I have thought often of his discussion of the novel’s allegorical implications, the way it turns out to be not really (or at least not just) about cloning, but about life and death and how we all spend the time in between, about the strangeness of our assumption that “that to be assured of death at seventy or eighty or ninety returns to life all its savor and purpose.” “Why is sheer longevity,” Wood asks, “if it most certainly ends in the same way as sheer brevity, accorded meaning, while sheer brevity is thought to lack it?” More than the novel itself, I have remembered James Wood’s review of it, which-rereading it today-still seems like an exemplary work of criticism. (Another novel that gets better and better, IMHO, the more you reread its earlier sections in light of its later ones is Atonement, which I really miss teaching!)Īnyway, I kept reading this time even though I was a bit bored, because I knew what was coming and I wanted to get there again.

A really attentive rereading would make the most of that later knowledge, and I expect all kinds of details would turn out to be much more significant than they seem in the moment, just as Stevens’s obsession with silver polish or choice of light reading in Remains turn out to matter much more than you might think at first. It’s only as you near the end that you understand that the very triviality and pettiness and (more or less) normalcy of those years is the point, or the challenge, of the entire concept. Sure, there are some intense moments along the way, but it’s the final 1/8 that, retrospectively, illuminates the earlier parts. The truth is that much of the first, say, 7/8 of Never Let Me Go is remarkable in its banality what gives it momentum on a first read is the underlying eeriness, the creeping sense that something is awry with these children and their teachers and their situation, that there’s a mystery we need resolved. Subtlety is one of Ishiguro’s great gifts, of course, but his characteristic understatement actually demands a lot of his readers en route to its rewards, and on every other attempt I just couldn’t keep it up. Why? Because every time I have tried, I have found it too dull, too slow, too (to put a more positive spin on it) subtle. And yet I have never read it again until now-at least, not all the way through.

Many people I know admire Never Let Me Go even more, so it has always seemed that it would be worth going back to, both to experience it in that fuller way you usually can on a rereading and to see if I might like to assign it some day. The Remains of the Day is one of my personal top 10 novels: I consider it pretty much perfect. I’ve tried several times since then to reread it. My copy of Never Let Me Go is a 2006 edition, and it may well have been in 2006 that I read it for the first time.

Never let me go novel book review