Never Let Me Go

Literary writers who dip their toes in science fictional waters can often become unstuck. Ishiguro is too good a writer to make a complete hash of this one, but it's still the least satisfying of his novels I've read. The central conceit is interesting, although not nearly as mysterious from the outset as the author would like us to think, but the real problems are in the plot and narrative, which are both very slight. There's barely any actual story here, and the narration is just too limpid and accepting of a fate that I'd expect to provoke rage and rebellion. It's all a bit vague and wafty, as evinced by the way you can see the central idea as an allegory for pretty much anything if you squint at it hard enough. Is it about racism? Or is it an indictment of capitalism and our unthinking consumption of resources? It could be a pro-vegetarian argument against industrial farming or perhaps an attempt to illustrate the class divide in modern Britain. There isn't enough in the book to firmly nail its colours to any of these masts, and the reader is left to apply her own prejudices to the set up in order to read it as anything other than a straight narrative.

I'm moaning more than I mean to here. I didn't hate reading this at all, and the pages kept turning quickly. Ishiguro is still an excellent prose stylist, and the evocation of place here, from an old fashioned boarding school to modern but run down facilities to house these people we don't want clogging up our regular lives (oooh, add maybe it's a metaphor for asylum seekers to the list above) is excellent. In the end, this is nowhere near his best work, but below par Ishiguro is still way ahead of the pack.