Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro (2005)

There is a passage near the end of Never Let Me Go that speaks about the inertia of the suffering we cause others (“By the time people become concerned…There was no going back”). Living requires that we cause pain to other beings. There is no avoiding killing microbes with every breath, killing plants and animals with every morsel of food, contributing to the killing of other human beings with the products we consume. Some of the choices were made for us long ago by evolution; others are consequences of the economic systems in which we participate, either blindly, willingly, or begrudgingly. Ishiguro chooses a particularly blunt commodity to make the point, but his innovation is to write the story from the commodity‘s perspective. He pulls it off with his typical elegance and warmth. Now our eyes are wide open: our buzz derives from the pain of others. And here’s the thing: there is a going back, at least most of the way, at least to the edge of what is inescapably required to be a living human organism. It only requires that we investigate, in each moment and each generation, the character of sufficiency. It only requires redefining joy—even pleasure—as what arises from the simple fact of being alive. Everything else is a bonus, and sometimes, to someone, a deficit. 9 ↑ ↓

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. Faber and Faber, 2005. Reviewed May 2, 2025