Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

21:47Jeff:Also, does it sound like the worst? It's pretty cold though. They're always looking for kerosene. Yeah. Well, the houses, like this is one of the ways that Ishiguro gradually tells us what this world is really like, that they're in these cottages. They've experienced the boarding school as, you know, their whole life being told that Hailsham students are very special. But at the cottages, we find out like there aren't enough space heaters and there's never enough kerosene for the space heaters and they're always freezing cold and when they sneak into each other's rooms at night to have sex sometimes they're not even under real blankets they're under like scraps of old carpet and curtains and so then you get the the dawning moment of like oh they're not given nice things they're living in squalor right you know they're no one is caring for them cage-free chickens here they're not organically grown alpaca these are what 16 or 18 year olds whose entire purpose, the entire reason that they exist is to be organ donors for other people, presumably, as you were saying, wealthier, more privileged people.

22:43Jeff:And so the world is not spending resources on them. But they also don't know what any other experience might be like. So they're not angry about it. No one is mad that they're constantly freezing. No one is mad that they're sleeping under carpet scraps. And all of that just adds up to help us understand this world that a Shikaru has created. And we come to learn that Hailsham itself was an experimental school. Like the climax of the book really is when they go, it's not a confrontation, they go looking for an answer, right? And there's this rumor that's gone around that if you show, oh God, I'm going to start crying.

23:18I mean, it's interesting how the book is put together because it's Catherine relaying. And this is, I think, important is there's an assumption on the narrator's part that we know about the system, we may be even participating in it. Maybe you're a carer if you've ever been a carer. I don't know how it was for you, but it is not free and direct discourse in that way. There is some kind of sense that this is talking to someone within or at least with knowledge of the system, but they come to... And she tells us banal sort of vignettes, right? If I was to tell you stories about me in junior high and grade school, some of them you'd be like, that only matters to you because you were there that particular day on the four square asphalt.

24:00And then some would be very moving and meaningful to you. And this is similar here. And this is one of the complaints is like, stuff just sort of happens like, well, she's remembering for herself. She's not trying to make it interesting. She's trying to recall.

24:11Jeff:That it's so banal, but also so compelling. That's one of the magic pieces. Such a testament to how good Ishi Guru is. That we are like, when we're at Hailsham, the big drama of their lives at Hailsham revolve around two primary things. One is that they need to make art. Like they've told that it's important that they're creative. They need to make art. And then every now and then this woman that they refer to as Madam comes to the school and she looks at the collected sort of curated best bits of everyone's art and she takes them away to her gallery. This is kind of all the students know. They don't know what function the gallery serves, why it's important, but like very much is made of you need to be creative we need to demonstrate that you are creative and some of Tommy's issues come from the fact that he's not good at art like Tommy had a bad time in art class kids have made fun of him he doesn't know like why I feel you Tommy

25:10Jeff:I'm totally screwed if my ability to like draw a good painting has anything to do to draw a good painting first of all as a sentence should tell you that I'm totally yeah you're on I think that's right. That's what the experts say. That's how you make a painting. And you squish sculptures. You squish them. Yeah, you've got it. So you have to be creative. And like the art making is a big thing. And then they have these sales where students basically get probably cast offs kind of stuff that's been donated. Maybe it's leftover items from past organ donor students who have now completed. But the big deal is like, who's going to get the shiniest pencil case from the items that come in for the sale.

25:49Jeff:And each student sort of forms these collections of little items that they get. This is how they get their clothing. They're also able to buy each other's artwork and poems. And like, Kathy has spent some time reflecting on why did we all care so much about that year that Susie wrote pretty terrible poetry, but we all wanted her poetry instead of whoever else's stuff. So like, that's their lives. And we get, I don't know, 85 pages of this. Yeah, the first third of the novel is essentially that. It's still totally compelling. And then they go off to the cottages and they read Duranda sitting in a cold field.

26:25Jeff:And we don't learn a whole lot much else about the world. It's kind of their poor college kid zone. I mean, one of the strange things about the book is you can roughly, or not so roughly, maybe quite elegantly map their experience onto a certain kind of educational experience, right, of boardings, especially in the UK where boarding school is more common. boarding school, university, and sort of early adulthood. But it's all compressed because, as we come to find out, they have a circumscribed lifespan, right? It's not exactly, right? Sort of, they're going to be asked, told, required to give their donations at certain points in the future based on some kind of demand we don't understand, nor do they, but it's just sort of how it is.

27:10Jeff:It's just how it works. and the the the denouement is there's been this rumor going around that if you can prove that you're actually truly in love that you can get a few years of deferral not even out of the system Rebecca like that's just their imagination is so so limited curtailed that the the biggest dream they can have the biggest fantasy they can allow themselves to even wonder about maybe being possible is a few years living in the white mansion with, you know, someone, your high school sweetheart, essentially. And that your art is proof because anyone can just say you're in love, right?

27:47You got to show that your poems or your art, you know, was a glimpse into your everlasting soul. And that was enough to purchase a few more years on this mortal coil. What's more heartbreaking than that? I know. What an idea.

28:03Jeff:That this system doesn't exist is the really heartbreaking thing. And as the reader, you kind of feel the whole time that it's not going to work out that way. That when there are students at Hailsham and this idea of deferrals comes up, no one, like no adult ever confirms that this exists. No one ever tells them when you grow up, if you fall in love, here is the office to which you submit your request for deferral. Here's the form. Right. Here's the form. Here's how these interviews go. They just have this vague sense that demonstrating that you're in love might be a way to kind of save yourself a little bit.

28:35Jeff:and that demonstrating that you're creative is important for some reason. The big reveal we get out of their time at the cottages is that everyone wonders about the person from whom they were cloned, their original, and there's a big dispute over, one of the other people in the cottage thinks that maybe Ruth's original, he spotted her working in an office in town that has big windows, and they all make this field trip to go into Norfolk, and to see, is this her original? Does this woman look like who Ruth might be? The whole time they also are dreaming of what their futures could be. Like maybe someday I will grow up and work in an office while also knowing that's never going to happen.

29:21Jeff:That they're never fully able to wrap their heads around or maybe their hearts around this reality that they are, at least at this point, that they are going to die in not very many years and they're never going to do the kinds of things that they dream of. And in that scene, there's a tension, the big moment of conflict is when Ruth says, like, we all know that we come from trash, that it's believed in the culture. And we don't know for sure, but it's believable given how our cultures work, that the people that are donating DNA to have it cloned and become people like our main characters are like sex workers and drug addicts and people who must need money to do that.

30:03Outcast, underprivileged, you know, something where the undesirables, the unclean of some kind.

30:09Jeff:And if that's where you're from, and already many people believe, like have weird feelings about the clones, which are not referred to as clones in the book, we should say. Like that word hardly ever comes up. It comes up a couple times. We have no access to how I think they're described normals as the non-donor class talks about them. There is a sense that they are unclean, untouchable, like Madame, who is even sympathetic in the extreme to their plight in life, you know, shrinks from them. Their physical touch is anathema to her. So you can imagine what sort of the wider world thinks. And we're given to understand later that there were some experiences that Hailsham's success slash existence and some other things that happened actually reminded people of this, the horror, the beyond questionable ethics of this.

31:01So they're even more put into the background, even more kept out of sight, out of mind. And let's not ask where your new pancreas is coming from. So let's not worry about the rights of those who we have brought into being to service us. And they do it.

31:17Jeff:I would say all those components come together in the last section of the book where Kathy is a carer and she's caring now for Ruth. They have reconciled after this dispute that they had as young people. Ruth and Tommy have sort of been in more touch than Kathy has been with Tommy. and after Ruth completes, Kathy becomes Tommy's carer. And they finally have a romantic relationship that we understand they've both been wanting and waiting for since their childhoods. And so now they're going to see if this is all real. Can we go to madam? Can we get a deferral? Tommy's been making art in his adult life to try to make up for the art he didn't make.

31:57Jeff:It's so heartbreaking. To try to make up for the art he didn't make as a child. And if we come from trash, can we prove that we are human, that we have souls, that you should give us a deferral for these couple of years? And as you were saying, Madam tells them, this is what the art existed for. Hailsham was experimental and very progressive. And Madam and her cohort were trying to give these kids as good of a life as they could have, to give them a childhood. And then we start to really understand that the kids who were born for this purpose and raised elsewhere throughout the country and in other schools like encounter many of them encounter terrible treatment that you can only imagine like these institutional kid farms oh my god right it's it's just awful and that is she grew lets that just hang and lets us imagine what that must be like rather than telling us is i think one of the other pieces that really indicates how masterful this book is but madam has to tell has to tell them we were having you do art because we were trying to prove that you have souls.

33:02Jeff:There is no deferral process. And the most heartbreaking detail of all is that like this rumor about deferrals based on whether you can prove you're in love or not, seems to spontaneously regenerate with every class of students. It's kind of whack-a-mole that there's never been a deferral. They can stamp it out this rumor from time to time. But then these kids who don't know much about the world or their lives or how else they might get deferrals, how else they might get out of this ultimate end that is unavoidable and that they've been told to accept, but clearly something in them is pushing against.

33:44Jeff:They're looking for some way to avoid it. Everyone reaches for, well, maybe it's about love. And if we could just prove that we're in love, maybe we could get a deferral. But that reveal is so painful where she's like, this just keeps coming up and we can't squash it. And they don't think it's that students are passing it down from one generation to the next, but that these young people keep coming up with this on their own. It reminds me, I don't know if it's a Marx quote, it's someone, but if God didn't exist, we'd need to invent him. There's an element to that here of this is a natural, organic manifestation of a central desire slash denial of their own mortality, right?

34:23Like there's got to be some, there's got to be more to this than just this. There's got to be some out. We can't just die into nothingness and oblivion. It's just not just here because of random atoms crashing together. There must be some higher purpose, some other place, a heaven or a creator or something else like that. And the terrible cold logic of it all, they both know. and find unsatisfying if true. And I think that's one of those places where the temptation with this book, and I do it, and I think it's not just a temptation. A necessary and natural read is to analogize into other things.

35:02I also think it's worth taking it just for what it is because pardon, this is down to my hot takes. It's not really a hot take, but you can get distracted with this book about the logistics of this sci-fi conceit, this dystopian horribleness. But this is a book about relationships. This is a book about memory. This is a book about art. I mean, we didn't even have to ask this about art. It's obviously and manifestly about art here. And the conceit allows, like I think the most interesting to me sci-fi does, not to have lightsabers. I mean, that's cool and whiz-bang. But to refract, condense, give a different perspective on

35:42Jeff:other known familiar experiences yeah when he was awarded the nobel and the nobel prize citations are like notoriously short and concise the citation for ishi guru acknowledges him as someone who wrote novels in novels of great emotional force has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world and all of his books are about that this is certainly about that about these students desire to be connected to the world their sense of connection with each other and of how weighty these seemingly low stakes things are in their lives that like whose paintings are going to get taken from Adam's gallery where did you find the shiniest pencil case this like one tape that Kathy has that she loves and then she loses becomes such a huge symbol to her because their lives are so small.

36:36So even the tiniest details mean so much to them. Freud's narcissism of minor differences. And the thing that's magic that Ishiguro does is it's a condensed version of our own existence, right? Like, why do I care what jeans I'm going to buy or what kind of car I'm going to drive? You're going to die someday. Is my beard scruff the right length? Is my video lighting right? Like, you're still going to die someday. What does it matter? And how much shucking and jiving we do to forget, to distract, to entertain. And Kathy especially, I think, and Tommy and Ruth too. And this is something we see. It's like a sped up version of other narratives that we see where only at the end, at the deathbed, at the reunion, at the funeral, at the, you know, I don't know others these kinds of places here where do you finally have to come to terms with what mattered what didn't matter what you did and didn't do what you regret who you missed the connections you've lost and that goes right to the title right this sort of never let me go of it which is heartbreaking itself but like the forgetting that we see these characters do it's so easy for us to say these why do these kids care about buying each other's paperclip statues or whatever this shit is.

37:57And it's like, but, but where go we, you know, where, but for, I mean, we're doing the same stuff just in a different register. And it's so, it has such a vertiginous experience. If you think about it in those terms, like how different is it really? It's just not that different.

38:11Jeff:And Kathy, she is only 31 when she's narrating this book, but she is at, as you said, the beginning of the end of her life. We know that she is about to start making her donations. And so she is staring down this cold, hard reality that her life is going to end. And one of the remarkable things about her narration of this is that Ishiguro is so concerned with empathy, but he doesn't very often use the word empathy. He just lets us see his characters do it. And as Kathy reflects on all of these moments, especially big, like moments that felt explosive to her and to her peers, especially with Ruth and Tommy, moments that fractured their friendships.

38:49Jeff:She always takes pains in every recounting to try to imagine like the most generous interpretation. Maybe I got it wrong, or maybe it's different. Maybe her motivation was something different than I thought it was. Maybe Tommy was going after something that I didn't understand. Always make space for the possibility that her take on something that her experience of it wasn't the, you know. It was subjective, right? She acknowledges that she understands her subjectivity from an early stage. And that's why I think, you know, in the introduction, he says that he tried a couple different narrative point of views.

39:27I'm assuming it was Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy, and that he first showed it to his wife and said, which one of these do you like? And he concurred that Kathy was the perspective. You can imagine versions of it. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think Tommy's would be extremely interesting to read at some point. But yeah, that they, she fast forwards, it's life on fast forward. I mean, this condition, this logistical condition that they are born into is a fast forward. I've thought a lot about this. One of the blurbs calls it one of the great horror novels ever written. And I agree with that, where the monster is never really shown.

40:05And the monster is, of course, the donations, of course, that you are going to be cannibalized to elongate other people's lives. But I think the signal difference is from this idea of that just speeds up a human lifetime and condense it and gives us, Ishiguro is this other sort of sandbox to explore is the circumscription of it, the knowing in this. That's the thing that's the most different than our own existence, right? We all know we're going to, we don't know the conditions, we don't know the time, but the doors are open to have many different experiences that you have some control over, you know, you could be an actor.

40:39You could have kids, for example. That's one thing. They're not allowed to have kids. I assume they're spayed and neutered like dogs and cats at an early age. I don't really know. But the thing that I find the most terrifying is that they don't have any agency at all. The only agency they have, and this is why I think it matters to Kathy, is in their interpersonal relationships. That's where the drama, that's where the narrative. And so it makes perfect sense that that's where her attention and heart and soul are going to focus.

41:07Jeff:And that's also the only and entire outlet that they have for the feelings that they develop about this condition that they live in. You can see that there are each of these characters has anger under the surface that this is how their life is going to go. That the closer they get to leaving the cottages and to beginning work as a carer and ultimately to encountering what it is to see the donations up close and to know that you're headed down that road. there is this simmering anger that they are powerless and the only outlet they have for it, because again, they've not encountered the real world at all.

41:43Jeff:They don't know that revolution is a thing they might reach for. Yeah. Writing your congressperson or I don't know, the lords and ladies of the house, you know, you have to forgive me, English parliament. In any moment, they turn on each other, that the rupture happens in relationships because of the anger that they can't express anywhere else. They have nowhere to put it. And they've been told so clearly, this is what your life is going to be, that when they really have to face up to it, and that does want somewhere to go, you know, like, if you want to stick with Freud, it has to come out of the unconscious and go somewhere, somewhere, yeah, put it into their relationships with each other.

42:19Jeff:And they say horrible things to each other. But then they ultimately have no choice but to resolve those conflicts, because without bouncing off the walls, but eventually, they're just gonna settle right back in the same room, there's nowhere else for them to go, except that then when they go out and when they leave the cottages, it's not exactly clear what happens, but they go, do they go, they go, they can be a care. We don't know like where Kathy is sleeping at night while she's a care. We know she's driving her. I mean, Ishiguro casts a mist over that, I guess, to use some very giant language.

42:45He's not concerned with it, except that she's in this liminal state between, you know, being grown and being slaughtered. And it provides her this time to think. I think that's another thing that I noticed this go around is that one of the reasons it's her is she has this a long period to sort of exist between these stages in which something like, if not a critical consciousness, then a con, you know, a meta consciousness about her own life and her own thinking. She's thinking about thinking, which is metacognition at its basic level. And that provides her this moment to narrate to the void. There's, you know, one thing underneath this is why is Kathy doing this even in her own mind as she's driving around is like that impulse to tell the story, like to capture it.

43:31She wants somehow to capture. She doesn't know what she's doing for us is capturing this make-believe dystopia, but she wants to capture Ruth and Tommy. Like this is one of the art-making impulses too. Kilroy was here, even for fictional characters, is a real impulse. And she doesn't even know that's what it is, but she wants to remember. She wants to think. She wants there to be a place where these things go. Her lost tape, this corner of Norfolk, which they joke doesn't really exist because they never saw a picture of it because their teacher didn't have a picture when they were talking about the counties in England.

44:02But she wants there to be some place where meaning is stored and resides and endures. And that's it's sort of beautiful and sad at the same time to think of it in those terms.

44:13Jeff:She wants that more and more potently as she gets closer and closer, as she starts to see what her donors experience, as she starts to tell us. And then presumably as she starts to really grok that that's where she's headed to. Like one of the ways that this feels like a horror novel is Kathy telling us that Tommy's in like a pretty decent facility. He's in a recovery place. It's pretty decent. Some of the other ones aren't so great. They don't even have space for like not all of the rooms can accommodate a wheelchair. And Ishiguro just drops that in as a reminder. And you can imagine, right? Like, wait, can't accommodate a wheelchair?

44:52Right. Oh, right.

44:53Jeff:Because they're going to have an organ taken and then they're going to have another organ taken. And at some point getting around is going to become very difficult. So yes, of course they would need wheelchairs. But again, he hasn't laid out all the mechanics of the world. He's just dropping in these little details. And then Kathy tells us about them so matter of factly. Yeah. Yeah. And when she and Tommy finally start sleeping together, it's after he has made one of his donations. And there are like bandages and maybe scarring or stitches that they have to work around. And that's also not remarkable to her.

45:31Jeff:It's just that this is, of course, this is the state that his body is in. Because this is the state that everyone's body will be in at some point in her world. and so if she wants to have that intimate experience with him that's what it's going to be and it's not horrifying there's nothing that she has to like they don't have to negotiate that at all it's just the reality of the moment and it's both really beautiful and really really heartbreaking and they do it's funny because like you know the the real life analog is aging right like these are in a way you could see them as assisted living facilities senior centers and depending on your socioeconomic status, your experience of those can be remarkably different.

46:12I'm guessing that the nicer ones, maybe if you sign up for the donor program, you put some money into it. And based on what class of service you bought, your donor gets better. I mean, it's not clear. That's the only thing that I try not to make too much sense of it, but how to account for these differences. I think it doesn't matter in so much as that it reflects real world differences in how people experience end of life care. Because they go out to have an old person's outing, which is to look at this boat that's been abandoned in a marsh, right? And like they can barely get there and there's a fence, but they enjoy each other's time and it's wistful and mournful, but also kind of beautiful and they do the best they can.

46:48But Ruth is like barely able to make it over. And if you said they were 89 instead of 29, their experience of it may not be that different of trying to have relationships, of trying to reckon with what they've done to and with each other and trying to, you know, Ruth eventually tries to atone for having kept Tommy and Kathy apart. And that's not unusual to see in late life situations where people want to tell the truth about what happens. And they want to let it go. They want to be forgiven, I think is really what they want, but they want the story to be out there. And, you know, if you change a few of the details, it would be very recognizable as a different kind of narrative.

47:33Jeff:Yeah, and it is, you know, one of the only things that's guaranteed in life is that we will die. And Ishiguro is always concerned with what are the things that make us human? What is it to be human? What do we long for? What do we need? What do we feel? And that it's all ultimately about connection. It's at the heart of all of his books. and one of the reasons that he's deserving of a Nobel Prize and the kind of acclaim and the career that he's had is that in lesser hands, a body of work that is fundamentally about how people all need each other could be cloying and corny and cheesy. It could be a pillow, Rebecca.

48:13It could be live, laugh, love. It really could. It could be embroidery.

48:16Jeff:It could be your grandma's. Live, laugh, donate. Right, live, laugh, literature. Yeah, right. And he just does not go there at all because he trusts us to put together the pieces that this is what his characters are doing. There's not a sentence in this book where Kathy says, and I ultimately realized that all we have is each other and all we need is each other and love is all there is. But we get to arrive there on our own and that's what a good writer lets you do. Yeah, a couple of things from the intro. So, you know, this 20 year, this book has sold consistently over time, even though it would have been hard to imagine in its publication that it would overcome the remains of the day because that was so lauded, but it sold quite a bit more than that, continues to get read.

48:58I think one reason it does is he even talks about this introduction, like he was a transitional figure from sort of just literary fiction, capital L, capital F, being concerned primarily with contemporary realist work, representations of life. And he talks about his relationship with Alex Garland, who he sort of met through touring in the 80s and into the 90s, getting to know David Mitchell. We should add Cloud Atlas to the list here. But anyway, and sort of seeing them unapologetically reference Pynchon, Ursula K. Le Guin, science fiction writers that Ishiguro and his education was seen as people that if you liked Philip K.

49:39Dick or Bradbury, you didn't really talk about it. You were talking about Henry James or Hemingway or Dickens or something like, or Jane Eyre or or Dostoevsky, people he likes, but it really opened his mind to other ways of writing and other exploratory modes he can have. Because what's fascinating about this book is you would think the idea would be, what if there were clones that were bred to donate? But that wasn't it. He wanted to tell a story about kids, about students being educated who had something special about them, and they knew where they were special and different. And over time, it was a real shower thought, apparently.

50:11It was kind of in the water, but he had this idea of like, okay well i can connect it i can use these sci-fi elements and like an early draft was like students who were hitchhiking and they got picked up by a truck i think carrying nuclear missiles

50:22Jeff:across america or something yeah and there's one like would it be a virus would it be exposure to nuclear material he failed to write the novel twice in right it was sitting around it's called the student's novel like in his drafts or something like in 1990 and 1995 he fails to write this and sets it aside and he writes books that become the unconsoled and when we were orphans and in that time period then in 1997 dolly the sheep is cloned and cloning technology is all we can talk about in the news and as you were saying we are with cloning how many clones have you had made six you know we were so worried about cloning what happened to that we were so so worried and at the same time he's like having these intellectual encounters as you're saying with Alex Garland who like yes the filmmaker Alex Garland the Alex I remember reading the beach and the Tesseract blew my mind yeah those books blew my mind when they came out and David Mitchell and the idea of genre fiction is swirling around him in a new way and so then it's like ah yes maybe it will be cloning and he does never let me go and it finally comes out in 2005 such an interesting journey that that introduction to the 20th anniversary edition is wonderful and I I watched his Nobel lecture, which is also really wonderful, where he talks about what he's trying to do, that his work has always been about the small and the private, and that the essential thing with these characters is that they communicate feelings and they appeal to what we share as human beings across borders and divides.

51:54Jeff:That his writing is informed by Forster's distinction between two and three-dimensional characters and this revelation early in his career that if he attended to the relationships between his characters, the characters would take care of themselves. Yeah, it gives you binocular vision, right? That other perspective, if they have to be in relation to something, it gives you something you can navigate by. You exist in three dimensions if you have these other characters you have to deal with. And that he had previously worked with homeless people earlier in his life and his career. How he met his wife.

52:27Jeff:Yeah, and then he talks about what that experience was like And you can see how reaching for humanity and empathy and connection for members of society that are often pushed to the side and dehumanized, what that reaching and that emphasis on their humanity did to inform his work in this book, certainly, but in a lot of the future ones as well. And it's so common in his books that the narrators are in the systems or in the mess of whatever their system or condition is, but they're not masters of it. They don't have the full picture. Their vision and understanding and agency is compromised in some meaningful way.

53:05And I think that can be a frustration for people who read expecting there to be a revolutionary or the president or the head of the lab that, you know, that does this. These are people existing within and making their way in the world as best they can and trying to understand it. And, you know, I think that's well put in his Nobel lecture. is like to see them, to see anyone as a fully formed human. And it goes back to this idea of, you know, if you're in love, maybe you can be forgiven or, you know, pardoned or whatever. Your salvation, your humanness is in some way defined by how you relate to other people in the manner and number, duration, intensity of your relationship with other people.

53:45He gets two groups of questions. He's, I'm sure, answered a million questions. I'm sure if I had interviewed them or we had interviewed him as a part of this, we'd have something similar. He said, there's two basket of questions. The first may be summarized by this. Given the awful fate that hangs over these young people, why don't they run away or at least show more signs of rebellion? The second group of FAQs is slightly harder to characterize. These are verbatim from Mishikro's introduction, but essentially comes down to, is this a sad, bleak book or is an uplifting, positive one? It seems to me that these most asked questions about Never Let Me Go arise because tensions concerning its metaphorical identity.

54:20Is this story a metaphor about evil man-made systems that already exist today or an imminent danger of existing ushered in by uncontrolled innovations in science technology? Or, alternatively, is the novel offering a metaphor for the fundamental human condition? Why not both? It may be both the strength and weakness of this novel that often wishes to be both of the above at the same time, thereby setting certain elements of the story in conflict with one another. So if it were a story of like resistance, rebellion, and like kind of a 1984 situation, for example.

54:51Jeff:Or Hunger Games. Hunger Games. To continue that, that would suggest that were we to tear down this system, utopia lies on the other side. I don't think that's what Sugar Grove thinks. I think life can be improved. You know, you don't volunteer in homeless shelters. You don't think things can be better. but I do think like most of us who are classically educated of the West I'd say believe that there is we are imperfect beings and that imperfection is going to rear its head it may have different manifestations over time but some of the same ego power lust you know anger all the things that make us humans in bad ways and sometimes make us humans in our most rich ways they are going this is what this is this book is but one manifestation of those things of exploiting the powerless there isn't going to be a durable structure that's going to get rid of that forever i've talked about this before in the gospel one of my hardest what the hardest scripture for me was when jesus says the poor will be with us always when i think judas says we shouldn't be spending all this money on perfumes and shit like we should just shouldn't we be giving this to the poor and christ says the poor will enjoy me while i'm still here the poor with his always like boy even christ isn't gonna get even christ isn't giving up but over time i've come to understand that or at least reckons again i'm no longer a practicer of that particular but i think what i understand about that is utopia is out there like thomas more that utopia is no place if you know the origin of this it means no place it means it doesn't exist the idea that and this is a fantasy of many dystopian novels i think a hunger king amongst them which is if you beat the bad guy everything's good right this is the fantasy of superhero movies right and this is the same fantasy that many dystopians most dystopian states are products in the stories that we tell of attempts at utopia that's right that we could cure cancer if we just had a supply of organs for everyone but where are we going to get them and what does that do?

57:03Jeff:Or like The Giver was my first encounter with dystopia. When I was 12. Shirley Jackson's the lottery. We can all be absolved. We just gotta murder one person with rocks once a year. We can have a perfect world if one person will hold all the painful memories for everybody else and we control all of the things that make someone human that utopia doesn't and can't exist. And I think Ishiguro believes that, that utopia doesn't and can't exist, but is still interested in what is, as you were saying, what does a better version of the world look like? And I think that's a really good way to answer the question for yourself of whether this is a book that is for you or not.

57:41Jeff:That if your response to, is this a bleak book, or is it a book about the hopefulness of the human condition? If your answer is, por que no los dos? This is a book for you. If you want that tension and you like it and can exist in that place. If you want something that feels like genre genre, where there's a lot of action, or a clear statement of what kind of world we're in, where the characters have a clear moral take on the world that they exist in and are going to push against it, because we know and they know on some level and the author knows that this is a bad deal that they've gotten, you will be unsatisfied by this book.

58:23Yeah, there's not even really a plot, right? She's recounting their story. I mean, there is ebbs and flows, and it leads to a point. If there is a plot, it's really about, it revolved, it would, you'd have to say it revolves around the love triangle, right? Because this is a coming-of-age story. It's a campus novel. It's a sci-fi novel. It's a novel of social critique in some ways. It's a dystopian novel. In terms of teaching, it has a Swiss army element to it. Like you can teach it in so many different sort of classes in certain different contexts. I think that's one of the reasons it's become so beloved and I think will endure for some time.

58:56But yeah, if you're looking for plot action, when that's what you associate with science fiction, this is doing something else. All right, let's do immortal questions time, Rebecca. So here are some of the big questions that are asked. And then we like to think, which of these are primary? What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what they what i know is this all there is how to deal with the certainty of death what else might there be what's the deal with good and evil so um all of them maybe a whole lot of these bells

59:27Jeff:definitely what is the good life definitely is this all there is absolutely what do i own my neighbor relations you know like you know how do i deal with other people absolutely how to deal with the certainty of death like that question could be an alternate title for this book right Right, right. What else might there be, of course? I think actually the only one that doesn't seem interesting for me, and maybe that makes it the most interesting, what's the deal with good and evil? And that kind of goes back to what I said for a moment is like Ishiguro doesn't think in that kind of binary term, I don't think.

59:59I mean, clearly this book is an indictment of a system that doesn't exist, but it's an indictment of systems that even resemble it in any kind of way. So I don't think it actually is that interested in... That's not a question for Ishiguro so much. Yeah, he's not interested in that.

1:00:14Jeff:None of the characters anywhere really issued judgment about these systems. We hear that some of the other schools are terrible and people wanted students to live in better conditions. But that's the closest to any kind of pushback or revolution we ever get is let's make the life for these students, for these organ donors better. We never get what if we didn't have them. We get some indication that like, well, the public just would not accept walking back now that they know what it's like to live in a world without cancer. And so this is how we've got it. This is where we're going to be. Let's make the best of it.

1:00:49Jeff:But I don't think he's interested in declaring anything good or anything purely evil. Those are also too, I just think they're too simplistic. and that one of the additional hallmarks of someone, a writer of the caliber of Ishiguro is that he's trying to answer so many of these questions in this book. Like we will read books for this show that do one or two of these questions and that do them very well. And that's why we'll be talking about them here, but that he's going for like five of them and doing all five of them with incredible skill. And I think the tangled fishing knot that he's most interested involves how to deal with the certainty of death.

1:01:27what do I owe my neighbor and what is the good life? Because I think the answer is kind of all the same or the answers emanate from the same source, which is it's each other, right? It's other people. It's being connected with, you know, it's the EM Forster just connect. But I also think the book is not an indictment of these kids for not connecting. It's not even indictment for us. It's a recognition of shit is messy, yo. Like it's not easy in those moments when someone has done something painful, you don't know what you want and we're all imperfect. And how do you and how does your relationship endure how do you come back to each other how do you deal with a relationship that's moved on i mean ruth has this very sort of real politic moment which you know i think some of us struggle with i'll put myself in there it's like she talks like you know i may not be with tommy forever and but that doesn't mean this was wrong it just means that was for that moment and we moved on and i think that's one thing a subliminal message here is like you can have different relationships at different times and that's okay you can let things go and that always needing to be with the same people have the same feelings about them is its own kind of its own kind of stultification and death and so that never let me go of the title right so like it's a made-up song but based on the real title of a real of a real jazz song i was listening to a couple times this week a couple different verses it's pretty good but you should go say just like the title but like this this knowledge that never letting go is impossible.

1:02:52Like that's what we all want, right? We want never to be let go, but we also know it's possible. And that is kind of the rub.

1:03:00Jeff:Yeah. That's the whole ball game that he sees this. I don't think he even hears the song. He sees the title on an album cover. Yeah. He says he never, I can't believe he's never listened to it, but that's another version. The never let me go idea, the quote from that introduction to the 20th anniversary edition is the sheer impossibility of what was being requested. There are times when we human beings wish from the depths of our souls for something we know to be beyond anyone's reach. And that asking someone to never let go of us or promising someone that we will never let go of them are things that that's not available to us as humans.

1:03:36Jeff:There will be - Not even the wedding vows say that till death do us part, right? That's beyond never. There will be an end. There will be some kind of letting go. And we watch Kathy reckon with that. We watch her let go of the two people that she is closest to and also how quiet and matter of fact it is. The ending of this book is devastating because she and Tommy don't have a big tearful goodbye before he goes to make his final donation and complete. They just have a day. Like they talk about it a little bit and then he leaves and she leaves and she finds out later how it went. And that's all there is to it.

1:04:17Well, isn't that the other fantasy we have about the relationships in our lives, right? Like the ones that are compromised or lost or broken. is that but for the right monologue delivered at the right time, it could be redeemed, right? And this book is not, it does not find closure to have a messianic quality or ability to it. It just doesn't believe that. I'm not sure what Isher Gora himself says, but like that is not presented as, and I was finally okay with me donating my liver to landed gentry in Oxfordshire because Tommy and I said that we loved each other and looked longing into our eyes and we had that time.

1:04:56Like it's not, that's not enough. That's not gonna, whatever it is we need to do to be whole, complete, docile and actualized fully, it's not someone saying, you know what? I'm so sorry, Kathy, I did keep you guys apart because Ruth tries it and it doesn't.

1:05:14Jeff:It doesn't change anything. I mean, it's not as bad, I guess, but it's not. You can change the quality of the connection, right but you cannot change your material circumstances you can't you can't change it are we sure this isn't about art writing no it absolutely is let me just manifest absolutely about the fact that art and connection are the things that make us human yeah i mean i don't know i'm not sure i was trying what do i have interesting to say about this i don't know that i have anything it's right there on the page i guess subtly slyly ishiguro may be making a case for written word as an art form over sculpture or drawing just because of the thickness of consciousness, right?

1:05:59I mean, just that idea, there's a lot of, I mean, this is my favorite medium, so I'm going to be a homer for it, but like, and I like other arts. I love lots of other arts. But the thing that writing can do that others can't is the thing I most want, which is this. As close as you get to the interior of another person as you're ever going to be able to do.

1:06:18Jeff:It's kind of an invitation to imagine a different version of the world these students live in, where instead of trotting up to Madame with your best paintings for her gallery to prove your humanity or to prove that you're in love with someone else, could you write a beautiful poem? Well, what if it was this document? I've thought about this. Could you tell this story and give the insight of your human relationships and that you see people and love them and that you desire to be loved and you get all of this and that it's the getting it that makes you human? And at the end of Watchmen by Alan Moore, like this story Watchmen has left for someone at the end with the idea that it'll be discovered and has this sort of revolutionary potential.

1:06:57there's a version of this where you can see that Kathy has been writing this all down and she mails it to madam or she mails it like it gets sent off as some message in a bottle even like one in a billion shot of changing the world that Ishergo leaves us that little bit of like breadcrumb of hope about revolutionary stuff he doesn't do that but you could imagine a version of that because this document has document-like qualities right where she's like I need to go I'm going to get to that in a minute she's like imagining in the future what I'm going to tell you about like it has a very textual presence even though we're not told what physical form it has

1:07:30Jeff:it also reads like it could be a transcript of some conversation that she's having because she does sort of constantly walk up to this a mention of something but like but i'll get to that later let me come back to it or that's not as important you need to understand this first before i get to that it's very discursive in that way the the lines themselves on a sentence level are not things you're going to put in Amber or, you know, put in Sentence Museum. But I think some of them do, as elliptical as this, sometimes the characters come out and make the revelation that we're talking about here. So it never occurred to me that our lives until then so closely interwoven could unravel and separate over a thing like that.

1:08:07But 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 have kept a tighter hold of one another. And that experientially I think that's true for me and so many other people that you have these friendships and relationships that have been part of your life that at the moment it seems unbreakable, it seems durable, and it's not a facade necessarily. I guess they're strong but brittle, like that distinction is an interesting one to make. But if you knew that at the time, you could do some prevention stuff.

1:08:41Like if you knew at the time how brittle and fragile those things really were, you would watch out for the crack in the foundation, right? Because that's what it turns into a crack and suddenly got to move the house and like the thing goes away. And the most regretful absences and losses in my own life that are relationships aren't, aren't really big blowups. They are the accrued erosion of day after day and time after time. Until which time the ship has floated so out far to sea, you don't know how to signal to shore anymore.

1:09:11Jeff:Yeah. There's a moment when one of the teachers is telling them your lives are set out for you you'll become adults then before you're old before you're even middle-aged you'll start to donate your vital organs that's what each of you was created to do you're not like the actors you watch on your videos you're not even like me you were brought into this world for a purpose and your futures all of them have been decided and she thinks that she's doing them a kindness by being right this direct about it and it is she grew being very direct on the page about about what's going to happen in this book, what the central tension will be, what the moral questions will be.

1:09:48Jeff:And as I've read this now for maybe five times and thought about it a lot, like one of my frequent complaints about more modern contemporary literature, like more books of the last couple of years is how overt the point is. And I think that what makes this an exception to that is that the characters know what all these questions are before we do. And They're not actually informing each other of the moral questions, of the issues, of the concerns. We're watching them reckon with it. And sometimes the narrator or Ishiguro comes in via one of the characters to make sure that we really see what's happening.

1:10:26Jeff:But I never feel like I'm being talked down to by Ishiguro. And I never feel like he doesn't trust that I can get where I need to get as a reader to reckon with these big questions and these ideas that he's asking us to sit with. and I don't know what to say about like what makes him so masterful other than that that he can't even do the thing and be very overt that normally cheapens a reading experience but he's figured out a way to do it and a way to say like what is at the heart of these books that enriches it instead well and I think even these moments of I don't know ontological clarity are not simple I think that's the other thing.

1:11:07These are not simple statements. They are still even shrouded to some degree. They're obfuscated by our limitations, right? It's like, okay, maybe if I known that there's such a ripple of regret through all of it that it cannot be cloying. It just can't be at any time. It's impossible for it to be. We've done some of the trivia and stuff. Rebecca, what else do you want to say about sort of a rata at the end?

1:11:34Jeff:I just think it's interesting that Never Let Me Go is his best-selling novel. He says in the Nobel lecture, it really quickly surpassed the Remains of the Day, even though Remains of the Day had a 16-year head start and had been made into an award-winning movie. And I wonder about that. This sounds maybe more commercial than the other novels because it has this dystopian horror thing, at least until you get up. Yeah, the hook is really enticing. until you get to Clara and the sun remains of the day is much shorter it's a little elliptical we're just much more of a character study I mean this is much more of a character study I think these are both masterful I'm not mad at you if you want to make the case that remains of the day is his best work but never let me go is the one that really settles it and I don't know that he wins the Nobel without never let me go that remains of the day had existed for a long time before we get to 2017 and he wins the Nobel and Never Let Me Go was much more recent.

1:12:35Jeff:Having just read The Berry Giant, I don't think it was The Berry Giant that clinched the Nobel win. Well, I do think, I think the genre exploration is a fact and that you get Never Let Me Go and Berry Giant coming off of some books that feel more traditional or within a tradition rather than traditional where these, each one, Isha Goro's in that zone. You don't know what you're going to, I mean, you know, it's going to be Ishiguro, but format, time, condition is going to be quite wild. So that's pretty amazing at the same time. I think the other thing that strikes me about it is the degree to which that the concern was about interiority, right?

1:13:20That he was thinking about students. And we didn't talk about this, but this idea of education itself being a topic, when do you know what you know? I think when we talked about Never Let Me Go Before, the analogy I made is like, when did you figure out that you were mortal, that you were going to die? Some people have a, there's no Santa Claus moment with their own mortality. Most of us don't. Most of us, we see goldfish die, and then grandparents, then movies, then TCs, and we make the logical leap to people die, I'm a person, ergo, I'm going to die someday. Of all the times we sit down, you sit down and have your sex ed tech with your kid, or about consent, or all the modern sort of well-meaning parent talks that you have, you know what's not on that punch list, Rebecca?

1:14:08That you're going to die someday. That you're going to die someday. And I don't know why. I guess the answer is maybe we ask the world to do that education for us. Maybe it's the one we don't have an answer to. Rowan and I were just talking the other day about if she lives to be 87, she'll live into the 22nd century.

1:14:27Jeff:It's wild. Cool idea, right? It's a wild idea, right? And I'll be like, at that point, well, then you could say my dad was born two centuries ago. Yeah, I'm from the 1900s. I'm from the 1900s. But implicit with that is like we weren't talking about it. I'll be gone. I'm not going to be around when you're 80. It's just not going to happen. It's Freud, right? That like we are, it's terror of death. That is the reason we do all the things. It's the reason that we have sex. It's the reason we have relationships. It's the reason that we make art, that we are trying to convince ourselves that we are alive and that facing the end is too devastating to actually do.

1:14:59Jeff:And that some people at different points in their life do come to a deep acceptance of that reality that life will end. But most of us, most of the time are operating at some level of denial that that's true because we couldn't function if we had to walk around with a real felt awareness of it all day, every day. And we see that in these characters in this book that that they more than normal humans have to face the reality that they will die because it is the thing they were born to do. That's their only reason for existing. And even they can't look at it that closely. It's just kind of out of the corner of their eye, like when the moon is full and the time is right and the vibe is good.

1:15:39Jeff:And you can you can look at it just just enough to start to think maybe I should apologize for that thing. Or maybe I want to tell this story to somebody. But I think Ishiguro gets his finger onto something here that like most of us can't come very close to it. And even when your life was created just for the purpose of ending, we still can't come very close to it. that this is why we need, or one of the things that drives us to connection and to create art is to convince ourselves that that's maybe not true, that we could avoid it somehow, that there's some magical deferral. Right. There's some magical deferral.

1:16:15If we just make a good enough snail drawing, it'll be fine. Hot takes, I don't have a lot of hot takes. I did one already, which is, do not get distracted unduly and totally about the sci-fi conceit. That's a mean, it is a means to an end. It is not the end.

1:16:32Jeff:Yeah, I think if you've never read a sci-fi novel in your life, you can read this because the sci-fi pieces are not that component and are not that central. And if you are a hard sci-fi reader and you aren't very familiar with literary fiction, you can read this as well because the language is not, this is not high literary and a challenging writing kind of way. like for whatever genre preference reason you think this might not be a book for you you can probably give it a try ishiguru finds a way to be accessible from both sides of genre or literary i was i think sometimes like does he have a crystal ball like this cloning stuff has not come true or like the the fears that he had about it in 2005 have not been realized in this way but the like ai driven imaginary or the ai driven friends that he imagines in clara and the sun like we're basically there we don't have them running around in robot bodies everywhere but we've got people having relationships with ai chatbots and it's that prescience about what humans will do i think like this is actually my hot take is that it's not that he's really good at looking at technology.

1:17:43Jeff:It's just that he has a really good sense of what humans are after and what we will do with any kind of technology or what we might do with a scientific advancement that lets these stories feel like they're prescient, but also timeless that you can't open this and it feels just as fresh today as 20 years ago. I have one more hot take I didn't put here. It's too hot to write. Tell me if this is a one star book for you. I don't know how to talk to you about books. i can i it's not quite beyond good and evil but if this is i'm not saying you have to have a play again you people have whatever reading experience they want i'm not interested in adjudicating that but in terms of relating to me and like being inhabitants of the same country when it comes to what we're looking for in books one star suggests that even the attempt is uninteresting

1:18:37and we're going to have to play a different game with each other. That's my hot take on this one. If you hate this book, hate it. You're like, I don't get it. There's nothing here for me. It's whatever. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that we are going to be speaking a different artistic, an aesthetic, moral, philosophical language.

1:18:58Jeff:Yeah, and this goes back to what we said in the first episode of this podcast, that this isn't even about what we like. and what we don't like or our personal reviews though we love this one of these books though this is a shared favorite it's right it's about why why do these books matter what are they trying to do in modern literature why how why and how are they in conversation with other forms of art with other contemporary books with other things that are in the zeitgeist like if the stuff that underpins contemporary dystopian writing is interesting to you there is something for you in this book, even if what you would prefer is a revolution against the Capitol and a plot driven, you know, like attempt to have an adventure and solve the love triangle and do the whole thing.

1:19:45Jeff:They're like the hearts of those ideas reside here too. And I would encourage folks to give that a shot. I didn't have a lot of read-alikes or books inspired. I had this thought experiment for you though. Or did you have anything? I was just going to say, if you want to do read-alikes, It's not about plot, but it's read other Ishiguro books and see what he can do. Yeah. I had one of like, what would Ishiguro do with this other sci-fi conceit? I was like, okay, what would I like to see? And I really like the TV show Severance. Yes. But I can't help imagining an Ishiguro novel with the same conceit being really incredible.

1:20:24Jeff:That would be incredible. Like, what are we doing? And that show comes pretty close. Like all they're ever concerned about the innies or the outies is connection with each other. And what does it all mean? And am I really alive? And what are we doing here? Or a never let me go version of directed by Ben Stiller, written and directed by Ben Stiller. Same conceit. Like that's a fascinating idea. That would be incredible. If you're going to your imaginary cocktail party where you're worried that Ishiguro is going to come up, I think all you need to say is that he helps us explore what makes us human by putting characters into dehumanizing and inhuman positions and that the work is always about the need for connection and empathy and finding meaning.

1:21:08Jeff:Whether you're talking about Never Let Me Go or The Remains of the Day or Clara and the Sun or I'm hot off of the buried giant, like it's always fundamentally about what makes us human and our relationships with each other. all right last thing zero to well-read score zero one to ten with ten being the highest of these five factors one is historical importance what would you give this historical importance this individual novel like a six or a seven but i give ishigurus body of work a nine or a ten like i don't think you need to have read any one ishigurus novel to do the whole thing but you need to have some ishigurus under your belt yeah if shakespeare like you know if if one of the triple a shakespeare is a 10 this just doesn't have 50 years of you know if this becomes 1984 right that the the the number could go up it could it very well could readability interesting one i think this is a nine this book is readable it's easy like the the language here is easy the plot and character though that a lot of people look for in readability i think the score is a little low um it's not difficult it is short like your eyes can get over the sentences without friction i guess if that's sort of so you want to come to what like a seven yeah somewhere in there okay it's not a page turner right if maybe that's the ultimate a page turner is a 10 current relevance is essential questions i mean this for me is a 10 i agree i don't know i don't know there's there's nothing else this is as central as it gets yeah book nerd read credit i think it's pretty high i do too i think it's pretty high something like eight or nine like then that it scored so highly in that New York Times, the best of the century indicates this, that like hundreds of literary professionals can come to an agreement that this is one of the best of the last hundred years.

1:22:52Jeff:Having this book on your shelf and in your brain, it does make you more conversant in some rooms than otherwise. Eight? Yeah, I think eight. Eight. Oh damn factor. The je ne sais quoi of reading experiences oh there's not a big explosive oh damn but just the quiet emotional devastation like how many times in the last two weeks as we've been reading this and preparing for this show has one of us been like oh my god my heart i just can't take it i mean it elicits by the end of an emotion i don't quite know how to articulate yeah i mean and maybe that's the highest compliment I mean, if you're not going to get a 10 for that.

1:23:35Jeff:Yeah, there's not like a palate cleanser you can go pursue after Never Let Me Go to shake it. There is no amount of TikTok scrolling that will get you off the emotion of, but it's just such a good, it's a good, heavy, substantial feeling. Maybe an eight there just because if it crystallized in like a real, a couple of showstoppers or one of the great, I mean, this has a good ending, but it doesn't have one of the great sort of memorable endings of all time. I'll give it an eight. So that's a six, seven, 10, eight, eight. So we've got 26. We're looking at a 39. 39 out of 50. Pretty good. Pretty, pretty good.

1:24:15You can find the show notes at bookriot.com slash listen. You can shoot us an email at zerotowellreadatbookriot.com. That email will also be in the show notes. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, until next time, we'll talk to you later.