There was so little real emotion in the story, so much “broken dreams and shattered illusions” kind of activity, that there was nothing for me to connect to, very little there.  Although there was a  connection drawn between the activism of the 1960′s and the tech-savvy activism of today, I found even the sympathetic characters cold and distant, ultimately not at all memorable.

Ultimately I found the novel to be largely forgettable, trying too hard to be insightful about a group of characters I didn’t identify with or care about.  Coming away from the book, and now, after several months, I think the value of the story is less literary and more historical, a fictionalized snapshot of Manhattan life before and after 9/11.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s NEVER LET ME GO is a story about a group of clones raised at a boarding school and intended, in their young adulthood, to be organ donors. Told as a memoir, the novel captures perfectly the way that people both accept the realities they’re presented with but also how emotion, love, pushes people to challenge any boundary. The writing is austere, even slow in places, and the simple plot unfolds gently, without any shocking science-fiction detail or grizzly surgery scenes. Most of the piece is a long reminiscence by the narrator, a clone named Kathy, of her childhood at an idyllic, pastoral boarding school. Like adopted children who grow up knowing the word adoption before they can understand it’s meaning, Kathy and her friends know the facts of their futures from childhood, never questioning their destinies. Even in their wildest dreams, the clones never want anything more than a brief reprieve. There is something deliberate and inevitable about the progression of the story, which, like the progression of my knitting, and like life itself, has a finite end. Even so, I’m reminded of weekends in college, when it got dark at 4:30 and I’d climb into the car with my best friend behind the wheel, and we’d drive off into the darkness. I was eighteen yet I still didn’t know how to drive, and somehow that made our journeys all the more sacred, since I could never be more than a passenger. The rural roads were dark, and even if it wasn’t actually snowing, the sky was usually clouded over. Inside the warm car we were completely encapsulated in silence or our conversation. It was easy to believe that the entirety of life, of existence, was contained in that car, so that even the back seat or the road beyond the headlights was unreal and imaginary. Although the isolation was frightening, it was also severely comforting. The bare trees and the stark landscape flew by, and sometimes, when the snow was falling thickly, the headlights illuminated each individual flake so that as we sped into the night I imagined we were flying through a starry sky. Time kept moving but was out of sequence, swirling into a languid circle instead of a straight line. Ishiguro’s prose makes me feel that way, like I am somehow outside of time. The motion in my hands makes the soft intonation of his words land more solidly, and I have the sensation that the story has no finite end-point, that I might sit in my blue velvet chair, knitting this shawl, forever. And while the idea of such permanence is frightening, it is comforting too.

I loved hearing this book for two reasons: It’s an amazing story, richly plotted, thought-provoking and emotional. Perhaps as important, for an audiobook, I really enjoyed the reader, Rosalyn Landor, and I felt she was perfectly matched to the content of the book.