Never Let Me Go
Never Let Me Go is a love-child, surely, of Enid Blyton and Franz Kafka - part boarding-school intrigue, part uncontrollable nightmare, it explores how we become aware of, and begin to face, our own mortality.
Recently published, it's already lining up as a candidate for the Booker Prize. Kazuo Ishiguro famously takes his time over his work - but the author of The Remains of the Day has not disappointed admirers with his eagerly anticipated - and critically acclaimed - fifth novel.
It's set in England in the 1990s, though it's a disturbingly alternative landscape: one in which Kathy H., the narrator, is a 'carer' who looks after 'donors' who have to make four donations before 'completing'.
She recounts her days at Hailsham, which seems to be a progressive boarding school deep in the countryside. The students there grow up believing they are special and their welfare crucial; their 'guardians', meanwhile, place a strong emphasis on creativity, but also subservience - aided by strict rules and rumours.
Kathy, now 31, is trying to make sense of her time there, and her relationships with Ruth, who is dominant and a little unkind, and Tommy, the dependable though tempestuous lad whom both girls seem to love.
The students, who never contemplate escaping the system (even after they leave), learn to suppress the reality of the fate that awaits them beyond Hailsham, as carers, and, latterly, as donors.
Only once, as the clock runs down for Kathy and Tommy, do they try to gain a 'deferral' by tracking down the shadowy authorities. Sadly for them and us, as Ishiguro spelled out in a recent interview, 'life is short, and you can't defer death.'
With echoes of Ecclesiastes' cry of 'Meaningless!', there is resignation, along with humanity and courage, as the characters near their 'completion'.
'Every journey must have an end,' writes the author Mike Riddell, 'even if the end is sometimes the beginning.' And that's where followers of Christ have something more to hope for, beyond the final page of this remarkable novel.
Death is inescapable. It is the ultimate departure, for which we prepare through the myriad goodbyes of our life. But it's also a moment of truth and transition that makes sense of the life that has gone before - and which will carry us on, we trust, into the loving arms of a God who will never let us go.
Brian Draper
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