This technique works like introducing sinister music in a film a little before the moment of horror. The novel is frightening and disturbing at many levels – Kazuo Ishiguro continuously drip-feeds the reader small details which are cause for disquiet (although events or characters with particularly sinister significance are often introduced innocuously). One of Ishiguro’s strengths as a writer is his ability to write clearly and unpretentiously about these. Many aspects of the story will be convincing for anyone: the casual, unthinking cruelty of children in the playground the fleeting way alliances are made and abruptly severed between young people how sex changes dramatically as a topic several times in our lives. Kazuo Ishiguro also draws on ideas of rebirth which challenge this simplistic structure.Īnother subtle and interesting feature is that the ‘Cottages’, though the shortest section of the book, and in one sense merely a transition or buffer stage, do represent something separate from both just Hailsham and being a ‘Carer’, just as true adolescence is not just a souped-up childhood or undeveloped maturity… This echoes the loss of innocence Cath undergoes in the story, although she is also sympathetic precisely because her destiny in this nightmarish, dystopian world precludes the possibility of becoming a mother or growing old naturally.

I was reminded of the way the goddess of magic, Hecate, is sometimes pictured as having three aspects: a youthful maiden in the morning, a matron at midday, a withered, ancient crone in the evening.

The story is split into three parts: one describes the characters growing up in a country boarding house called Hailsham one recalls the time they spent at the Cottages the last third is about their splitting up and final coming back together, as adults.

I was driving along not long after finishing this book when a song lyric invoked the novel, and I felt a sudden, unexpected, almost physical stab of pathos for Cath, Tommy, and Ruth. Like The Buried Giant, the clarity and poignancy of the way these relationships are portrayed is arrestingly powerful, and lingers unsettlingly in your mind. At its heart, however, is the simple story of a girl growing up to become a woman, and her relationship with her best friend and eventual lover. This is a sad, complex, haunting novel which raises huge questions about family, memory, exploitation and ‘othering’.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro