Never Let Me Go (2005) is the third novel by Ishiguro that I have read. The Literary Club read The
Remains of the Day (1989) which won the Man Booker Award, and I also have read his latest book
The Buried Giant (2015). I haven’t been able to identify exactly why they don’t live up to my expectations. However, they keep me thinking about them long after I turn the last page, so I persist to read his books.
If you are familiar with his works, then it is obvious that they have the similar theme of memory (remembering and forgetting and concealed truths). His books do not follow a specific time/action moving plot line. The emphasis is on the characters and on human relationships (in particular friendships and love in the face of mortality). Ishiguro’s writing process is that he focuses on the characters and the themes first. The setting comes last. He does not think consciously about genre.
Ishiguro writes literary fiction, but he doesn’t see himself boxed into a category of either serious, snobby high-brow literature or mainstream genre definitions. To him science fiction elements like the dystopian dimension (or fantasy elements in
The Buried Giant) are techniques in his writer’s toolbox to enhance the story in a way he could not if he wrote strictly realist fiction. It is not intended to be a science fiction genre novel, and therefore the science is intentionally vague and incidental. He has said in interviews that he considers this book to be an alternate history concept. For 15 years he was developing these student characters and the idea to do a campus novel with some sort of strange fate hanging over their heads but couldn’t figure out what. Then he was listening to a biotechnical program on the radio, and he realized the missing puzzle piece to define their fate.
The setting of the book is a bleak, cold and grey England set in rural landscape and seaside towns. It is dreary and adds to the depressing atmosphere when you realize the character’s fate and contrasts with the few happy memories of childhood innocence and the hope that true soulmate love may allow one to escape their fate. Ishiguro has said that his settings of Japan and England in his books are completely stylized to match his own imagination and a more mythical ideal rather than a detailed reality. He has said that part of his struggle with setting is because of his personal immigrant experience. He was born in Japan and moved to England when was young always thinking that his family would move back to Japan but never did.
I have many more thoughts, but I will start with that for now.
