Thoughts on Never Let Me Go, with help from the majestic teal dear

[lily_handmaiden]

I did not make this. But I don't know who did. Oops.


About a month ago, I read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It made me have a lot of thoughts. Normal people on the internet express their enthusiasm about books and movies and TV shows with keyboard smashes and gifs. I do things like write essays that somehow end up being over 11 pages long and then wonder how it happened. It is called "pulling an Erin."

And I have done it again.

 

I wanted to read Never Let Me Go because it is going to be what looks like a very good movie with Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan in it. I knew going in that it was going to be dystopian; I knew that something was going to be awry with that boarding school and the people in it, and I was able to guess really early on what it was. I do wonder if the realization would have been a slower creep (in both senses of the word) if I hadn’t known it was coming, and I wonder what it would have been like to read the book that way. But I can’t know anything about that for sure, so I’m not going to dwell on it much. My experience of reading the book, between my vague memory of the trailer I’d seen a few months before and Michael’s warnings about how heavily emotional it would be at the end, was exactly as I expected it to be. I zoomed through it in about two and a half days, teared up at the end, closed it, and expected that to be that. I’d gotten what I’d come for out of Never Let Me Go.

But that was not the end of my experience with the book. I think my most profound experience with it came after I was done reading. Scenes, ideas, niggling problems kept coming back to me, over and over, throughout the next few days. My thoughts were fueled further by Margaret Atwood’s review of the book, which Michael sent to me and which gave me a few whole new angles from which to approach it. You’ll see some of that influence in this review. It was after I was done reading the book that I started to grasp how brilliant it is. Fine, I’ll say it—it just won’t let you go. It’s that kind of book. It haunts you.

As I was thinking, as the ideas and questions I’m about to subject you to kept coming to me, it occurred to me that I would love to teach Never Let Me Go in a class someday. I’d love to be in a class where it was taught, but not a grad class, because grad classes on this type of literature have a way of ruining everything. So on the whole I think really it’d be better if I taught it, maybe in some general fiction class. It’s one of those texts about which I’d never run out of things to say. It’s an endless mine of good discussion points, points that are especially poignant to students, I think—both because of our age and because of what we’re doing with our lives.

The trailer for the film adaptation, as I mentioned, is exceptionally good. I watched it again after I was through with the book and not only is the casting wonderful, but I could pinpoint each scene, each moment, and almost all lines of dialogue as directly from the book. There was one exception—the last line of the trailer is not, as far as I can recollect, in the book, but it sums it all up beautifully:

“Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.”

Yes. If Never Let Me Go has a central thesis, that is it. The universal “we” ties together the two stories interlaced throughout the novel—because there are two stories being told. On the one hand, Never Let Me Go is a story about Issues, about the conflict these characters have with the world in which they live. It is about ethical and philosophical ideas, about a fictional society and how we can see our own society in light of it. But on the other hand, it is a personal story, about these characters’ relationships and conflicts with each other within their world. It is about three people who know each other their whole lives. Margaret Atwood’s review favors the former and all but dismisses the latter, but I think that is a grievous mistake. The presence of both, each fully developed and yet intrinsically bound, is I think what makes this novel and Ishiguro’s way of telling this story so full and so special. One of these facets could not exist fully, or have its full impact, without the other. The book could not exist without both. They are so inextricably tangled that, although I considered trying to split this review up into two sections based on this distinction, I don’t think I could. That’s a sign of a truly artfully crafted narrative, I think.

So. Maybe none of us (the “students,” the clones), maybe none of us (the readers of this story and the people in our world), maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time.

First, I want to look at the question of “enough time.” If the deferrals had been real, if Kathy and Tommy had gotten some extra time, a few extra years maybe—would that have been enough? Would they have felt like they’d had enough time? Or would they have gone back, like Oliver Twist, asking for just a little more. Time is the most precious commodity we have. No matter what you do, no matter what, I’m inclined to believe that if you know your time with your beloved, your time of freedom, your time to live is limited to a year or two, when it ends, it can never have felt like enough. You will always want more. Just a little more time to do one more thing, to spend one last day that will, in turn, still not feel like enough.

So why is the idea of deferrals so important to the students? (I’m going to keep calling them “students” because, quite frankly, it feels more comfortable. And yes, I know the use of euphemism to cover uncomfortable truth is problematic—here, deliberately so. Apparently, I am Part of the Problem.) The rumor of deferrals is powerful enough to continue to crop up spontaneously among unconnected groups of students across the country and across the years. The rumor is never that one can opt out of becoming a donor altogether, which in itself is very sad and which I’ll come back to later. It is just that one can defer—put off the inevitable, for one finite period of time that will never be enough. So why are all of the characters so hungry for it?

The older students at the Cottages get excited and wistful just talking about it, thinking it’s something that must surely be reserved only for the “special,” for Hailsham students, but maybe, just maybe, there’s some loophole…? They grasp at it with the hope of the shipwrecked man who strains his eyes for a distant shore. Ruth is willing to go all lengths for it, at least for a while—to grasp onto Tommy regardless of her own feelings or anyone else’s, at the cost that her best friend will go right on to her death. I wonder if she ever thought about it that way, that she was sacrificing Kathy to save herself, or maybe it wasn’t that consciously calculating a move on Ruth’s part. But I’ll get back to Ruth later, too. Even Kathy and Tommy, long after they’ve left Hailsham and the Cottages behind, after Tommy’s donations have actually begun, are desperate enough to seek out deferral, to beg for please, please ma’am, just a little more time. Even if they won’t be satisfied with it, the goal of “more time” is unattainable, almost unimaginable, and they dream of it. Think of what it could give them: an apartment with a loved one, a garden, an office job, maybe. The things that are mundane to us but mean so much to Hailsham students because they finally understand they can never, never have them. A chance to be like the normal people—not outsiders, not “spiders.” Do they think it will be enough? It doesn’t matter. It would be more.

These delays of the inevitable might seem pointless to us. Why would someone put themselves through what is ultimately an exercise in futility? Why the craving for insufficient time? Until you consider that time is limited for all of us. Death is always inevitable. The lives of these students are our lives in microcosm. The truth of what these characters are is all the more heartbreaking because Kathy does not overtly dwell much upon it. Her narrative is on the surface almost all about the personal. We, like Kathy, occupy ourselves with our relationships and drama and small things that seem to matter so much, and only when it is forced on us do we consider how finite it all really is. We know our lives will end, some sooner, some later, and if we could, wouldn’t we beg for just a little more time? Isn’t that part of what prayer is? One more day with someone we’ve lost or are losing. One more year to visit all the places we wanted to see. The knowledge that it won’t be enough would never stop us from jumping at the chance if it were to come up. There’s a truism: “One lifetime is never enough.” It never has been; that’s part of what makes us human. For thousands of years man has been fighting mortality tooth and nail, doing anything he can to live beyond the span of his life. In this world, at least, mortality always wins. But that doesn’t stop us fighting, and we have come to believe that the way in which we fight matters. As Richard says in The Lion in Winter, “When the fall is all there is, it matters.” 

One of the primary ways we fight mortality is through art. If we produce a work of art that is good enough, it lives on after us, and we live through it. We are not entirely forgotten, and a piece of us continues to exist in the world. Our words continue to speak, if our work is very good and we are very lucky, to generation after generation. We become immortal. For Hailsham students, this idea of art as a means to prolonged life is literalized. Tommy’s theory has some degree of accuracy, and the rudiments of it are this: If I produce great art, then I will be granted more life. Of course, Kathy and Tommy discover that this is not really true—there was a time when it might have been, but as events in the world outside Hailsham have transpired, the students’ art no longer matters. It has earned them nothing. And in our world, too, there is no true key to immortality. We will still die, our works of art may well be lost or forgotten, and one day the world will cease to be and all art that has ever been created will cease with it, as though none of it had ever existed. (Depressing, isn’t it?)

So, what is the purpose of art, both for Hailsham students and for us? And can that even be one question? For us, at least, art is worthwhile for itself. As Tommy suggests, it shows the nature of our souls. As Miss Emily suggests, it shows that we have souls at all. Art is the expression of our humanity, of the imagination which sets us apart from the animals. It connects us to people. It helps us understand ourselves and one another like nothing else can. It is also catharsis. It is our rage against the dying of the light, and the rage itself is beautiful. The light will die anyway, but before it does, the rage can shake worlds. You may be going into that good night, Thomas’s poem tells us, but there is dignity in not going gentle. It may not earn much money, it may not be what is considered a “practical skill,” but art is important because we are all falling, and all we have is to make the way we fall down matter.

For Hailsham students, though, art is regimented. You are supposed to create it no matter what you feel, and it is commodified. Miss Lucy tells Tommy it doesn’t matter—Miss Lucy, who cannot conceal her despair at the fact that none of her students are going to live to middle age. For her, art has no purpose in the students’ lives because they are all going to die, and when she discovers that art may save their lives, it suddenly matters again. There is not much of the transcendental about the question. Has the quality that makes art worthwhile for us been taken away by the world in which the students live? They do certainly use it, to an extent, to connect, if only to one another. And, in their highly regulated lives, art may in fact be the only way of raging against the dying of the light these students have, or at least the only way that occurs to them. Tommy is the only one uncomfortable with art and, in the periods when he is unable to do it or when he sees its futility, he just rages. In spite of their shared knowledge of their impending fate, he is the only one of the students to do this. It can’t be coincidence.

Then, too, there is the fact that the characters seem to lose their will to create art as they lose their hope and the bleak reality of their situation sets in. Fewer and fewer of the students continue their artistic pursuits, the further removed they are from Hailsham. There are the essays that almost no one bothers to finish because, really, what’s the point? I wondered when I was reading if the fact that Tommy’s drawings are less lively and spirited when he resumes them in his centre said something about Kathy and Tommy’s relationship (Were they really in love, or just so desperate to defer that they could pretend or imagine they were?), but I don’t think that was it, really. It was that he was losing his belief that art could really express himself, losing his will to rage anymore against his fate. Tommy and Kathy had hope, yes, but it was a thin hope, and they knew that.

All of the students lose their will to rage. Art is a manifestation of the will to live, and as the students lose that, they stop creating. As they become increasingly aware of how boxed in they are, they lose their will, their individuality, their ability to think critically and to imagine. That is, I think, the most awful part of the program in which they are created and exist. Rather than confront the idea that these people might have souls, the society in which they live manages to break them down until it drains them of any visible manifestation soul, and then is able to turn around and say, “See? We’re not doing anything wrong.”

In the later chapters of the book, I kept imagining the characters as older than they were. Not ancient, but in their sixties or so. I couldn’t help it, and it shocked me every time I reminded myself, “No. They are my age. They are not much older than me.” Because they acted older—they acted tired. I kept asking, “How can you be tired of living at 25? How?”

The answer might be different for different people, for each of the different characters. But of course, if you’re living every day as they are, surrounded by the dying and being told that your destiny is to die—to die soon, to die for this purpose, and you have no other options, there is nothing else you can do… of course that is going to break you down. I can easily see how one would get tired of fighting and just resign to it. How it might seem like a relief, to stop struggling against it, stop trying to turn away from it. And this society knows this. That’s why I think that the existence of carers is really more for the carers themselves than for the donors. Yes, on the one hand, you get cheap counseling for your donors who might otherwise harm themselves, and you don’t have to worry about a psychologist coming and being creeped out. But for the carers—it breaks them down. They are confronted every day with what they will become, until finally they give in and can’t do it anymore. They let go of everything and everyone they’ve loved. Their fate is waiting for them, and it seems natural and right, and easier, much easier than caring.

In the end, the students are brought to take their existence and their fate for granted as much as the world they live in does. The scenario Ishiguro presents is chilling because it seems so plausible—we started doing this, not thinking about whether we should, and now we are accustomed to it, and so we won’t think about whether we should. It raises the question: What about our world can we be taught to take for granted? What do we do now that’s barbaric and destructive, just because we’ve never thought about it or, having thought about it, feel we couldn’t do without? If we found out tomorrow that chickens were extremely intelligent, sentient, feeling beings, would we stop farming them in the conditions we do now? No, probably not. We would search like hell for evidence that would enable us to declare they’re just chickens again.

As I thought about this book in the hours after I finished it, it occurred to me that this is a work that could actually change the shape of the world. It could make it so that a world like the one it presents will never become reality, because I could not imagine the technology to create human clones would be put into use without somebody waving this book around and saying, “But wait!” Surely this book would make it so that this thing, at least, is something we do not take for granted. But then I thought more critically about our world, and I’m not so sure. It’s amazing what we can turn a blind eye to for the “advancement” of the species. We’re destroying ecosystems to get at oil that will enable us to keep living in the manner to which we have become accustomed. And there are doubtless other examples of careless barbarism put into practice every day that I can’t even think of because I, too, don’t notice them.

Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through.

It seems that Kathy has an excellent understanding of what she’s lived through personally—or at least she tries to—but such an imperfect understanding of what she’s been living through on a big-picture level. As she points out, all of the students at Hailsham are exposed to their nature, their purpose, their ultimate destiny bit by bit, from the time they are children, too young to understand. It becomes a part of them, and the attempts to actually understand themselves and their world have to come later. It seems that that understanding is always imperfect.

For example, there is the matter of the possibles. I wondered in reading—what is the intrigue of the possibles, exactly? It feels absolutely true, that it should mean so much. They are seen by the students as some kind of missing key to self-understanding. I imagine it’s a lot like the drive an adopted child, no matter how happy she is with adoptive parents, might have to meet her biological parents, just once. But I’m not sure exactly what the nature of that drive is, either. Is it the feeling that through this encounter one will be able to glimpse one’s future, understand one’s past, or both? Probably both. Almost definitely both, though one might be weighted more than the other, depending on the individual. And for the students there is the extra fact that they will more than likely never reach the age their possibles are. They will never get the opportunity to look like that. The search for the possibles is the quest for them to understand themselves and their place in the world. Where did I come from? What might I have been? We define ourselves in part by who our parents are, our hometown. The students don’t have that—they only have their schools. And then, out there somewhere, people wearing their faces. And it might not be logical, the students know this. The identity of their possibles does not really determine anything about themselves. But what if it does? There is still a great deal of debate about what is biologically determined—nature vs. nurture. This debate won’t change anything for the students, their ultimate destiny won’t change. But emotionally, it matters, if only to answer the question, “who am I?”

Another part of this question which the students never really seem to address but which the novel itself begs is: who owns our bodies? Getting all grad-school and theoretical on this, the body is tricky because it is the anchor of the self—it is the most measurable unit of who we are—and yet it is out in the world, in contact with it, doing things for other people, and so on. So, who owns our bodies? Do we? Sovereignty over the body is one of the most basic human rights. Or do the people who made us? Do our parents have some stake? Does the state, which dictates so much of what we can and cannot do in its efforts to protect us?

I read somewhere not long ago—I don’t remember where, but it was some theological text I had to use for some type of research—that the reason suicide is a sin is that our bodies do not, in fact, belong to us, but rather to God. Therefore, our bodies are not ours to throw away. I think the question of whether or not the Hailsham students might belong to God is one that would be very interesting in the novel’s society. But it is not a question that is dwelt on there. Is religion part of the Hailsham education? I can see where it might be a subject they would want to avoid, for fear of too much discomfort. And yet Kathy and Tommy, prior to speaking with Miss Emily, have no notion that there could even be a question as to whether or not they have souls. Of course they do. They know that; it was a given.

You would think that, given what is going to happen to them, there would be more “turning to God” and “finding Jesus” amongst the students, especially as they near the ends of the donations. But nothing like this is ever mentioned. In fact, one of the only mentions of anything like an afterlife in the novel come when Tommy expresses the common donor fear that, after the fourth donation, part of you doesn’t “complete” (It would be interesting to go back through the novel and see where the word “die” is used, rarely, instead of “complete.”) and is suspended in a kind of limbo state of endless further donations. The other comes at the very end of the novel when Kathy imagines, just for a moment, “that this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call” (288). It’s not technically an afterlife, just an imagining—Kathy’s dream of a sort of heaven like Norfolk. This, too, is part of what makes Kathy ready to donate, to give up on life. She’s lost everyone she’s ever loved, and so she’s done with this world and ready for, just maybe, a heaven like Norfolk.

But if these students were created not by God, but by science, who do their bodies belong to? To the scientists who created them? To the program that employs the scientists? To the people who will one day receive their organs? Do their bodies belong, in any way, to themselves? They don’t get to choose whether or not they will have children. For their time at Hailsham, at least, they don’t get to determine what they eat, where they sleep, how they use their bodies. For the duration of their short lives it seems more like, if anything, they belong to their bodies. They are obligated to keep themselves healthy. The only time Kathy every really speaks of herself in physical terms, it is to say that she feels compelled to sex by her body’s urges, nothing she can control. It seems like the lack of stake in their own bodies is part of what the students at Hailsham are taught when they are too young to understand, and which they never question.

It is this lack of physical control which is always part of them combined with the broader lack of control over their lives which they learn over time which really seals the fate of the students. I mentioned above that the characters seem to lose their ability to think critically as they become aware of their circumstances. Ruth gives up on the office job, she won’t even apply. For all their schooling in philosophy and critical theory, no one stops to think of themselves philosophically, or to attempt to get out of their situation. They do not think, critically, “Who says I have to be this? How can I make it otherwise?” That is what is most disturbing. Each character subscribes to or bows down to the society which is killing them. The book does not make it clear whether or not there are actual measures keeping the students in their world—at Hailsham, in the Cottages. The fence is not electric. Is there something keeping them from just leaving? Is there something keeping the carers from just not showing up at the next centre on the list, going rogue? Could they “pass?”

Last semester, for my American modernism class, I read several samples of what seems to have been a subgenre of the first half of the twentieth century—dealing with the question of “passing,” wherein a light-skinned Black person passes as white. Now, the novels I read brought up a whole realm of issues involving race loyalty, fear of discovery, pride, vanity… But none of those issues can be applied to Never Let Me Go because, although we know from the Norfolk excursion and a few offhand comments by Kathy that the students can pass for “normal” people, they never consciously do so. Why?

One possible answer is that there is some sort of tracking device—an implanted microchip of some kind that will let the authorities know if they go rogue (“And they BLOW YOU UP! POOF!”). Based on the trailer, this is the option the movie goes with, which is interesting. Kathy never mentions such a device, but that does not necessarily mean that it’s not there, just that it’s so everyday that she doesn’t feel the need to bring it up. The other possibility, though, is that the students are simply so indoctrinated into their system that it doesn’t occur to them to break out of it. It’s not a possibility. The only possibility is to work within it. In the end, it might not even matter whether the first option is true; the broken-down adult students come to resemble dogs who won’t leave the yard even when you remove the leash. Even on the last page, Kathy quickly wraps up her emotional indulgence to go on to “wherever I was supposed to be.”

Part of what contributes to the mental state which makes this possible is undoubtedly the strong insider-outsider dynamic impressed upon Hailsham students especially, who feel cut off even from other students. But all students, regardless of school, are cut off from the larger world. Even after they leave their schools, even after they leave the Cottages, there seems to be little inclination to be part of the world. Kathy and Tommy have no idea about the political scandals and developments which have essentially doomed them until Miss Emily tells them about them. They’d apparently never felt the desire to look into it, and for that reason they were unable to begin to understand what they’d lived through. They cannot understand that, their whole lives, even Miss Emily and their beloved guardians were repelled by them.

This novel has made me wonder about the effect of lifelong ostracism—of being “spiders”—has on the psyche. It impresses Ruth and Kathy especially strongly, that first impression that they are somehow different and undesirable. They always know themselves to be “other,” “apart.” And their response seems to be to reproduce that insider-outsider dynamic among themselves. At Hailsham, there is the clique of “our group,” the Cottages have Hailsham vs. everyone else, and afterward the donors distinguish themselves as a group apart from the carers, with experiences and stories the carers could never really understand, no matter how they try. It’s painful for the outsiders, every time. I would say it’s a weird kind of cycle-of-abuse dynamic, if I didn’t feel that part of it is just the simple idea of “high school never ends.”

At the risk of revealing too much about myself, this book contains the most real exploration of friendship dynamics, and the dynamics of friendships breaking down, I have ever read. This could be because I’m almost always, like Kathy, the beta-friend (to Ruth’s alpha, in Kathy’s case), and Ishiguro’s narration gets that experience down perfectly. And I’ve had reunions like Kathy’s with Ruth at the centre—it’s not awful, or not awful like you’d expected it to be, but too much has happened between you for things to ever be the same. (Much as I like to romanticize and idealize, this is almost definitely how Elphaba and Glinda would reunite after Wicked. This is where Gwen and Morgana are headed on Merlin.)

Ishiguro also captures the little moments that mean so much to us, the small shifts, the tiny rifts. Drawings. Secret conferences. A touch. It’s funny how so much hinges on moments that seem so unimportant at the time. We might not understand what they are or how they connect, but it’s little things that bring out how much we really care about each other, and it’s little things that signal the most substantial changes. There’s one line from a song that keeps coming to mind: “These silly little wounds will never mend.” It’s so often the littlest slights that mean the most to us, and it’s those rifts that won’t heal, even if you never talk about them again. Sometimes the details of these things stand out so vividly in the memory, like Kathy’s do, so that you can remember the exact words even years later. But often these moments, these little things, are hard to pinpoint, and only the feeling they engender remains, with no easily traceable source. You just remember there was too much pointless pain. I envy Kathy her ability to remember so exactly, every glance, every beat.

But then, the trouble with memory is that it’s subjective and unreliable. Memory lies. We get Kathy’s moments; are they moments for the other characters, too?

When I say that Kathy has an excellent understanding of what she’s lived through personally, what I mean is that she clearly spends a great deal of time going back over these moments she remembers and trying, in retrospect, to imagine Ruth and Tommy more complexly. Despite her own feelings, she tries to extrapolate and imagine what Ruth might have felt or Tommy might have thought. She tries to remember that they were people, too, that she might have hurt them and that little things might have been important to them, too. This is a very valuable and worthwhile thing to do, but it cannot provide answers. She tries to interpret Madame’s reaction to her singing “Never Let Me Go” and finds she cannot even come close. In trying to figure out who Ruth and Tommy really were as people, not just as they related to her, how close does she or can she really come? Can we, all stuck inside our own heads, ever really know each other?

Ultimately, the personal side of Never Let Me Go is about three friends who are more like family—really bound together in a permanent, complex way because of where they come from and because they have no other family. No matter how many times they pull away from each other, they always end up being pulled back. They try to let one another go, all of them, at various points, but they never can, not really. They’re too tangled together. Until, finally, in the end, they have to. And when that time comes, they just do. Kathy just watches Ruth die, and afterward can talk about her having “completed.” And Tommy—Tommy doesn’t want Kathy to watch him die so, essentially, he fires her and breaks up with her in one fell swoop. And while I understand the motives behind that, while I actually think that, in a way, it’s nice, he leaves Kathy without closure. After everything they’d been through—after being with her and loving her and having her love him their whole lives. And reading it, I was sitting there thinking, “How could he do that? How could he just let her go?”

I can’t go on without talking about the utterly, beautifully painful way Ishiguro writes Tommy and Kathy’s parting. How do you have a conversation with someone you love knowing it’s the last time you’ll ever talk to them? And then—Tommy’s goodbye. The last thing he says to Kathy is, in keeping with the importance of little moments in the novel, something utterly trivial: that he used to pretend he was splashing through puddles after he scored a goal in football. “It felt really good. You’ve just scored, you turn, and then, splash, splash, splash. … All this time, I never told a single soul.” That is the last thing he says, and he knows it will be. It’s so childlike and yet so urgent. Like he wants to get something that had always existed only inside his head out into the world, before it dies in his head.

But more than she tries to understand Tommy, I think Kathy tries to understand Ruth. Maybe Tommy is just easier to figure out, but I think Kathy tries to understand Ruth so that she can forgive her. What Ruth does to make amends with Kathy and Tommy doesn’t take away all she did that hurt them, it doesn’t make it any better. The fact is, as I mentioned above, had the deferrals been real, she might have killed them—one or both. And even in the reality of the situation, she deprives Kathy and Tommy of years when they might have been happy together and whole. This is not, to put it mildly, nice or good. Margaret Atwood’s review dismisses Ruth out of hand as, to paraphrase, a manipulative bitch. But that is a horrible oversimplification of a complex character. Because Ruth tries to make amends. In the almost childlike way she has of doing many things. Ruth is not just one thing.

Despite my attested sympathies with Kathy, I find Ruth particularly intriguing. This could be because of a recent fascination I have with what I call “characters who want.” A good example is Sarah from Tanz der Vampire. According to Bob Fosse, most songs in musicals fall into one of two categories: the “I Want” Song and the “I Am” Song. Every single one of Sarah’s songs is an I Want Song. Sarah wants. Because of the aforementioned indoctrination of the students, Never Let Me Go doesn’t really specialize in characters who want. But Ruth, at least for the first half of the novel, is the exception.

Ruth wants and wants and wants for herself—wants above all the most simple of things to us: to live—and does she know the whole time that she might be killing Kathy by doing it? Does she figure it’s a dog-eat-dog world and that’s the price you pay to survive? Or does she not even think about the ultimate consequences of her actions? Does she love Tommy, or think she does? On the one hand, I think she must not have—she never tried very hard to understand him. He was her status symbol and then her ticket to possible survival. But then on the other hand, she must have—she wanted him on her side so much.

Ruth is the ultimate maker of cliques, enforcer of the insider-outsider distinction. She’s the head of “our group” at Hailsham; she forms the group to protect Miss Geraldine, invites people to join, and then kicks them out. She makes herself and Tommy into a couple and keeps Kathy on the outside, then insinuates herself into the older students’ group at the Cottages and makes Kathy and Tommy feel how much they are on the outside of that. When she and Tommy are both donors, she makes it clear that they are united in something which Kathy cannot be a part of.

And yet, the whole time, Ruth is an outsider, too. Because Kathy and Tommy are always a pair, holding on to one another in the current, and Ruth is on the outside, jealous, trying not to drown. Kathy and Tommy might not even realize this distinction, but undoubtedly Ruth does, and it probably hurts her more than Kathy ever guesses. In fact, Ruth is always drawing lines and making cliques because she’s always trying to put herself on the inside. The experience of being “othered” affects her deeply. She is in constant fear of losing her status at Hailsham and being put on the outside. She is desperate to fit in with the other students at the Cottages and with the outside world in a way that Kathy doesn’t understand. Despite being the alpha female of Hailsham, despite seeming to have such a strong mind, despite being the character who wants the most, Ruth is only putting up a strong front. Her physical weakness near the end of her life betrays a greater weakness of… of mind? Of character?

The fact is that Kathy, who does not particularly want to fit in with the world at large, is in many ways much the stronger of the two. She does not mind so much being outside, so she can hold out longer in the world, hold out longer as a carer. Ruth wants to fit into the world, be a part of it, and the world will never have a place for her, not in any office or apartment or gallery shop. Ruth, from the beginning, lives on dreams—imaginary horses, protecting Miss Geraldine, a job in an office. She does not want to understand what she’s lived through; she wants to pretend to be like, to be like everyone else. And when her world closes in, when all of the truths she’s tried so hard to avoid confront her, when reality sweeps those dreams away, she is more broken than most. Anyone looking to pick apart the question of whether or not Hailsham was a good thing need look no further than Ruth for arguments to support either side.

I can’t help but wonder if Ruth really did try to apply for that office job after all—I mean, why go to all the trouble of getting the address without even trying to use it?—but exploring that possibility opens a whole can of textually-unsupportable worms. Tommy and Kathy ask each other whether Ruth would have wanted to know the truth about Hailsham and the deferrals. It’s unpleasant, but it’s a truth. Was Ruth at a point in her life, before she died, when she could have handled that truth and done something with it? It may be best that she died first, believing her one act of atonement to be pure. This is the stance Tommy takes. But Kathy says she wishes Ruth did know, partly so that she could “see whatever damage she’d once done to us couldn’t be repaired as easily as she’d hoped” (284), but mostly so that there would not be an invisible line dividing her and Tommy from Ruth. This, even though the last time the three of them were together, Ruth happily enforced the line dividing Kathy from herself and Tommy.

So does Kathy forgive Ruth? She says she does, but it’s at best a complex kind of forgiveness. She thinks about her a lot, but she doesn’t imagine Ruth coming toward that fence in Norfolk. She still wants Ruth to hurt—maybe for her own good, who knows? But maybe not forgiving her doesn’t mean not missing her.

Maybe Kathy is ready to be a donor in the end because she doesn’t want there to be a division with herself on one side and Tommy and Ruth on the other anymore.

Ruth might be easier to see as complicated because she’s an enigma to Kathy as well—whereas we’re supposed to know Kathy. We’re getting this story through her eyes, out of her head, and we forget that she’s an unreliable narrator. For example, she doesn’t dwell on the effect her friends’ “completions” have had on her. She talks about them very matter-of-factly, with every now and then an “oh, and of course I’m sad she’s gone now, but…” It is heartbreaking that the reader doesn’t really get how much Kathy misses Tommy (and I suppose Ruth) until the very last page, when she stands in front of that fence in Norfolk. That’s the only time she lets herself feel it.

Toward the end of the book, Kathy talks about her excellent memory, saying that she may have lost Hailsham and Ruth and Tommy, but she can never lose her memory of them. In fact, she implies it will be better once she has them only in memory and is no longer looking for them in the world. In the end, Kathy might prefer memory because then she can keep everything exactly as she wants to remember it.

Except that Kathy has taken that memory and produced art, even though art has failed her in the past. She is the first-person narrator, telling her own story and, we can assume, “writing” the book. So who is her audience? She refers to an audience, to a “you,” presumably an audience in her own world, given the level of familiarity with it she assumes. Possibly she is addressing an audience of other clones who want to know about Hailsham and what it meant (“I don’t know what it was like where you were…”).

So, is this Kathy’s means to connect? Is she, like Tommy with his football puddles, just trying to get what is in her head out into the world before she dies? Is she putting her memory of Ruth and Tommy out there in concrete form so that she does not have to ever let it go?

Is this catharsis? Is she just trying to work things through, to understand, personally, what she has lived through?

Or is this Kathy’s rage against the dying of the light? Maybe Kathy has been a carer so much longer than is usual because she does not want to let go, is not ready to resign herself, is not ready to die. Maybe this, unlike the song she sang as a girl (but like what Madame assumed it to be), is her plea to the world: Never let me go. I have a soul, here is my soul, please do not let me go. In this novel perhaps we finally have Kathy as Madame saw her: “a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go” (272).

And if this is the case, then there is the tiniest glimmer of hope at the end of the novel. Because if the audience is not necessarily just other clones, if it is a universal audience (sheltered Kathy’s “I don’t know what it was like where you were” does not rule this out), then there is the possibility that Kathy’s plea may become a paean, a wake-up call to her society. Never let me go. I do not want to go. This narrative could achieve what all the Hailsham art could not: proof of soul, which could lead to critical questioning, and eventually, change. So, in a novel full of futility, where the fall is all there is, there is just the outside chance that art, Hailsham, and the way these three characters fell might matter.

 

Comments

[cordeliasmarz.livejournal.com]

Thank you so so much for writing this completely wonderful essay!

You write so comprehensively and I just.. it's so easy to read! And by that I mean, it's a perfectly-constructed essay and is so... it's so good! I was worried I'd get lost in it as they're rather weighty issues but you dealt with it all so beautifully and it could be my English essay-writing mind set but I really admire the way you added so many of what we're told to call "wider readings"! Such gorgeous quotes! I love “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”

I can't get even close to describing how much I enjoyed reading all you had to say.

I'd heard Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield discuss how we, like the "students", are all so accepting of some things and don't question, constantly try to ignore our fate, how the story's relatable to us, kind of thing. And I didn't see that when I was reading it. I assumed it was mostly one of those dystopian "What if" scenarios, "putting a mirror to society" and all that.

I enjoyed the book much in the same way as you did when you first read it. I thought it nothing particularly outstanding but cried a LOT and found it very interesting and rather beautiful.. however when it was brought to my attention that it had whole other levels of meaning, the idea of this microcosm, I looked at it closer, started thinking about what that could mean.. and only now, after reading into it more and just now reading your wonderful essay, have I realised what a masterpiece the novel truly is!

So basically, this post was such a Godsend for me. I'd been looking for people I could talk to about Never Let Me Go the other day but couldn't find anyone then today, completely by accident I found this post (via. that Sir Leon icon you made saying "..I got better" - another work of genius might I add!) so it made me even happier! MAGICCC!

I'm sorry I'm not really bringing anything more to the table here but I think you said it all pretty much!

I actually cried so much because I wrote you this really long, much more in-depth reply which would've been a lot more rewarding to read but then my Safari closed down!
So I'm a bit emotion'd out at the moment!
Another emotion-drainer/mind-melt, I actually only realised the other day that there probably wasn't an afterlife (and did a post about it (http://cordeliasmarz.livejournal.com/55710.html) if you're interested?) then in light of this post which discusses how short life is (/can be), it makes it even more tragic!
But I've loved reading it all and slowly learning the ways of the world :')
That “When the fall is all there is, it matters” quote really - and I'm aware of how trite this sounds but - spoke to me.

So again, thank you so much!

I'd love it if we could be friends and talk about this (and anything!) when I'm a bit more together because you're clearly amazingly intelligent and have fantastic taste!
Merlin and Never Let Me Go?
I'm sold!
Hopefully this poor example of my writing won't deter you from friending back?

[lily-handmaiden.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you liked it!

Like you, apparently, I had the experience of reading the book and having no one with whom to discuss it, so I wrote out this whole thing, sent it to a couple of friends, and posted it here, figuring no one would actually read it. But you did! So yay!

I love that "when the fall is all there is" quote, too. Have you seen The Lion in Winter? It's amazingly written.

Thank you for all your lovely compliments, and of course I'll friend you back. Anyone who likes Merlin and makes it through my overly-analytical ramblings gets automatic friend status in my book. :)

[cordeliasmarz.livejournal.com]

It's times like these that I really appreciate the internet!
I get to read things like this and reply/give thanks when in real life I don't know anybody who would talk about this sort of thing - especially not so eloquently!

No I haven't! I IMDB'd it when I first read the quote and it's on YouTube so I could watch it! What is it about if you don't mind quickly summarising? Well, summarising what you like about it anyway!

Yay friends! All compliments very much warranted - glad my admiration came across and not too strong that you backed away! ;D

[lily-handmaiden.livejournal.com]

The Lion in Winter is about Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the princes Richard, Geoffrey, and John getting together for Christmas and trying to politically outmaneuver each other. It's full of excellent dialogue and great one-liners. Plus the movie has Peter O'Toole, Katharine Hepburn, and a young Anthony Hopkins.