"When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world. And I saw 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. That is what I saw. It wasn't really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I've never forgotten."
A masterpiece of dystopian science fiction, "Never Let Me Go" turns 1990s England into a little-talked-about laboratory for the pursuit of clone technology. Kazuo Ishiguro follows a group of cloned organ donors as they progress through prep school and out into the world, with no chance of escaping their predetermined fates.
Narrated by a donor named Kathy, the book explores morality, mortality, and the tales people will tell themselves to justify their place in the world. The brutal nature of "Never Let Me Go" is somewhat obfuscated by the simple narration, with the lack of overt explanations diminishing the growing horror.
"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."
"But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then -- who knows? -- maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another."
The chronology was occasionally confusing in the novel, but the highly anticipated movie adaptation -- which, unfortunately, had none of the heart of the book -- handled the passage of time much more seamlessly. The movie portrayal of Ruth is much more revealing, showing her conniving and deceptively shitty character outside of the blinders of the narrator.
Ishiguro has once more tailored a heartbreaking, beautiful story that asks as many questions as it answers, relying on a terse, matter-of-fact style to challenge a world that may be much closer than we realize.
" ... That there were people out there, like Madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you -- of how you were brought into this world and why -- and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange."
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