tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

It's inevitable that someone would compare the upcoming movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go with the Michael Bay 'mishap and flop' science-fiction film, The Island, starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johanson. Why the comparison? One term: cloning. But the similarity (it's actually common denominator) ends there.

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Says someone at the IMDb board who managed to convey the same feelings as I, with regards to the comparison:

The novel was actually published around the same time the movie The Island came out in 2005, so it's unlikely either of them had any influence on the other. Never Let Me Go is, of course, nothing like a Michael Bay movie.

Some movie fans, by their very nature, would certainly not stop there, and remain adamant in their "comparative analysis". Of course, moviegoers who prefer the likes of The Remains of the Day (also written by Ishiguro) or Atonement can never see eye to eye with those who brag about the awesomeness of Transformers or similar big-budgetted films. And so, someone added:

Never Let Me Go is more of a drama than a Sci-Fi thriller. It starts off as a Prep-school genre type novel, about three adolescents growing up in a British boarding school some time in the 1990s. It's an eerie, atmospheric and subtly disturbing story. If the movie is anything like the book it's based on, it's NOTHING LIKE THE ISLAND.

The cast of the movie can only be described as superb - the three leads represent the best of British talents - Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan (who plays the main character Kathy H.) and Andrew Garfield (who was electrifying in Boy A). Playing pivotal parts are Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins.

More About the Book: Slate published an interesting book review written by author Margaret Atwood.

Never Let Me Go is the sixth novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his chilling rendition of a bootlickingly devoted but morally blank English butler, The Remains of the Day. It's a thoughtful, crafty, and finally very disquieting look at the effects of dehumanization on any group that's subject to it. In Ishiguro's subtle hands, these effects are far from obvious. There's no Them-Bad, Us-Good preaching; rather there's the feeling that as the expectations of such a group are diminished, so is its ability to think outside the box it has been shut up in. The reader reaches the end of the book wondering exactly where the walls of his or her own invisible box begin and end. Ishiguro likes to experiment with literary hybrids, to hijack popular forms for his own ends, and to set his novels against tenebrous historical backdrops; thus When We Were Orphans mixes the Boys' Own Adventure with the '30s detective story while taking a whole new slice out of World War II. An Ishiguro novel is never about what it pretends to pretend to be about, and Never Let Me Go is true to form. You might think of it as the Enid Blyton schoolgirl story crossed with Blade Runner, and perhaps also with John Wyndham's shunned-children classic, The Chrysalids: The children in it, like those in Never Let Me Go, give other people the creeps. [ read more ]

What follows is a summary of the book itself

[ Warning: Spoilers!]

The novel describes the life of Kathy H., a young woman of 31, focusing at first on her childhood at an unusual boarding school and eventually her adult life. The story takes place in a dystopian Britain, in which human beings are cloned to provide donor organs for transplants. Kathy and her classmates have been created to be donors, though the adult Kathy is temporarily working as a "carer," someone who supports and comforts donors as they are made to give up their organs and, eventually, submit to death. As in Ishiguro's other works, the truth of the matter is made clear only gradually, via veiled but suggestive language and situations.

The novel is divided in three parts, chronicling the three phases of the lives of its main characters.

The first part is set at Hailsham, a boarding school where the children are brought up and educated. The teachers there mysteriously encourage the students to produce various forms of art. The best works are chosen by a woman known only as Madame and are said to be collected in a gallery. That Hailsham is not a normal school is also indicated by the emphasis on frequent medical checks and other odd details.

While the students of Hailsham are often cliquey, capricious and cruel, the three main characters - Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy - develop a stable friendship during this time. Kathy herself seems to have resigned herself to being an observer of other people, and the choices they make, instead of making her own choices. She often takes the role of the peacemaker in the clique, especially between Tommy and Ruth. Tommy is an isolated boy who has difficulty in relating to others and is often the target of bullies, while Ruth is an extrovert with strong opinions.

In the second part, the characters, now young adults, move to the "Cottages", residential complexes where they start to have contacts with the external world and they are relatively free to do what they want. A romantic relationship develops between Ruth and Tommy, while Kathy explores her sexuality but without forming any stable connections. While at the Cottages, they travel to Norfolk. The third part describes Tommy's and Ruth's becoming donors and Kathy's becoming a carer. Kathy cares for Ruth and then, after Ruth "completes" (Ishiguro's evocative euphemism for death), Kathy takes care of Tommy. Before her death, Ruth expresses regret over coming between Kathy and Tommy, and urges them to pursue a relationship with one another, and to seek to defer their donations based on their love. Encouraged by Ruth's last wishes, Kathy and Tommy visit Madame, where they also meet their old headmistress, Miss Emily. During this visit, they learn why artistic production had always been emphasized at Hailsham. They also learn that deferring their donations, a possibility rumoured among clones for many years, is impossible. The clones learn that Hailsham in general was an experiment, an effort to improve the conditions for clones and perhaps alter the attitudes of society, which prefers to view the clones merely as non-human sources of organs. The novel ends, after the death of Tommy, on a note of resignation, as Kathy accepts her own inevitable fate as a donor and her eventual "completion."