Love, Hope and Being Human in Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go'

*Warning! Spoilers!*

Never Let Me Go begins and ends with the same image: a figure, alone in a field, railing against the sky. Limbs flailing, swear words spewing. A child's tantrum under the open sky.

This image embodies the essence of the novel, it's primary question. This surge of visceral rage against an indifferent sky. Through transposing life into a dystopian alternative, Ishiguro creates an experimental space in which to put life under a microscope. It is not so much a tale of clones, organ harvesting and ethics than it is concerned with the bits within all this where the human is found.

Through the flawed and naive characters (read: clones) of Kathy, Tommy and Ruth, Ishiguro spins a tale of hope, of love, of the unfailing human spirit to yearn for something more, something better than our lot. The characters, unwittingly caught in a triangle, find themselves caught up in a complexity of feeling the world who created them in labs would choose to ignore. In his gentle sentences, he builds lives brimming with all that comes with being human: the friendships, the missed opportunities, the felt conversations, the twists of jealousy, the cups of tea, the fear of being left behind, the creative urges. As children, they play football. They are scared of the woods. They prefer certain 'guardians' (read: teachers) over others. They whisper under covers in the dark, trading their own ideas, their secrets.

Through the central institution of Hailsham, a boarding school for clones destined to be organ donors, founded on the desire to humanise our characters through creativity and culture, the suggestion is that what makes life worth living - at least as it is imposed at the school - is the ability to create art, to enjoy poetry and literature. However, through the character's lives beyond its grounds, what they cling to, what gives them purpose and fuels their uninformed theories of the world around them are grounded in Love. True Love, they whisper to each other, ashamed at their wild hopes, will grant them a deferral of their fate. They pour all their hopes into this whisper. A deferral of three years. Even their wildest hope is a reserved one.

Love is the frame through which our three main characters try to make sense of their upbringing in Hailsham. The central mystery being the culmination of all their efforts in class: an event where a distant Madame arrives and chooses the best of their output to be taken away to the "Gallery". Tommy confides in Kathy his theory of why: they kept them as evidence, evidence of true love between the students. How else to understand these momentous yet unexplained occurrence, if not for love? What other explanation could there be? What other thing could warrant such attention, such ceremony, such gravity?

It is a flimsy theory, a naive hope. But it is not a blind one. They mull it over, examine their choices and carefully come to their eventual decision to test it, go after this 'deferral'. The culmination of the hope that pervades the novel. A hope laced with stoicism.

At its heartbreaking climax, the denial of this reserved hope for more, this quiet rebellion against their lot shatters against the cruel reality of their existence. This painful gap between their theory of what is allowed in their world - a consequence of their sheltered yet sinister upbringing - and the twisted truth at the novel's core is brutally revealed in their former headmistress' final monologue. A Miss Emily who only has enough time for them until workmen come to remove unwanted furniture. This rumour was simply not true. No matter how hard they have tried to stamp it out, it would crop up again, incubated from scratch. The Gallery, she explains, wasn't set up to corroborate potential claims of true love. Rather, it was used as evidence that they had souls, that they could love at all.

But they could not only love, their fervent belief in it, their desperation to harbour it, made them reinvent over and over again the same rumour: three more years, true love can grant them three more years. This organically recurring rumour, the insidiousness of their hope, the despair of Tommy's grief, the circularity of it all. They attest to the most poignant parts of being alive. As tea is more concentrated in a smaller mug, so the condensed lives of Kathy, Tommy and Ruth play out the aches and joys of being alive all the more fiercely, all the more earnestly.

This grand reveal, the part of the puzzle that gives full sense to the rest of the novel, we are made ambivalent towards the narrator, Kathy, with whom by this point we are so intimate. We have identified with her, felt frustrated for her, trusted her to guide us through her quietly eerie world. To us, she is human. In the way she notices the small details of life, the way she relates to others, the way she doubts herself, the way she dances to music. Through the flux of her confused and fraught relationships with Tommy and Ruth, we have seen the world through her eyes. And it is full of the nuances that make our own whole. Her life resonates with our own. How we do, or try to do, the best we can with what we are given. The 'creepiness' of their clone existence, then, only works to reinforce where life is found, the parts that hummed with our own numbered days.

Ishiguro's last twist of the knife, the master stroke that makes his characters lingers beyond its elegiac conclusion is the final memory Tommy shares with Kathy before completing (read: dies after last organ donation). He recalls his days in Hailsham, when, after scoring a football goal, he run back with his arms overhead and pretend he was running through shallow water ("Splash, splash, splash"). This tidbit of memory, his final gift to her in their time together, gestures to the thing that makes us most human of all: our inner lives. Our perspective on the world, our imaginations projected outwards. A universe of quirks, thoughts, unique moments through which we make this world our own. With Tommy gone, a whole world is stomped out.

Clones and organ harvesting aside, Never Let Me Go is an exploration of the most poignant bits of living. It nudges us out of our complacency, our naive security in the longness of life. It reminds us of our fragility, urges us to embrace it, to let it fill us to the brim. To let it engulf us, so we, too, find the uncontainable torrent of resistance towards the sky. To scream that we are here, that we occupy this space. That for a short while, we, too, get to rail at the indifference of the world.