„Never let me go“ by Kazuo Ishiguro (short essay)

„Never let me go“ is a 2005 book by Kazuo Ishiguro, the well-known author of „Remains of the day“.

Set in a parallel world in which cloning of human beings has been perfectioned as early as in the 1960s, the novel focuses an Kathy H., a young clone. The novel uses the first person narration and takes over Kathy's perspective. Due to her lack of knowledge Kathy is a so-called unrealiable narrator. Establishing an open-beginning, the very first lines immediately create some mysteries: „My name is Kathy H. I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, ...“ What on earth is a carer and why would a career of eleven years sound long enough? The reader needs some patience until these and other upcoming questions are being answered in the book.

Parts I and II constitute major flasbacks, Part I dealing with Kathy and her friends' childhood, Part II referring to their adolescent years at a place called „The Cottages“. The third part is set in the novel's present, which is at some point in the nineties. As one might gather, clones are not really the kings and queens of society, to say the least. They are meant to serve a certain purpose.

Why would the author use a parallel world instead of a probably more „realistic“ (and probably far more frightening) speculative future world? The answer proves to be simple. Creating a future vision would demand a quite big deal of science fiction writing. The story's focus would be on technology and perhaps on society. The parallel world of the past allows the author to describe the world of the clones (which is some kind of parallel society within the story) in the context of the world of the Sixties to Ninenties which the reader is familiar with. (And there is one more aspect: Hopefully once the cloning technology is as far developed as in the novel mankind will be mature enough to properly deal with it.) So the focus can be put on human and philosophical aspects, such as the question if clones do have souls.

A similar story is unfolded in Michael Bay's 2005 movie „The island“ starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, based upon the novel „Spares“ by Michael Marshall Smith.