathy's ruminations turned the ending into the idea that memories allow a person to cope with the unimaginable and allow her to create a mental prison/ concentration camp of the mind. I suppose that's important, but nowhere do I see her being fully human and raging against the machine or against the dying of the light, and it left me feeling dissatisfied and bereft. Nowhere do I see her exercising agency beyond the impotent and pathetic attempt to appeal to Madame. 

I'm just curious what's special about the novel particularly.

There are parallels between the morally compromised world of the novel and the gray zone of innumerable moral compromises that we make on a daily basis – many unwittingly, some wittingly that we cannot fully escape. We move through various institutions in different phases of our lives and adapt /conform to their rules and prescribed roles. We are endlessly molding ourselves around the expectations of invisible architectures /the forces of hegemony. We deceive our children to preserve their innocence, protecting them from the horrors of history and of the present and from traumatic realities. It might be quintessential to the modern human condition that we are doomed to witness the suffering of others and are powerless to act (Carson McCullers' "Court in the West Eighties" also deals with this theme). Another reader commented that Never Let Me Go teaches all these analogues and this one, chief among them: “Even love will not conquer our most formidable foe, death.” True.

I really struggle with dystopian fiction like Never Let Me Go, because it paints too bleak a picture of the world, conjuring the world as a prison and making the reader complicit in consenting to premise of an enslaved underclass. It reminds me of a quote by Theodor Adorno: “In the innermost recess of humanism… surreptitiously rages the brute who as a Fascist turns the world into a prison.” To me, rather than being descriptive, the alchemy of this book is prescriptive; it imagines a world in which we can adapt to and accept anything, when we very well shouldn’t. When we accede to an inhumane reality, we consent to dehumanization and make it a foregone, inevitable conclusion; we normalize a world that routinizes such violence. And maybe this is the state of the world and we need to be awakened to it, but it horrifies me to conflate what’s happening to protagonists Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy in the novel with the “universal human condition,” because we lose our humanity in the process. 

The speculative fiction that I love is not one that perpetuates a “politics of submission” but rather one that creates a “politics of resistance” (Jill Lepore, “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction,” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/a-golden-age-for-dystopian-fiction ) and imagines new possibilities; it takes flight, creating spaces of freedom where none existed before. It imagines elsewheres and otherwises (Avery Gordon). It refuses the status quo. It chooses fugitivity over servitude (Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney). When C.S. Lewis was confronted with the derisive charge that fiction is merely escapism, he responded, “I never fully understood [the charge of escape] till my friend Professor Tolkein asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.” 

As a romantic and an existentialist, I know that WE are radically free and radically responsible for our lives and that life is a precious gift: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom” (Viktor Frankl).  

Contrarily, in NLMG, everywhere in the book is evidence that Ruth’s, Tommy’s, and Kathy’s mental enslavement and obedience to their conditioning are complete; as was said, they have completely internalized the system of authority and hegemony that has worked its total control and domination on them. They don’t dare disturb the universe by disrupting the status quo or subverting their conditioning. Everywhere we see arrested development / perpetual adolescence and slammed doors – no freedom, no choice, no responsibility, no escape. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth are not creating art and reading literature because they inherently love art and literature and because it feeds their souls; they are creating and reading because those are the entertainments-as-opiates and rewards foisted upon them in their disguised cage. They have no choice and no agency. 

Kathy is also preoccupied with whether she will find her original in the pages of a pornographic magazine. She and Ruth express anxiety about their originals coming from the reprehensible outcasts of soceity — criminals, junkies, prostitutes, and porn stars. Kathy’s fear emerges because of her alienation from mainstream society and her consequent uncertainty over whether her sexual urges are normal or monstrous, healthy or aberrant, echoing Victorian Gothic novels that distinguish sexual normalcy from sexual perversion as a signifier to separate between the human and the inhuman (Dracula and Jane Eyre come to mind, and I think Judith Butler’s Skin Shows explicates this theme). Sexual desire demarcates the boundaries of belonging, between those worthy of protection and inviolability and those exempt from social rights and protections, condemned to violability as “bare life” (Agamben, Homo Sacer).

Self-determination and bodily autonomy / integrity are fundamental to our humanity. Our freedom is fundamental to our humanity. We should demand a good life and a natural death, with all our parts intact, no less. When I read the book, I see aborted futures, foreclosed possibilities, and thwarted passions. And even when the body is captive, we see that the protagonists allow their minds – the last citadels of freedom – to be perverted in service of rationalizing and normalizing an abhorrent environment. They have demolished the last sanctuary to express their will through resistance and refusal: the human spirit. Behaving as lobotomy patients, they surrender their bodies and minds to a rapacious totalitarian overlord.

Is this too harsh? Perhaps. There are other themes and questions to tease in this text. Memory is the place where we can hold onto our loved ones forever and never let them go. Memory is the space in which we are fully humanized to each other and not the hollow detritus of a soulless world (I’m thinking of the image of the plastic bags at the end). The book unsettles and upsets me, though, and not in a good way, I think.

While Ishiguro will probably not become my favorite author, I nonetheless respect his writing craft and masterful storytelling abilities.  I find his worlds subtly Orwellian and sinister, and I appreciate that his works fall on a spectrum of dystopia. After having read The Remains of the Day subsequent to NLMG, I see themes of deforming oneself to conform while “encaged in the circus of civilization” (Langston Hughes, “Lament for Dark Peoples”) and of grappling with whether one has wasted one’s life.