Notes on 'Never Let Me Go'

in ,
 
 

A post with notes for those teaching Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (on the Leaving Certificate comparative list):

1.
Faber have published an Educational Edition of the novel for GCSE and A level study. A good thing here is that the pagination (until the final 70 pages with the guide itself) is the same as the general edition, so they match up in class. This guide is by Geoff Barton, former English teacher and headteacher who has now gone on to other things. Check out his site for lots of great materials and resources.

  • ‘Before Reading’, has material about Ishiguro’s other writing (it was published well before Klara and the Sun, which has some parallels with this novel), prior reading, school life, science fiction and human cloning.

  • ‘During Reading’ has ideas for the three sections of the novel on settings, themes and characters, including glossaries of words which might be unfamiliar.

  • ‘After Reading’ looks at characters and settings, symbolism and themes, with a helpful interview with the author. On pages 332-3 there is a special glossary of the ‘ordinary’ words which Ishiguro gives new and unsettling meanings to, such as possible, complete and donor. Later, to encourage debate and discussion, there is a section on ‘Responding to other views’, including extracts from the original reviews.

  • Finally, a few pages look at the 2010 film.

2.

The Connell ‘short guide’ to the novel by David Isaacs is certainly short - 64 small pages in large type, and is more of a rambling essay than the kind of study guide Geoff Barton gives us. But there are still some useful points:

  •  (quoting Louis Menaud) The world of the novel is vaguely irreal’ - nearly an exact likeness of ours, but not quite right … It gives you the creeps. Read Menaud’s review in the New Yorker here.

  • That the clones are not quite right, that they are both uncanny and funny, that they are off-to-the-side and vaguely irreal, allows the novel to speculate … on big existential questions. One of these questions is, are the clones human? If so or not, what defines us as human? If we have no one to look up to, no parents, no ancestors, no origins, history, culture … we’re on our own. These ideas can prompt interesting discussions in class.

  • (quoting John Mullan) Kathy is less an unreliable narrator, as an inadequate one.

  • The creation of a falsely idyllic childhood does not constitute, for Ishiguro, a meaningless lie - it is an act of moral and political positivity.

  • (the latter part of the book has much interesting material for the ‘General Vision and Viewpoint’ comparative mode). The question of whether it is better to live in a dream world like Kathy, or to rage and kick and scream with conscious futility like Tommy, is one that Ishiguro deliberately leaves unanswered. He shows us the dangers of complicity, but he shows us, too, the importance of optimism.

3. Some reviews.


One of the most interesting (and divisive) contemporary novelists is Rachel Cusk, whose ‘Transit’ trilogy I loved. She has written thoughtfully on Never Let Me Go in a ‘re-reading’ in the Guardian::

Perhaps it is a book that requires two readers, the reader who can be blind to its ugly visage, and the reader who can see into its delicately conflicted soul.

Mimi Wong in Electric Lit writes that

To say that Ishiguro’s writing eschews identity politics — an implication that his most popular novels, ‘Never Let Me Go’ among them, are somehow safer and therefore less racially transgressive — would be a failed reading of those works.

And she argues that

Ishiguro’s characters explore aspects of nonwhite identity that are actually more incisive and authentic than if they were simply reflections of Japanese culture ….

adding that most readers will presume the clones are white, but

there’s a strong case to be made for Ishiguro’s characters being non-white both figuratively and literally.

An original review, by M. John Harrison, in the Guardian (Isaacs in the Connell Guide regularly quotes him):

So what is ‘Never Let Me Go’ really about? It's about the steady erosion of hope. It's about repressing what you know, which is that in this life people fail one another, grow old and fall to pieces. It's about knowing that while you must keep calm, keeping calm won't change a thing. Beneath Kathy's flattened and lukewarm emotional landscape lies the pure volcanic turmoil, the unexpressed yet perfectly articulated, perfectly molten rage of the orphan.