No, Please, Let Me Go

Because it’s about to become--or has already become, and is about to be released--what the new dust jackets and paperback covers will surely advertise as a Major Motion Picture, I thought take the timely opportunity to reread Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go. When it first appeared, reviewers struggled mightily to discuss-without-revealing-fully the main conceit of its alternate world, but since I've never given a damn about SPOILERS, and since Ishiguro, for all the affected reticence of his prose on the point, basically gives it all away in the first chapter, I won't operate with any such compunctions. Ishiguro imagines a world where, beginning sometime after the Second World War, science successfully achieves human cloning, and the fruits of this discovery result in a society where clones are created and raised to young adulthood, at which point their organs are harvested until they die. Ishiguro invents a clever bureaucratic language, some of it simply the language of real contemporary medicine. The clones make "donations" until they "complete." The story takes place at one of the better schools-cum-orphanages where cloned children are raised and indoctrinated before a brief, semi-independent adulthood, donations, and death.

Because it's "literary," and because Ishiguro is a serious writer, we're not really supposed to notice just how goofy this imaginary setup is. It doesn't make sense. You'd raise children and send them to school only to kill them as adults? What about the costs? Wouldn't it make more sense for a society so cavalier about life to, I don't know, harvest the organs of prisoners. What happens when someone needs a heart or a lung transplant? What do they do to the rest of the organs? I mean, uh . . . and they let these kids wander around the country? Doesn't anyone ever try to escape? And uh . . . and something about souls? Do they have them? Huh, what? You mean in a society that is literally capable of creating human life from scratch, the moral dilemma is determining whether or not ensoulment occurs. Like, uh, that's the animating force driving the equivalent of an abolitionist movement? Huh?

Now, to be fair, Ishiguro is writing a sort of fable, and yet I think it incredibly unjust that his literary reputation, which is exaggerated to begin with, ought to shield him from the simple scrutiny any half-assed Star Trek novelizer would face upon completion of a time-travel plot. Ishiguro, whatever his ambitions, wrote a speculative tale, and we're obliged to ask if his speculative present is consistent with itself. Because he takes great pains to make this world very much like our own--so much like our own that it has only this one, terrible difference, the incoherence of the idea is more pronounced. He should have set it on Planet Krelmek in the year 2792 or something. I'd've been like, oh, man, raising clones just to kill them and harvest their organs? Sick. Then I would've bitched about how unrealistic was the portrayal of FTL space travel or something.

But, no, you know, seriously, I get it, it's not really a tale about forced organ donation; it's a tale about predestination, love lost, opportunity missed, hopelessness. It's the Remains of a Pale View of the Floating World. It's quiet and oblique. Its moments of reticent joy are forever burdened by the undercurrent of sadness. And yet it is wholly undone in a way that, say, P.D. James' Children of Men (NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!) is not, because in its headlong rush to domesticate its speculative heart and become a novel about little people and their lives, it cowardly shies away from contemplating its own premise. I mean, James' novel rests on an even more unbelievable foundation, that humanity suddenly and completely loses the ability to reproduce, but we suspend disbelief because it asks all the interesting questions. What would such a world be like? How would people react to the sudden eradication of their posterity? What would happen to families? What would happen to love? What would governments become? Who would be debauched, and who would merely despair? It contemplates mortality in the most radical sense. Stripped of a future, stripped even of the consolation of a generic human progeny, what would become of us?

Ishiguro's characters--in his fashion, we are strictly limited to their limited perceptions--are likewise the victims of a strict and inescapable mortality, and yet he never once looks beyond their thin lives to ask what sort of society could create these children? What kind of a people would husband human beings, even artificial ones, to adulthood in order to kill them like livestock? His characters aren't stupid; if anything, they're hypersensitive and overly bright, yet they experience no qualms about the fact that they're being farmed. They acquiesce to having no future even as they are depicted wishing for one. Why? What prevents their escape? What explains their servility? Regular people recoil from them slightly, and yet they are permitted, in effect, to have several fully funded Wanderjahren, driving about the countryside and visiting cities and towns without supervision before they are, you know, taken to a hospital and killed! In the words of my favorite reviewer: who's fuckin' with my meds?