Never Let Me Go

Synopsis: In one of the most acclaimed and strange novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewered version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now 31, "Never Let Me Go" hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, "Never Let Me Go" is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

'My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That'll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn't necessarily because they think I'm fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who've been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I'm not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they've been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. 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. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well.

Review: I loved every page. You begin this book by thinking you are reading about a fairly normal girl at a fairly normal boarding school. Kathy's schooldays at Hailsham sound pretty idyllic and from the way she eulogises about it you think that Hailsham must be pretty special and it is, just not in the way you were thinking. Bit by bit she drops snippets into her recollections that make you think that all is not as it seems and fairly soon you know that something fairly disturbing is occurring. This is not Malory Towers!

You get to know the characters very well, Kathy and Tommy in particular, but there is always a slight detachment. Kathy is not emotional in the way that we perhaps expect her to be, and she accepts her situation with a kind of docile resignation. All the same her narration draws you in. In some respects Kathy and her schoolfriends are not entirely clued up about their situation, they know about it, they've always known about it, but somehow it hasn't entirely registered. You hope at some point the penny will drop and she'll rebel because you don't want her to suffer the same fate as the others, you feel it would be easy for her just to run for the hills but these children/young adults have been conditioned to accept their destiny.

Haunting and beautifully written, it keeps you turning pages even though it is extremely slow paced. Some people feel that the science doesn't add up, it probably doesn't but I don't think it matters. It's thought provoking, you hope such horrors could never occur, but the unacceptable often becomes acceptable without you quite knowing how it happened.