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By Rome Jorge, Lifestyle Editor
It is an intimate and tender account of a girl
coming of age, waking to the realization and docile acceptance of a
life of sacrifice, preordained by a society that has declared her
less than human. This is a dystopian fantasy about cloning.
But it has no chase scenes, no sexy futuristic
technology and no moralizations on the perils of progress. Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is the anti-science fiction novel.
Ishiguro, best known for his Booker
Prize-winning novel turned Oscar nominated film The Remains of the
Day, portrays an alternate reality where humans are cloned only to
have their organs harvested for the benefit of “real” people.
Like The Remains of the Day, the novel is told
from the first person in an excruciatingly British fashion that
allows the narrative to gently bloom. Through the journals of its
protagonist Kathy from the time of her childhood in a special
boarding house for other “special” children to her final days as
a donor slowly giving up her organs with every surgery at the age
31, one slowly realizes along with her the destiny that awaits her.
Implied by the very language and manner of
recollection of the narrator is another terrible truth: that
docility has been bred into their very character, in much the same
way that today’s domesticated animals are a far cry from their
wild origins. Broken and tame, they are lambs to the slaughter.
The novel’s revelations are not plot twists,
surprises or cliffhangers. Rather, they are adult matters that the
protagonist slowly realizes with maturity (hence their mention in
this article). The novel’s most lasting realization is simply that
clones—despite their legal ineligibility for human rights—feel,
think and hurt like us too.
If the novel’s premise is vaguely familiar, it
is because bombastic film director Michael Bay has used it for his
formulaic sci-fi movie The Island (complete with attractive stars,
romance and other Hollywood conventions) released in 2005—the same
year as Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. But novelty was never the lure
of Ishiguro’s prose.
Enjoy Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. It
will hold on to you gently like a motherless child.
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