Spare parts.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro 

Alfred A. Knopf, $24, 288 pp.

Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel opens in mysterious territory. We're in England in the late 1990s, not in some futuristic fantasy world, yet the way in which characters in this story use certain familiar words is disorienting. Our narrator, Kathy H. (a name that echoes both Kafka and the grade-school classroom) tells us that her profession is "carer" and that she looks after "donors" who will ultimately "complete." When one of Kathy's donors, dying painfully, asks her to recount tales of her famous boarding school, Hailsham, she tells of a quite ordinary childhood--or a childhood that would seem ordinary were a reader not aware that Kathy's classmates, too, have gone on to become donors and carers, and that some of the childhood customs at Hailsham are distinctly puzzling.

Like all of Ishiguro's novels, Never Let Me Go is an introspective narrative concerned with troubling moral questions. His best-known work, The Remains of the Day, employs a hyper-dutiful, repressed English butler as witness to aristocratic sympathy for fascism. Ishiguro himself came to England at the age of six from postatomic Nagasaki (his first novel is set there, in the eerie aftermath of the bomb). His first-person narrators, in their emotional yearning, make muddled attempts to recall their own struggles as the world around them has gone through upheaval. They delude themselves and sometimes implicate readers, too, in delusion: Ishiguro uses irony to strong and subtle effect.

In order to reflect Kathy H.'s ordinariness, Ishiguro here employs a style more matter-of-fact than in his other novels, the language flatter and more workaday. The story of Kathy H.'s childhood, too, is a little slow and flat--but, because her seemingly pacific youth is set in opposition to the strange future awaiting her, narrative tension builds. Most readers will, from page one, have a rough idea of what is to become of Kathy and her classmates, but the novel unveils its mysteries gradually, and anyone who would prefer to solve the riddle of the book themselves should stop reading this review right here.

It would be coy to discuss this novel's concerns without revealing that Kathy H. and her classmates are human clones raised to be organ donors when their bodies mature; that they will serve brief terms caring for other donors before they become donors themselves; and that they will "complete" their donations in death. The clones assigned to Hailsham, a reader learns, are part of a benevolent social experiment designed to give these manufactured humans an education and make their childhood full (most clones are housed in Dickensian institutions they would prefer to forget). The students at Hailsham have a high status in the world of donors, but they are ordinary precisely because they are ordinary human children, perfecting the ordinary cruelties as they choose leaders and learn to conform. They shun each other, curry favor, hatch conspiracy theories.

Kathy, from the story's opening, is certainly capable of inflicting hurt, but she also distinguishes herself by her empathy. She has a special feeling for Tommy, humiliated by the other boys because they enjoy watching him throw tantrums. Those tantrums make him one of the few characters in the novel to protest mistreatment--not as a clone, but as the scapegoat of the other boys. The girls, too, join in deriding Tommy because he is no good at "creating" at Hailsham, where art is so highly prized. The social reformers who have created this experiment to improve the lives of the clones use the children's creations to demonstrate to the outside world that clones have interior lives--have, perhaps, souls--and are therefore worthy of decent treatment.

The effect on a reader piecing together the reason these children have been created is most unsettling. Kathy's friends lack curiosity (they answer references to their futures with silence and embarrassment) and defer to their guardians. They have, of course, been trained in obedience. As small children, they hear stories of a curious girl who climbs the fence encircling Hailsham--when she returns, the guardians will not let her back in. Such banishment is unthinkable. When they leave Hailsham as older adolescents, they are given nearly complete freedom before they begin their training, but it does not occur to them to flee or to question their fate. The most poignant scenes involve their fantasies about alternate futures: Kathy's friend Ruth imagines the "dynamic, go-ahead types" in offices. But when some friends go looking for a "possible"--the human model from whom Ruth has been made--Ruth reminds them angrily that they all must have been modeled from trash.

Kathy, too, has fantasies: despite the physical impossibility, she dreams of being a mother, of singing a popular song, "Never Let Me Go," to her infant. When she and Tommy fall in love, they persuade themselves to believe the myth their friends believe, that Hailsham-raised couples who prove their love can win a deferral, an extended time together before they begin their donations. When they realize that this is not possible, their quiet responses may roil readers more than open rebellion.

On the most literal level Ishiguro is asking precisely the questions about cloning and other genetic experiments that we all should be asking--about what it means to be human and how far reproductive technology should proceed. But by setting the novel in the present rather than the future, he also suggests that acquiescence to one's class, duty, even fate, is a problem of not merely future technology but of our moral present. Early in the novel, Kathy asks Tommy why he's so much happier than he has been: "So what's happened?" she says. "Did you find God or something?" It is the novel's only mention of God--Hailsham is the product of a postreligious age that has taken social ranking and notions of human worth to a hitherto unimaginable level.

Ishiguro's interweaving of present and future moral catastrophe makes Never Let Me Go deeply disturbing, in the best sense. Though this narrative is not as taut as his earlier novels, the strange world it evokes is nonetheless compelling, the work's intelligence and concern for exploited souls a sad consolation.

Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels.