'Lucky pawns'.

KAZUO ISHIGURO is known for writing stories told in a calm, almost remote manner by narrators who have lived through tumultuous times--the bombing of Nagasaki, for instance, or Hitler's rise to power. The narrators give the impression that the only way they can share their memories is to stand at a safe distance from them. The tone is well chosen for such characters as the reserved English butler in Ishiguro's most famous novel, The Remains of the Day; but it gains a strange new power when used to tell a horror story.

Ishiguro's new book, Never Let Me Go, is set in the recent past and narrated by a 31-year-old woman who introduces herself simply as Kathy H. In a series of impressionistic flashbacks, Kathy recalls her days growing up at Hailsham, an exclusive school in England. Exactly where in England is never specified--Kathy herself doesn't even seem to remember. This is just one of a series of omissions and other oddities that grow increasingly difficult to overlook as the story progresses.

Kathy describes her career, on the first page of the novel, as matter-of-factly as she describes her childhood: "I've been a carer now for over eleven years.... My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as 'agitated,' even before fourth donation." Though clearly proud of her work, Kathy is no hurry to go into detail about these unusual terms, or to explain why so many of her friends have pursued the same line of work--or why "carers" eventually end up as "donors."

Her memories focus mainly on two of those friends: Ruth and Tommy, fellow Hailsham students with whom she's recently come into contact again. We see them as schoolchildren engaged in puzzling activities that they take for granted--such as producing paintings, drawings, and sculptures that are carted away by a mysterious woman known only as "Madame."

Kathy then starts dropping shattering revelations into the story, almost as casually as she recalls that it was raining on a given day. About a time when she'd caught "Madame" watching her and crying, Kathy reminisces, "When I told Tommy about what had happened with Madame in the dorm, he came up with a fairly simple explanation. By then, of course, we all knew something I hadn't known back then, which was that none of us could have babies."

And so we learn, as gradually and insidiously as they did, that these children must deal with a knowledge that clouds all their lives, though it affects them all differently. The first time we see Tommy, he's on the verge of throwing a violent temper tantrum. Kathy, cool and practical even at 13, feels a twinge of sympathy for her hotheaded schoolmate and manages to calm him down when no one else will go near him. Sympathy develops into friendship as Tommy matures and learns to control his outbursts.

Tommy, however, takes up with Ruth, Kathy's other close friend, who actually becomes less mature as she grows up. Unequipped with Kathy's iron self-control or Tommy's hard-earned fortitude, Ruth can't find a way to cope with the knowledge that grows ever more troubling. She lurches back and forth between kindness and vindictiveness. It becomes apparent that she's clinging to her relationship with Tommy for selfish reasons, and yet it sometimes seems that she's deliberately trying to sabotage it.

Ruth picks so many quarrels that Kathy feels little regret when they eventually part ways. Yet for all her repellent personality, Ruth is ultimately the most vulnerable, and thus in some ways the most appealing, of all the characters. For Ruth, like her fellow students, is facing something that is nearly impossible to face. Ishiguro has done some subtle rewriting of history, giving the postwar British society into which these characters were born the same views on the role of science and the value of life that much of our society has now--plus technology far more advanced than ours.

So the sheltered Hailsham students are living out the logical consequences of that worldview--a worldview that leads most outsiders, along with many of their own teachers, to regard them as less than human. Even as adults living in the wider world, Kathy and her schoolmates feel themselves cut off from others: They have a destiny they did not choose but must not question.

"I can see," someone tells Kathy and Tommy at one point, "that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns." She's referring to the fact that when they were children, there were people who dedicated their whole lives to fighting for them, to guarantee that they would have normal childhoods and a good education. But this discovery serves only to teach the youngsters what devilish things are sometimes done in the name of compassion.

This summary risks making the book sound like an "issues novel." But though Ishiguro is in fact dealing with bioethics--which involves some of the most divisive issues of our time--this quietly devastating, beautifully written tale can hardly be reduced to such a simplistic level. Ishiguro has done what all great novelists do: He has drawn from his imagination a fictional world that captivates the reader. Though Kathy tells much of her own story in the detached tone of an observer (even when she remembers bursting into tears, she seems to be talking about someone else's sorrow), we come away feeling its emotional consequences--an experience that no mere preachy "novel of ideas" can produce. At the very least, Ishiguro ensures that, having known Kathy's world, we will look at our own through changed eyes.

Gina R. Dalfonzo is a writer for BreakPoint Radio and a graduate student at George Mason University.