Never Let Me Go

Over the summer, I read about entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, a man who above all else doesn’t want to die. He’s altered his lifaestyle, even done plasma transfusions, but unfortunately for him was diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease this year. That led to him taking a new, slightly quirkier approach. “I’ve just cloned myself…as a newborn”, he announced on social media this June. His plan is to create a “blood-boy” which he wants to use to test therapies and grow organs for later transplantation. 

Technically, he didn’t clone himself – all he is describing is a type of stem cell – but he does seem like the kind of person who’d go that far. After all, if you’re that desperate to survive, developing a clone to prevent you from any illnesses and extend your life is the natural endpoint for an obsessive thanatophobe like him. Whilst I was reading about Johnson, I couldn’t help but remember a book I’d read recently: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. 

Never Let Me Go explores the concept of raising clones for the sake of later using them as organ donors. In this hypothetical world, following the Second World War, scientists decide to develop clones en masse to then be used to treat various cancers and diseases, a plan that works well for everyone, aside from the clones. But in this world, they’re just collateral, and no one would ever bother raising them to be humans. Apart from one school, Hailsham, which does exactly that.

When I read Never Let Me Go this summer, it was actually for the second time. The first, I felt like the clones aspect was a bit unnecessary, almost tacked on at the end, and could be easily ignored. You could read the book blissfully unaware the characters being clones mattered, and come away loving what you’d just read. That said, that was four years ago; this time, I grew to love and understand the cloning element more. Ishiguro’s stark, economical prose never flinches, so that when you come to realise the horror in the characters’ situation, it feels almost more frightening. However, I’d still consider Never Let Me Go a slice of life with a dash of sci-fi anxiety. On the surface, that sounds like a strange genre clash, but to me, it works perfectly.

The narrator, Kathy H, works as a carer for clones who have reached their only purpose in life - to donate organs - and throughout the book, she looks back on her life at Hailsham. She remembers hanging out with her friends: the often outspoken Ruth, as well as the emotionally dysregulated Tommy. Her descriptions of Hailsham are perfectly idyllic, where her only troubles are minor disputes with Ruth and some of the other girls, what she is going to buy in the school’s Sales, and her own sexual awkwardness. She’s vaguely aware she must eventually become an organ donor, but her teachers never go into detail about this, almost like they’re hesitant to expose the harsh reality of their world. Indeed, she only learns about the true extent of what her life really means as we do. This makes Kathy an unreliable narrator we can’t truly trust, and Ishiguro writes her inner monologue and memories so brilliantly, you can’t help but follow along.

That’s part of what makes Never Let Me Go so beautiful to me. It’s not a dystopia or speculative fiction - not really, at least. To me, it’s more about childhood. When you’re a kid, you might have some idea about what will happen when you grow older. You don’t have a solid understanding of all the systems that run the world, but you’ll probably have heard of them. You know you’ll die one day, and maybe it will keep you up at night, but you don’t go around fearing you’ll get struck down this instant. That’s what Kathy’s like. She doesn’t spend her life rebelling against the system or trying to get more rights for the clones. Instead, she hangs out with her friends, finds a cassette in Norfolk, and gets into messy relationships. There’s an entire section devoted to her feeling sorry for teasing Ruth about a pencil case, for crying out loud! And that’s what makes this book so poignant to me. It’s about growing up, not truly aware of what you’ll find out about yourself. 

One day, you might get diagnosed with a terminal illness; what would you do then? You could spend the next year, if you have that long, campaigning for greater awareness of your condition, but there’s not much else you can do. Besides, you’d probably prefer to spend time with family, living out your last days as you’d want to. 

If you view Kathy’s life through that lens, suddenly her actions are far more understandable, and way more tragic. She never had a chance, and doesn’t see a need to make one herself - her life is decided for her at birth, why bother?

Ultimately, Never Let Me Go poses lots of moral questions but doesn’t really answer them. To go back to Bryan Johnson and his “blood-boy”, I’m sure most people would agree creating life just to destroy it is unnecessarily harmful. Ishiguro never explicitly takes a firm stance on whether cloning is moral or not. However; Kathy herself is resigned to her fate until the bitter end. At most, you could argue one of the final, most haunting scenes, where Tommy lashes out in the middle of a forest after he and Kathy are told about who they really are, suggests Ishiguro’s critical of the idea. If you were raised to be human all your life, only to discover you’re not, you’d probably hold a grudge against the world, maybe even wish you were forgotten about from the start.

That’s what I got from the book: the idea that to be human is to experience love, heartbreak, sorrow, euphoria, anger. When you think of being human like that, you couldn’t possibly argue Kathy and Tommy aren’t…and yet the world they’re in couldn’t care less. They’re all disposable at the end of the day; they only ever lived for someone to benefit from them. 

That someone could be Bryan Johnson, whose hunt for eternal life has arguably made him depraved, believing his blood-boy only matters insofar as it keeps him alive. 

Maybe we’re all just blood-boys for the powerful; we just don’t know it yet, and we’re too preoccupied with our pencil cases to notice it.