Lucky pawns

It's been a long time since I read a book as good as Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro has the gift of presenting us with enormously deep and difficult emotions in an understated, tightly controlled, slowly paced manner that only serves to highlight the depth of feeling. The slow clenching in your gut that you feel as you read seems to come from the story and from the characters, not from the writing itself.

Never Let Me Go opens at an exclusive British boarding school, where the three main characters, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are students. The school, called Hailsham, seems nice enough, almost idyllic, but there are a few strange things. The students are never allowed to leave the grounds and don't seem to have families. And the only classes that are mentioned are things like art, music, and poetry; there is no chemistry or math or history. The students are pushed to be creative, and their very best works are taken away to be put in the Headmistress's "Gallery", a collection that the Guardians at Hailsham never mention but all the students are sure exists.

The book traces the relationships of Kathy (the narrator), Tommy, and Ruth as they leave Hailsham and begin the next phases of their lives, and as they begin to figure out who they are, what the Gallery means, what kind of institution Hailsham actually is. Ishiguro depicts the changing relationships with precision and poignancy; there is the sense, as in real relationships, of tension, uncertainty, and vagueness, and also the sense that understanding and working out these relationships is critically important.

The premise of the story lacks a certain realism if you think about it too much, but as it unfolds in the book you are so drawn in by the realism in the characters and the feelings that it doesn't seem to matter; the situation the characters find themselves in can be understood on an almost symbolic level. What makes this book great is that the lives of the characters, so different from ours externally, make us see our own lives in a different perspective.