Clone home: Jay Jennings on Kazuo Ishiguro.

NEVER LET ME GO

BY KAZUO ISHIGURO

NEW YORK: KNOPF. 304 PAGES. $24.

In Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, Never Let Me Go, narrator Kathy H. takes her place as a close test-tube relative of Ishiguro's earlier storytellers, such as the painter Masuji Ono of An Artist of the Floating World (2001), the new wife Etsuko of A Pale View of Hills (1982), and, best-known, Stevens the butler of The Remains of the Day (1988). As in all of Ishiguro's previous books, the story is told in a first-person voice that is elliptical, measured, and frequently apologetic--the voice of someone trying to make sense of the past from an uncertain present. At what we later learn is the literally ripe old age of thirty-one, Kathy thinks back on her salad days at a strange kind of English public school called Hailsham (perhaps an ironic echo of halcyon). Her descriptions of unusual practices there are often prefaced with "I don't know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham...," and she also issues the standard Ishigurian caveat about memory: "This was all a long time ago so I might have some of it wrong."

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Early on, we hear about the school's obsessive emphasis on health: "I don't know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we had to have some form of medical almost every week." Artistic skill brings social acceptance: "How you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at 'creating.'" And then there's the staff's confusing attitude toward intimacy among the students: "We couldn't decide whether or not the guardians wanted us to have sex." This is an adolescent world turned inside out, but why?

These provocative anomalies begin to seem like clues and thus initiate a diverting parlor game for readers. But what kind of place Hailsham is, and what kind of people Kathy and her cohorts are, are two of the principal secrets of the book, points that Ishiguro takes pains to conceal from us. I'm hesitant to be the critic who cries "Soylent green is people!" during the opening credits, and to judge from the deliberately vague publicity material, the publisher doesn't want me to. But in order to discuss what's seriously wrong with the book, I must quote from the crucial revelation on page 81 of this 304-page novel. Stop reading now if you don't want to know that one rogue guardian, Miss Lucy, tells her charges: "You'll become adults, then before you're old, before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs. That's what each of you was created to do." The remains of the day indeed.

This foray into speculative fiction is Ishiguro's second consecutive attempt at genre work, having tried his hand at detective fiction in When We Were Orphans (2000). In that book the plot, which centers on a detective's investigation of his parents' (apparent) abduction in pre-World War II Shanghai by a Chinese opium warlord, eventually devolved into shallow melodrama. It also touched on parody (investigator Christopher Banks actually carries a magnifying glass) and employed an ironic gaze. But for the most part Ishiguro played it straight, providing a final confrontation and the customary surprising-culprit confession and explanation.

In Never Let Me Go, he chooses to ignore sci-fi's conventions. He transports us to a "late 1990s" England where organ farming is common, but gives only the barest nod as to how this earth-shaking development came about (according to the book's unspecific chronology, the practice would have had to have originated by the early '60s). There's almost no actual science and not even much speculation. The details of clone existence in larger society, both before and after the revelation above, are dribbled out in the story of the friendship between Kathy and two other Hailsham residents--Tommy, a misfit at the academy because he is lacking in creativity, and Ruth, a highly emotional character whom Kathy, a "carer" since having left Hailsham twelve years previous, shepherds through her organ donations. Ruth and Tommy become a couple at the Cottages, a post-Hailsham clone colony for young adults. Here Kathy, as narrator, lays out a closed world whose inhabitants, from birth to death, are both cosseted and constricted, and seem psychologically suspended by that conditioning, so much so that any attempt to break free seems unthinkable. While this might make a fine premise for a novel of ideas--one that features, for instance, Foucault's belief that institutions are where "human beings are made subjects"--Ishiguro's choice of a limited and unsophisticated narrator precludes such a direction.

Ishiguro practically perfected the exacting, formal, often deluded voice that reeks of authority yet remains transparent, revealing more than the speaker knows about him- or herself. The colloquial (yet still measured) tone he creates for Kathy is perhaps meant to conjure intimacy, but it makes her seem dim rather than merely unenlightened. Her speech is riddled with qualifying phrases ("all kinds of other things," "all kinds of little things," "sort of," "I suppose," "who knows?"). Her position as Everyclone, who wants only to fulfill her purpose, to complete what she has been created to do, allows her to describe the actions of the (relatively) more erratic characters in a straightforward way, but she remains obtuse about the nuances of the clones' role in the world. For all her similarity to previous Ishiguro narrators, she fails drastically as a storyteller.

The tensest chapter is the one that brings the clones and the outside world closest to interacting. A couple from the Cottages, on a visit to Norfolk, think they see a businesswoman who may be Ruth's "possible," that is, the human from whom she was manufactured. A road trip is planned, and all five stalk the streets in search of this woman. Through an office window they glimpse her, but ultimately their quest proves futile. This leads to an outburst by Ruth about the clones' essential nature as well as their place in society, one of only two times in the book the word clone is in fact used. "We all know it," Ruth rants. "We're modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps.... If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter." Instead of serving as a call for the characters to rebel or act, or as an opportunity for Ishiguro to develop his ideas about freedom and identity, Ruth's words lead nowhere. At the end of the trip, she and her companions merely pile in the car and return home. Just once, you wish one of them would gather the strength to break and run.

In a recent interview with the BBC, Ishiguro said that he starts books with the "idea," and because of that his characters "tend not to be three-dimensional" but rather "cartoonish." This is an astonishing admission for a novelist to make, especially coming from the author of the earnestly realistic Remains of the Day. In that novel, style, subject, and idea merged into a gem of tragicomedy. Regardless of the author's admission, he managed to create in the butler Stevens a flesh-and-blood character whose limited moral depth did not compromise his vivid humanity. And the way Ishiguro breathes life into his characters is through comedy, whether it arises from the fish-out-of-water brilliance of Stevens's motoring trip or the sustained cosmic joke of Ryder's bafflement in The Unconsoled (1995).

In Never Let Me Go, what little comedy there is seems so black as to be completely opaque (read: not funny). In relating a class discussion about World War II prison camps, Kathy remembers a fellow student's observation that the inmates could have committed suicide by touching an electric fence; she says that this "might have been intended as a serious point, but the rest of us thought it pretty funny. We were all laughing and talking at once, and then Laura--typical of her--got up on her seat and did a hysterical impersonation of someone reaching out and getting electrocuted. For a moment things got riotous." A naive and unreliable narrator can be a powerful engine for a novel (not to mention a source of humor), but Kathy is simply bland and inept. Telling the story through her constitutes what seems like a dare. Ishiguro's saying, Don't enjoy this tale; think about my big ideas.

We hear plenty about laughter in Never Let Me Go, but we get it all secondhand through the filter of Kathy. Whether recounting adolescent days of goofing around or later foibles, Kathy hardly lets a page go by without describing someone having a laugh. When the friends are in Norfolk and they spy the woman they imagine is Ruth's "possible," Kathy describes it this way: "She was laughing at something her friend in the red outfit was saying, and her face, especially when she was finishing her laugh with a shake of her head, had more than a hint of Ruth about it." That's how we feel through much of this strange and unsatisfying novel--on the outside, neither hearing nor getting the joke, and not laughing ourselves.

Jay Jennings is a two-time MacDowell Colony fellow and is currently at work on a novel.