So Much Stuff That Has Meaning

Never Let Me Go, what a wild ride. Following the lives of Kath, the wonderful Tommy, and the rest of their friends, I learned all about the cloning, the organ donation, and their (not so) normal lives. The book isn't political, Kath and Tommy are straight up adorable, Ruth is enraging, but relatable, and later in her life redeemable. You just have to empathize with them, just as you would with any character in any more normal novel.

This relationship between myself and the characters, this normalcy of their lives and personalities, makes the ending section of the novel all the more important. This is when it is revealed to me how society truly views the children whose lives I followed. Up until this point I hadn't questioned the society, the normal people, they didn't play a big role, sure the people visiting their school didn't interact with them, but who isn't at least a little afraid of congregations of high school students. And yes, farming people for their organs is bad, but because the government and the rest of society weren't portrayed in the novel, I didn't think about it, I wasn't thinking politically, I merely read and enjoyed the book.

So when Miss Emily says, "We created Hailsham to prove you had souls"(237), I was right with Kath when she was saying, wait wait wait "Did someone think we didn't have souls?"(238). And this is where our book, finally, gets a bit political. Miss Emily talks to them, explain the elements of society they were never taught about. Within this speech, Ishiguro is able to make comments, and ask questions about not just the society in Never Let Me Go but any society. So let's unpack these little tidbits.

First Miss Emily gives them a speech, the gist of which is, 'no you cannot defer your donation for a few more years of life together, but you must think about how lucky you are',"You must realize how much worse things once were"(238), aka you're lives are so much better than those of the people before, and the lives of everyone who wasn't raised in a place as nice as you, so don't complain. Hasn't this been what we tell people, in our society, to silence them, sure you have it bad, but other people have it worse, so it isn't your place to complain. In the case of Kath and Tommy, they will die, apart, watching as if 'in a horror film' as their organs are removed from their barely alive bodies, because no one fights for them.

Which leads to the next little comment Ishiguro makes. Miss Emily ends her speech by explaining to the students how they had failed to prove that the students, like Tommy and Kath, had souls, that they weren't normal humans like everyone else. The reader, of course, knows better, the characters in the novel are just like me, and you, and everyone else, but Miss Emily says, "So long as the climate was in our favour, so long as a corporation or a politician could see a benefit in supporting us, then we were able to keep afloat. But that changed. The world didn't want to be reminded how the donation programme really worked"(242). Really, it wasn't about the 'experiment' it wasn't whether or not the clones deserved better, it was about whether or not people could accept them, if people wanted to acknowledge that they were farming perfectly healthy and normal (besides being sterile) people for their organs, and of course the answer is no. People want to be as left in the dark as possible, and Miss Emily explains this is because there is no going back.

"How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that future, to go back to the dark days?"(240). How can we go back? This goes beyond talking about politics and standing up for what is right. It acknowledges a moral question, talking about how far we can go as a society, but should we. Everyone has a family member who's gotten sick, now almost everyone is fixable. What sacrifices would you be willing to make to give your sibling or parent a vital organ they were in desperate need for? Probably, you'd do anything you could. However, now considering Kath, Tommy, Ruth, should we be given that choice, to essentially kill those you don't know, for those you do. Again, farming people for their organs is wrong, plain wrong, but can't we all see the conundrum in a society grown to rely on these things? Take it a step further, a step closer to home, nuclear weapons. We as a society 'need' those now too, but on a moral level, it's wrong, what if society had simply not developed them. That would be nice. In some cases, it's fair to say society has gone too far.

O.K. Congratulations to anyone who has read this far into my messy, meaning-of-the-work-as-a-whole blog post, but I could write a thesis paper that still wouldn't cover it.

To sum up, Ishiguro talks about, love, death, the moral bounds of science, politics, and friendship all through following the lives of kids a lot like me or you (minus the organ donation and secret lives in a terrible but oddly familiar society).  Never Let Me Go is genius, complicated, vague, but easily accessible, understandable, and likeable. The themes and ideas Ishiguro presents in the book are multidimensional, important, problems which he masterfully presents through storytelling.

I will leave you all with this, "I keep thinking about this river somewhere with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end, it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how I think it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together" (258).