“Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it--unable quite to let each other go.”
Kathy is thirty-one years old and has been a carer for almost eleven years. She is good at her job, and that is why she has been a carer for such a long time. While she takes care of her donors, she lights up whenever she encounters someone coming from Hailsham, a boarding school in England, and starts remembering melancholically her time as a student there. She tells her life story as a flashback, beginning from her very first days at the school. Students there were closely watched by guardians and the head of the school, Madame, and encouraged to stay healthy, study, do sports, eat well, and work on their arts and crafts. Kathy was free-spirited, kind, and loving and had many friends, among which her closest ones were Ruth and Tommy. They all grew up knowing they were some sort of special creatures but never dared to ask for more explanation. There was always a veil of mystery about their future: when they would start with their donations, and what that would actually mean. At the age of sixteen, students were reallocated from Hailsham into the real world for a period of two years as a preparation to become donors. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth ended up together at the Cottage, and even though they were with other future donors from other institutions, they spent all their time among themselves. The friendship among the three was strong but complicated. Kathy had always been very fond of Tommy, even when the other kids bullied him. However, Tommy was in a relationship with Ruth, who was rather bossy and extroverted and always taking the lead of the group. Kathy and Ruth always had moments of perfect chemistry and moments of fights, but somehow, they always managed to overcome any conflict. The three realized that, differently from the other young donors, those from Hailsham appreciated culture and art and loved reading. While staying at the Cottage, they heard for the first time some rumors according to which couples from Hailsham who were in love could obtain deferrals for their donations. These rumors caused a lot of fights among the three friends because Ruth and Tommy were, by then, in an established relationship but Kathy was not. The breakup point was reached when Kathy, tired of lies and childish behaviors from Ruth, decided to end her stay at the Cottage by volunteering as a carer. She started living a lonely life, driving many hours from one hospital to another to assist her donors and make sure they could complete as many donations as possible before terminating. She did not see Ruth or Tommy for many years until she heard that Ruth’s first donation went badly and her health was already heavily compromised. She decided to become her carer. The story moves quickly closer to the present when Ruth admits that she stood in the way between Tommy and Kathy and that they should have been in a relationship instead. She urges them to contact Madame from Hailsham to ask for deferrals and terminates with her second donation. Sadly, Tommy and Ruth do not obtain any deferral but learn the truth from Madame. They are clones, and their fate is set: they will inevitably donate their organs and terminate so that normal people can live a better life. Hailsham was just a project meant to give clones a decent life and good education before starting with donations and dying. With their last hope teared up, the two young lovers resign back to their usual daily business: donating organs.
Never Let Me Go takes place in a parallel reality where, in the nineties, human cloning was legal. It opens an ethical debate on how to treat clones, whose sole purpose is to ensure a longer and better life for normal people by giving them viable organs when their own would fail. The project Hailsham wanted to give dignity to these clones by teaching them literature, art, science, and how to think critically about life. However, knowledge gave clones a better understanding of their reality and fate, and more sufferings until their death (or termination). It is a futuristic science fiction story written very captivatingly, which gave me a lot to reflect on. The author is Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-British writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.