Savage Meritocracies

Alix Ohlin revisits Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Never Let Me Go” on the occasion of its 20th anniversary.

By Alix OhlinApril 28, 2025

• Fiction

• Literary Criticism

• SF

NO MATTER HOW many times I read it, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go breaks my heart all over again. Although it might be my favorite novel, I don’t have a clear memory of the first time I encountered it. Over the years, I’ve read it multiple times, at least five or six, and my memories overlap and blur (as is the case with so many of Ishiguro’s narrators) so that it’s hard to tease them apart. What I know for sure is that the cadences of this lovely, melancholy novel are ingrained in me. Some books belong to a specific place and time in a person’s life, and when you go back to them, they don’t fit you anymore: perhaps the politics hasn’t aged well, or a character’s voice no longer resonates, or the particular wound you brought to it, which made it speak to you, has healed. That’s not the case for me with Never Let Me Go.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication. Widely acknowledged as one of Ishiguro’s best, number nine on the (admittedly flawed) New York Times list of the top novels of the 21st century, Never Let Me Go has now reached the age at which its youthful protagonists confront the cruel reality of their lives: that they are clones created to serve as organ donors, soon to die painful, premature deaths.

Rereading it this fall, I found the book more resonant than ever. The questions it raises around cloning feel less immediate than they used to, but the world it presents—fundamentally extractive, inequitable, and threaded with loss—is more than ever our own.

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Never Let Me Go is narrated—I want to say remembered—by Kathy H., the longest-surviving member of a trio of friends who grew up together at Hailsham, a mysterious yet unmistakably British boarding school in the countryside. Degrees of intimacy among Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy shift and swing as they grow from childhood to adulthood, but Kathy remains both the anchor point of the triangle and the person left, by the end of novel, to sift through the detritus of their lives for what treasures endure. As an adult, Kathy works as a “carer” for “donors,” a job she finds difficult but rewarding: “Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural.”

Each of these statements raises its own question—about what it means to be natural and not a machine, what it means to have a kind. Kathy evidently takes pride in her work, but what she describes sounds less like care than control. Her donors, she says, have impressive recovery times, and “hardly any of them have been classified as ‘agitated,’ even before fourth donation.”

What is this world in which caring is containment, and donations are numbered? It takes some time for the ideas of the book to unfold for the reader, as it did for Ishiguro himself. He first conceived of Never Let Me Go as far back as the early 1990s. In his 2008 Paris Review interview, he outlined the process:

The original idea was to write a story about students, young people who are going to go through a human life span in thirty years instead of eighty. I thought that they were going to come across nuclear weapons that were being moved around at night in huge lorries and be doomed in some way. It finally fell in place when I decided to make the students clones. Then I had a sci-fi reason for why their life spans are limited. One of the attractions about using clones is that it makes people ask immediately, What does it mean to be a human being? It’s a secular route to the Dostoyevskian question, What is a soul?

These questions were very much in the air in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Human cloning shimmered on a distant but not infinite horizon, and public discourse wrestled with its ethics and implications. Dolly, the famous sheep cloned from a mammary cell and named after Dolly Parton, was created in 1996 and died in 2003, of a lung infection not related to cloning. In 2000, the artist Eduardo Kac attracted attention for his transgenic work GFP Bunny, a bright green, bioluminescent rabbit named Alba that he made in a lab, and the British artist Marc Quinn used related biotechnology to extract and replicate his own biological material for his 2001 work Cloned DNA Self-Portrait 26.09.01. The Human Genome Project completed its mapping and sequencing in 2003, paving the way for genetic testing and editing.

Never Let Me Go appeared in 2005, a work of art in the age of biotechnological reproduction. As the interview quote suggests, Ishiguro’s novel wrestles less with scientific questions than with human ones. The clones are not laboratory experiments but students—of the human condition, and of their own. The fullness of their existence as clones dawns only gradually on Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth. Like any children, their view of the world is blinkered; their identity is a fact about themselves that they grow up knowing yet not knowing at the same time.

The first part of the book centers on the day-to-day routines of their lives at Hailsham, where they are reared by “guardians” and encouraged to express themselves creatively through sculpture, drawing, and painting. Throughout their safe, secure childhood, occasional ominous notes sound; darkness lingers around the edges. A shared intimacy develops between characters and readers as our understanding grows alongside theirs. An early clue to the situation arrives when Madame, an external figure of authority, visits the school to collect some of their artwork for her “gallery.” The children of Hailsham have the sense that she dislikes them, and they decide to swarm around her in greeting to test her response:

I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her. And though we just kept on walking, we all felt it; it was like we’d walked from the sun right into chilly shade. Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.

Being the spiders: Ishiguro’s choice to narrate the story from the perspective of the othered lends the novel its beauty and its chill. Madame’s shudder throws their evanescing innocence into relief—this is a tale not about children feeling different but about seeing that difference refracted through the gaze of society. To come of age is to understand the implications of that gaze. Tucked away at Hailsham, where they feel safe, they are being raised for harvest. It’s not a school—it’s an abattoir. Like the butler in 1989’s Remains of the Day and the AI doll in 2021’s Klara and the Sun (all three of Ishiguro’s narrators share similarities of affect, and the books seem to compose a trilogy of English life past, present, and future), Kathy H. will grapple all her life with the harsh truths of her home.

Twenty years after the book’s publication, the bioethical questions around cloning are less contested. Most nations have banned human cloning, though limited applications of somatic nuclear cell transfer, the process that created Dolly, are used in stem cell research and regenerative medicine. But in other ways, the unsettling fiction of Never Let Me Go has edged closer to documentary realism. Political and social systems around the world, including in the postelection United States, refuse to recognize the essential humanity of certain people, or to grant them rights of self-determination. We are witnessing an ever-widening gap between the global rich and poor, trans rights and reproductive choice are under attack, and anti-immigrant sentiment has risen frighteningly. Late-stage capitalism treats the existence of workers as transactional, a resource for those with greater wealth and capacity. More and more of us are spiders.

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Never Let Me Go maintains its timelessness in part via the euphemistic terminology Ishiguro assigns to cloning (the word itself appears in the book only a few times). When they become adults, the clones “donate” three or four times before they “complete” and die. The specifics around clone technology remain opaque—there are no scientist characters, no labs, no public debates. Cloning is as given and mysterious as death itself.

Can you call something a donation if the person is required to give it, has been bred for the very purpose of giving? It’s like saying cattle donate hamburgers. Can you call a life complete when it doesn’t include agency around choices of career or family? In its gnomic simplicity, Ishiguro’s language calls attention to the ways in which social agreement shellacs over the complicated reality of extraction.

One of the novel’s few direct conversations about cloning comes when Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth are young adults. Having left Hailsham, they’re living in a group setting called the Cottages, in a brief and liminal period of freedom before donations begin. With some friends, the group embarks on a search for Ruth’s “possible”—the person from whom she was made. They spy on a woman in an office who bears some resemblance to her, but the longer they watch her—that is, the more they understand her as an individual, with a past, present, and future less constricted than theirs—the less likely it seems. Ruth bursts out that there’s no way she’s the original:

We all know it. We’re modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren’t psychos. That’s what we come from. […] If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from.

Ruth makes the subtext text: they’re made from “trash” because they will be treated as disposable. It’s so moving to me that the clones refer to their model not as an original but as the “possible.” They believe, somewhat superstitiously, that if they were to find their possible, they would catch a glimpse of their own futures. What they’d really see, of course, is a person for whom a future—in its branching, myriad options—is possible at all.

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Because of its speculative element, Never Let Me Go is sometimes referred to as a science-fiction novel, but I don’t think the label fits. The novel inhabits an uncanny valley all its own, staking out a particular relationship to place and time. In much of his work, Ishiguro writes about and from a mythic England, deploying recognizable iconography: the boarding school, the countryside of cottages and hedges and winding roads, trips to the seaside. This allows him to weave the fabric of his story out of imagined touchstones rather than a specific lived reality.

What exists beyond those touchstones is hazy. Ishiguro is not interested in the technological specifics of the future, or in world-building details; his focus is on the human figures in the foreground. That’s not to say that the larger world doesn’t matter in his work; from postwar Japan in his first two books to war-torn Shanghai in When We Were Orphans (2000), the backdrop is persistently, palpably one of instability, conflict, and unease. In Remains of the Day, the impact of the ending depends on the butler Stevens realizing that he has sacrificed his life and his opportunity for love in the service of an aristocratic Nazi sympathizer. In Klara and the Sun, wealthy people genetically engineer their children to give them professional advantages, while others whose jobs are made obsolete by technology live in self-organized communes amid racialized violence. In Never Let Me Go, clones are reared in relatively humane conditions, until the work of an unseen scientist threatens to grant them genetic superiority, at which point Hailsham is shut down.

In his 2017 Nobel Prize speech, Ishiguro addressed the political explicitly:

And around the corner—or have we already turned this corner?—lie the challenges posed by stunning breakthroughs in science, technology and medicine. New genetic technologies—such as the gene-editing technique CRISPR—and advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics will bring us amazing, life-saving benefits, but may also create savage meritocracies that resemble apartheid, and massive unemployment, including to those in the current professional elites.

Against the backdrop of these “savage meritocracies,” Ishiguro’s gaze rests purposefully on his three main characters in the foreground. The political context gives shape to the human dramas of love and friendship; at the same time, the attention paid to those dramas insists upon the fundamental value and worth of the characters. In her narration, Kathy often addresses the reader directly: “I don’t know how it was where you were,” she says, or “I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day.” There’s an anxious, beseeching quality to these addresses that escalates in pathos as the book goes on.

How to connect and with whom—this is what preoccupies the narrator. In her telling, first Kathy and Ruth are friends and Tommy’s an outsider, then Kathy and Tommy find a special connection, then Tommy and Ruth become a couple, and then they all drift apart. Ruth dies, and Kathy and Tommy become a couple; then Tommy dies as well. The triangular relationships move in and out of harmony, rarely achieving equilibrium, and someone is always on the outside. As a child, Tommy is bullied by the other children at school. Even by the novel’s end, with Ruth gone and Tommy and Kathy in love, she feels excluded because he is a donor and she is a carer: “[H]e’d divided me off yet again,” she says, “not just from all the other donors, but from him and Ruth.” Exclusion and separation are seemingly built into every interaction, every community, as universal as any other facet of human experience.

Just as these dramas take place in a semimythical England, they also exist in a counterfactual version of the past. Kathy narrates the novel starting in “England, late 1990s,” making their childhood begin in the late 1970s. What technology does exist is secondhand, and shared. The clones operate in a barter economy—they receive boxes of useless items from the outside world, which they purchase with tokens they receive for making art. As teenagers, they listen to music on a shared Walkman, passing it around in a circle:

The craze was for several people to sit on the grass around a single Walkman, passing the headset around. Okay, it sounds a stupid way to listen to music, but it created a really good feeling. You listened for maybe twenty seconds, took off the headset, passed it on. After a while, provided you kept the same tape going over and over, it was surprising how close it was to having heard all of it by yourself.

Similarly, once they leave Hailsham, they copy mannerisms from television and share pornographic magazines. These older technologies give the novel a quaint and cloistered feel. At the same time, the emphasis on shared, mediated, and collective experience offers a ghostly hint of the rise of social media (2004, incidentally, was the year Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook).

Kathy listens to music, including the song that gives the novel its title, on an old cassette player. Later, after she loses the tape, she and Tommy find another copy of it while rummaging through thrift stores in Norfolk, where they also find “piles of creased paperbacks” and boxes of LPs and cassettes. Showcasing the material culture of cast-off technology contributes to the nostalgic sweetness of the novel. Indeed, one of the tonal miracles of the book is how it knits together the unshakable decency and ingenuousness of its characters with the darkness of its subject matter. The juxtapositions of the story—the innocence of the students versus the future they face, the idea of clones transposed to the dusty recent past—are central to its texture.

Perhaps these juxtapositions work the way memory does: we enhance the importance of our childhoods and first loves, and our emotions color our understanding of the past. For Ishiguro, memory has always been the defining process of human experience. In his Nobel speech, he describes reading Proust and discovering that memories laid next to one another could form a causal chain:

The ordering of events and scenes didn’t follow the usual demands of chronology, nor those of a linear plot. Instead, tangential thought associations, or the vagaries of memory seemed to move the writing from one episode to the next. Sometimes I found myself wondering: why had these two seemingly unrelated moments been placed side by side in the narrator’s mind? I could suddenly see an exciting, freer way of composing my second novel; one that could produce richness on the page and offer inner movements impossible to capture on any screen.

So memory is more than a human impulse; it’s also the architecture of story. Retrospection is the operating principle of Kathy’s narration, and thus of her interiority and her sense of self. It may be that the clones, sifting through castoffs while their possibles barrel toward the future, are the only ones who remember history; they are the custodians of the world that used to be.

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Criticisms of Never Let Me Go, both then and now, have to do with the flatness of Ishiguro’s style, and with the passivity of his characters. James Wood, reviewing the novel (enthusiastically) for The New Republic, compared Kathy’s narration to “an expository writing paper by a not very bright freshman.” Ishiguro himself has said he privileges story over style, and that accessibility—to international readers, and readers of the future—is an important consideration for him.

Kathy’s voice is, of course, inextricable from her circumstances. She lives a circumscribed existence, so she tells a circumscribed story in a circumscribed way. Much like the “innie” office workers in the Apple TV+ series Severance (2022– ), who are trapped inside a corporation’s suffocating and impenetrable routines, the banality of the clones’ lives is part and parcel of their pathos. Kathy’s voice is calculatedly ordinary. She’s not meant to be the exception to any rule, or especially deserving of compassion; she’s deserving of it because everyone is.

Personally, though, I don’t think the flatness of her voice is just about making the strange familiar or mundane. It’s about tamping down chaos. What I’ve always responded to in Ishiguro is this exact quality of constraint, which functions as a kind of negative space, gesturing toward everything it’s keeping at bay.

Restraint makes the few moments of rupture, when emotion breaks the surface, that much more powerful. When Stevens in Remains realizes that he gave his life for nothing, and his heart breaks—you wouldn’t feel it the same way if he hadn’t refused to say it for so long. Tommy’s howling in the dark, after he and Kathy are told definitively that they will receive no “deferral” for their deaths, is similarly intense. Kathy tries to contain him, carer that she is:

I caught a glimpse of his face in the moonlight, caked in mud and distorted with fury, then I reached for his flailing arms and held on tight. He tried to shake me off, but I kept holding on, until he stopped shouting and I felt the fight go out of him. Then I realised he too had his arms around me. And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field, for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us being swept away into the night.

Holding on tightly against forces that will sweep them away—this is what Kathy and Tommy can do for one another. Matthew Salesses has pointed out that causally connected, character-driven plots emphasize individual choices; such stories revolve around “the idea that human agency is how to make sense of the human experience.” But not every person, and not every character, has that agency. Ishiguro’s novels often center the perspective of marginalized individuals who have little control over the larger political forces of their times. Just because individuals don’t have meaningful agency doesn’t mean their lives don’t have meaning. Like Kafka, Ishiguro shows how the dictates of systems override the capacity of the individual. But unlike Kafka, his systems can be beautiful, even beloved. Stevens loves Darlington Hall; Kathy loves Hailsham; and Klara loves the human girl she’s made to befriend, the girl who will abandon her. So too do many of us love a world that doesn’t always love us back.

Once they realize what’s happening to them, the clones don’t fight back, or try to escape. There’s no clone uprising, no battle scenes; nobody takes to the streets. Over the years, talking about my love for the novel, I’ve met many people who object to this aspect of it. As a representative Goodreads reviewer wrote in 2009, “Kathy and Tommy finally get all the answers about their school and what was actually going on, and they respond by … going about their lives in the exact same way as before. I mean, good God.” People are entitled to their own responses, but isn’t this the most resonant part of all? In 2025, as oceans rise, glaciers melt, violence increases, and dictators expand their powers, many of us do the same as Kathy and Tommy: we keep living our lives as best we can, holding on to moments of human decency where we find them, taking care of one another.

Perhaps Kathy’s greatest form of resistance is to hold on to her naivete. When their old guardian explains to her and Tommy that the purpose of the artwork they made as children was to attempt to see if they had souls, she asks instinctively: “Did someone think we didn’t have souls?” You could say the question is foolish, but you could also say the foolishness is the point. The knowledge of Madame’s gaze has not infected Kathy; she’ll never think herself a spider. It’s obvious to her that the clones do have souls, just like they have bodies and friendships and memories. What they lack are the same things we all do: infinite time, infinite control over our fates. When I read Never Let Me Go again, five or 10 or 20 years from now, that will still hold true.