I've read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Again again to teach it again. Once I taught it to a 12th grade AP Literature class; now to a group of talented and intelligent freshmen. The age gap is a big one, I suppose, but the language in Ishiguro's novel is clear, conversational, relatable; I'm not worried about it being beyond their grasp intellectually. But I do wonder about the age difference when it comes to maturity. A senior is looking out into the future, into the world of college or work, and perhaps can understand something fundamental about the anxiety about growing up into a dangerous world that Never Let Me Go expresses. A freshmen has made it, they've got their foot in the door and the change--triumphant or traumatic--is, in some sense, behind them. For now.
The first time I read Never Let Me Go, I wanted to read it purely as a coming of age parable, as a universal narrative. The students at the boarding school Hailsham--and you really shouldn't finish this sentence if you haven't read it--are clones, sure, destined to give up their vital organs so that others can be cured of terminal disease. But are they so different than the rest of us, grappling with a future in which the only thing certain is death? I always wanted to read that as the central irony of the novel; we yearn for Tommy, Kathy, and Ruth to fight against their fate, but we too are captives to a fate that cannot be fought.
Reading it now I'm much more prone to see the elements of privilege and class that make Never Let Me Go decidedly not a universal story. Though the novel does much to erase them--that's Ishiguro's main trick, repression--there are people here who live vastly different lives than the student clones, and whose entire well-being is predicated on the clones' suffering and dying. Read this way, Never Let Me Go brings to mind all the ways in which a global underclass suffers and dies for the comfort of the few, in sweatshops, in lithium mines, in hunger and in poverty. Read this way, the proper response to Never Let Me Go is not sadness or wistfulness but rage.
There are glimpses of that rage at the beginning of the book. As a kid, Tommy is known for his short temper and his blind, furious screaming sessions. It takes very little to set him off, and he's widely disliked for it (though Kathy sees more or less past his bad reputation). The anger is socialized out of him as he grows up, developing healthy relationships with Kathy and Ruth, and with the guardians at the school. But anger is exactly what's required in the face of a great injustice, and instead the guardians divert Tommy's energy into ill-fated attempts at creativity. Instead of shouting, he draws minutely detailed animals in his notebook, hoping they will prove something about him. (The clones mistakenly believe that what they will prove is that he and Kathy are in love, which will be rewarded by a brief deferral of his "donations"; what they are really meant to prove is that he has a soul at all.) One of the novel's final scenes, in which Tommy and Kathy, after failing in their milquetoast attempts to confront Hailsham's former headmistress, has Tommy making a primal scream in the woods. All that repressed anger returns, but there's no longer the possibility of a useful outlet for it. After all, Tommy's already made two donations.
The other thing I'm noticing for the first time is this: it's a strange thing to represent an abused underclass with the literary vocabulary of the boarding school novel. The ostensible privilege of a place like Hailsham works to obscure the grisly nature of what is done to the clones. You might react by indicting Ishiguro. If you want to depict the underclass, you might say, go write a novel about a Pakistani immigrant or something, not a stuffy English boarding school. But you might also say that Hailsham is a literal false consciousness, an ideology used to repress the reality of class-based oppression. And in fact, Hailsham's legacy causes class fractures among the clones: among their friends at The Cottages, a kind of clone halfway house, being a Hailsham student indicates a kind of privilege. Hailsham students, a "veteran" asserts, must know about the possibility of deferring donations; they have that kind of secret access. False consciousness pits members against the underclass against each other to keep them from confronting, or even seeing, their real oppressors.
So what is Hailsham, exactly? Kathy never wavers from her nostalgia for it, and it's easy to see why. In a brief, painful, and constrained life, it offered companionship, care, education. That's exactly what the headmistress, Miss Emily says, when Tommy and Kathy confront her at the end. Hailsham, Miss Emily explains, was founded to prove to the outside world that clones were real people and deserved better treatment. To that end--they provided better treatment, for some--they were successful, though the public side of their campaign was a failure. This conversation is well-wrought and complex; you really do find yourself wondering whether Miss Emily is right.
But Hailsham reads to me now as an image of moderate pragmatism and its failures. Think of the choice, perhaps, between advocating for better prison conditions and prison abolition. Yes, the abolition of prisons seems like a pipe dream, but when does the pragmatic approach--by sealing off from the left the question of whether we should have prisons at all--collude with the imprisoners? Miss Emily, in this scene, is confined to a wheelchair, but she hints at the fact that she hopes to be able to walk again soon. Does Miss Emily tell herself, as she tells Kathy and Tommy, that she's proud of the difference she made in their lives as she's off to the clinic to receive her brand new clone-grown spleen?
That's when Tommy goes off and yells in the woods. You wish he'd gone off and screamed in Miss Emily's face. I do, at least, and the more I re-read the novel, my anger only grows. But there's plenty to be angry about in the here and now, and plenty of screaming wasted.
