Instead, it is a kind of meditative, even nostalgic recollection of her days at Hailsham with her classmates Ruth and Tommy. But the story she tells has not been designed primarily to provide a dramatic unfolding of the truth of what their lives were created for. She’s a thirty-one-year-old former student of Hailsham who is now a “carer”-someone who helps the others through their donation programs. Kathy H., the narrator of the story, is one of the clones. But Never Let Me Go is barely science fiction, and its narrative point of view diffuses this horror in order to highlight something even more horrifying-society’s complicity with evil. Put this bluntly, the plot is horrifying and the novel sounds like a science fiction thriller. We are introduced to several students at a private school called Hailsham, and follow the details of their lives for awhile before we have it verified for us that these students are clones who have been raised for the sole purpose of harvesting their organs for others. The novel is set in England in the 1990’s. This choice is itself no guarantor of success, but in Ishiguro’s hands, it is a stunning revelation.
While typical speculative fiction is set in a future often radically different from our present, there is a kind that more subtly imagines what might have been instead of what might be. In his newest novel Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day, brilliantly demonstrates some of the more rarely seen powers of speculative fiction.
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