Review: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Goodreads rating: 3.82/5

My rating: 3.9/5

Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro is an account of events from childhood to adulthood of the students of Hailsham from the perspective of Kathy. What is Hailsham? It is a boarding school where children are raised, secluded from the outside world. It is no ordinary boarding school though, and the children are not ordinary children. They are clones whose sole purpose in life is to become donors. Donors of what you ask? Of vital body organs.

Hailsham is a boarding school where clones are raised until they are ready for harvesting.

This reminds me of a time I visited a meat market. One of the shops I entered had cages of chicken, just waiting to be slaughtered. I wondered to myself, "Do chicken know that they are going to be slaughtered to be food for humans? Do they talk among themselves about how they are going to die?". The place smelled awful and it was obvious that there wasn't much care given to their living conditions.

Now imagine a human being raised and treated the same way. Thankfully, Hailsham aimed to treat their children like they were normal human beings and was determined to prove that they were worthy of such treatment. As the blurb says, "Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be."

The stories that Kathy tells about her life include her unique friendships, her bittersweet love story, the mysteries of Hailsham and the aftermath. However, the story that Ishiguro wrote has an underlying meaning. If you read between the lines, you would see that the story is actually about people's morality and arrogance in terms of how the weak and different are treated in society. One of the characters in his book asks why anybody would want to treat a clone child badly or any different from a normal human being, how would you answer that?

As for Ishiguro's writing, I love how eloquently he managed to create and portray a fictional yet very possible future. Through his vivid descriptions, he made it easy to imagine the setting and any reader would be transported into Kathy's world. I simply loved how Ishiguro managed to make me feel as if I was there with Kathy while she was telling her story. The story was so fluid, hence it was very soothing to listen to (I listened to an audiobook). It is also not easy to create a story that seems so shallow yet addresses the core of human beings but Ishiguro did just so.

Would I recommend you read this? Yes, it's a great book.