Remains of the DNA

How clones, like the rest of us, justify their own misery

Mike Godwin from the October 2005 issue

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Whether Ishiguro intends the connection or not, it's worth noting that this fantasizing is a nice metaphor for religion. Indeed, maybe it really just is religion--the time-honored practice of creating a metaphysical justification for our suffering and loss, one that gives us enough meaning to endure at least a little longer.

Just as important, the author paints a picture of how subtly and almost painlessly indoctrination can work--creating a worldview that accepts monstrous cruelty, and does so at such a fundamental level that it does not occur to anyone to question it. (We later discover that even those who take advantage of the cloned are trapped in their own mind-sets--they occasionally have some qualms about what they are doing but don't seriously question or challenge the whole setup.)

In this respect, Never Let Me Go invites a comparison to Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day. In Remains, the central conceit is that the butler narrator is so focused on playing his proper social role that he cannot fully see what is happening in the souls of the human beings around him--from the woman who might have loved him to his employer, who lurches into British fascism. In Never Let Me Go, by contrast, none of the characters is truly blind to what's going on; they can recognize the horror of their situation, but it doesn't matter.

It is perhaps because the cruelty of Never Let Me Go is so blandly observed by characters who are unwilling to challenge it that some reviewers have fretted so obsessively about whether it is "science fiction." Consider James Wood's not entirely backhanded compliment in The New Republic: "Given that Ishiguro's new novel is explicitly about cloning, that it is, in effect, a science fiction set in the present day, and that the odds against success in this mode are bullyingly stacked, his success in writing a novel that is at once speculative, experimental, and humanly moving is almost miraculous." Wood goes on to characterize as a "thin elite" those science fiction writers "who succeed on literary terms." H.G. Wells and Karl Capek make the Wood cut, but hardly anyone else does. Thanks a lot, Mr. Wood, and science fiction doesn't need you either. Calling the book "science fiction" gives some reviewers a way to pigeonhole it--to avoid its uncomfortable truths.

More important than the novel's genre is whether it enables us to see things about ourselves that we might not have seen so clearly before. Never Let Me Go, like all good fiction, meets that test. It shines a light on the extent to which we are all somewhat proud of our ability to adapt ourselves to what history may later judge a monstrous state of affairs, telling ourselves that this--where "this" may be glib tolerance of dehumanizing poverty, the heedless degradation of our biosphere, or even the invasion of Iraq--is, after all, "what we are supposed to be doing, isn't it?"