Tolog Review: Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
reviewed by Hannah Huynh

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is about a young woman named Kathy who looks back to her childhood at Hailsham. Hailsham was the school Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy went to. It was a mysterious place secluded from the rest of the world, surrounded by a chilling forest. Kathy is now a thirty-one-year-old carer. Tommy and Ruth have reentered her life as the donors Kathy must look after as a carer. With them back in her life, she looks back upon her days at Hailsham reflective and nostalgic. This novel is a story about friendship, loss, and if life is worth living. 

This novel is told in the perspective of Kathy. We only get her side of the story and her opinions. Symbols, motifs, themes, and foreshadowing are all found in this novel. Symbols in this novel include the open-plan office and the song Never Let Me Go. The open-plan office is seen several times in the book. It symbolizes the students’ fading hope for their future. When the students search for Ruth’s “possible” in the open-plan office, they figure out it is not her “possible”. This confirms the unlikelihood of Ruth’s wish for her future. The song Never Let Me Go was Kathy’s favorite song from her cassette tape. This song gives the novel its title and also represents losing loved ones and loving others. The song additionally symbolizes the relationship between Kathy and Tommy in the novel. When Kathy loses her cassette tape, she experiences her first loss of something she loved. The motif of imagination and reality is found throughout the novel, including Hailsham guardians not directly telling the students about donations, Ruth’s dream future of working in an open-plan office, and the supposed deferrals on donations. One of the main themes of this novel is the worth of living. In his novel, Ishiguro questions whether one’s life is worth living if he or she knows they will die when Kathy says, “Why did we do all of that work in the first place? Why train us, encourage us, make us produce all of that? If we’re just going to give donations anyway, then die, why all those lessons? Why all those books and discussions?” (Ishiguro 259). Ishiguro uses foreshadowing in his novel. The woods that lie outside of Hailsham foreshadow the students’ futures when they leave the school, and the loss of Kathy’s cassette tape foreshadows the many losses she later experiences as a young adult. Never Let Me Go is a great novel to read especially because though human life does come to an end, it is important to know that all should live their life to the fullest.