Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go.

Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro won the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day which begins with Stevens at Darlington Hall fretting whether he should go on an expedition to the West Country in Mr Farraday’s Ford. It doesn’t seem to him quite proper, Stevens being a butler and, well, Farraday being less of a master that allows such things.  The big question of what is a life for?  is asked. The same question pops up in Never Let Me Go.   It is written in the same first person style and begins with,  ‘My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years’.  It flits between her time as Hailsham student, a kind of grandiose public school that nurtures young boys and girls, her relationship with Ruth and Tommy, both of whom  were pupils at that school and in different ways she loved and she becomes carers for.  The  reader in The Remains of the Day is an outsider looking in and can understand how Stevens continues to delude himself  about the pre-war glory years of serving a Fascist Tory parasite (are there any other kind?) with a title and an expectation that his sort of household was the correct way to run society.  What could not have been expected was after all those years of Upstairs Downstairs, which was kind of like Crossroads, but with more cut-glass accents, was the cloning of The Remains of the Day for popular telly.  You may well be asking what this has got to do with Never Let Me Go? The answer is that everyone in the book is a clone, including the reader. A person, very like me, worked his way steadily through the narrative.  The narrator seemed to him, although superficially a young lady to have the voice of an middle-aged butler that might or might not have had a few regrets. The 2010 cloned film version, directed by Mark Romanek with a screenplay by Alex Garland seemed to him that very rare breed, as being better than the book.

Since it is the end of the year and everybody does lists and tries to make them sound authentic I’d suggest a few films that are better than the books. 1) Bible. 2) Ben Hur 3)Bladerunner. Next year I’m cloning the letter C.