The Psychology of Inaction in Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go"

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro starts out with the tone of a deceptively simple fable, of a woman in her early 30s reminiscing on her schoolgirl days. I read the book for the first time when I was the same age as the narrator and was also feeling a bit nostalgic and ambivalent about the status quo versus the future. (Warning: there are spoilers for the book ahead.)

However, this novel is no simple tale of nostalgia, and like Ishiguro’s other masterpiece The Remains of the Day, multiple layers lurk underneath the almost bland, polite exteriors. The intentional every person banality of the opening chapters exposes as it conceals; there is a creepy matter-of-factness, the stillness of a certain mannequin existence. Ishiguro’s craft is unique; a narrative sleight-of-hand where straightforwardness still gives you a sense of icy mystery, that something isn’t right despite everything appearing to be in its place.

His euphemisms go along with this illusory pastorale, of “carers” and “donors” and nurturing special schools in the countryside. The dynamic between the narrator Kathy and her best friend Ruth and their mutual troubled friend Tommy unfolds almost like a young adult book-of-the-month selection, but all the while you still sense that there is more to the story as subtle clues are dropped.

After a favorite teacher abruptly leaves the seemingly idyllic school Hailsham, the narrative’s wheels start to churn faster. The children enter restless adolescence and young adulthood in a holding pen of sorts after they “graduate” from their school. Ruth’s mood swings, seemingly typical for her age, nonetheless resonate with something more urgent, as it becomes evident that these young adults in the prime of their lives are about to become little more than lab rats. They are clones raised for organ harvest.

The novelty of this premise in and of itself is nothing remarkable; the movie The Island deals with the same idea at face value, and other sci-fi tales often have revisited this topic of a cloned underclass whose humanity is ignored (most famously Blade Runner). Instead, it is how obliquely Ishiguro touches on this loaded issue that renders it more chilling and tragic than one realizes, until after the book has ended. This obliqueness makes the idea larger than the sum of its parts because one is lulled along with the narrator into thinking it’s a normal, routine thing.

And it’s only after the story ends that it strikes you that, like the sheep in the pastoral English countryside, the characters don’t fight back at all; they question somewhat, especially the fretful Ruth, but they don’t rebel against their fate, even when presented with relative freedom to go about as they please. Like lambs to the slaughter, they go mournfully but willingly.

The tragedy of inaction weighed heavily in The Remains of the Day as well. Stevens was so tied up in his sense of duty and his role that he never bothered to question his boss’s Nazi motives, and he never let himself express his love for Miss Kenton. Here also, Kathy lets herself fall in love too late; her affair becomes a heartbreaking underscore to the ultimate tragedy around the corner. The final chapters are painted with lyrical, painful British beauty.

Existential questions arise; what does inaction mean for any of us, who often feel trapped by the circumstances of our lives, by fear, by indecision, by forces beyond our control, and ultimately death? Is it better to fight and to question, to operate the gears of our free will, than to just ride the wave of fate? Can we be lulled into doom because we fail to question the way cruelty is disguised and normalized because we let euphemisms and societal routine easily trick us into valuing dangerous faux stability, duty, and peace?

In Never Let Me Go, we are shown what happens when we just accept our fates even in the face of indefatigable evil. And strangely, instead of feeling rage or frustration for the characters’ fate, we find it familiar. In this era of national uncertainty and division, anti-immigrant sentiment and racism, mass shootings and terrorism and wars without justification, global warming, ever-exploding Internet communication and yes, cloning and genetic modification, many of us are just sitting back and letting the engines run without fighting, without mourning anymore. We’ve grown numb, and we don’t know how to change things anymore. But the book warns us about the cost of such passivity. Unlike those characters, we can hopefully still exercise some free will and choice in the coming years, especially the next one.