Anne Enright
Booker-winning author and professor of fiction at University College Dublin
My writing students all know and love Never Let Me Go. Year after year, they choose to discuss it more than any other suggested title. These students are all ages but mostly young, so their affinity may have something to do with how tenderly Ishiguro writes about youth, innocence and friendship. The novel contains some of the tropes popular with readers of young adult fiction; there is an elite boarding school with beautiful grounds, various styles of guardian and no sign of any parents. Narrated by Kathy, who tells us about her friends Ruth and Tommy, the style is accessibly conversational and it contains a melancholy seriousness that young people value and sometimes use. The characters seem orphaned. They believe love might save them, and they die tragically early. They will never grow old.
If the story works close to folktale, the concept satisfies an anxious interest in speculative and dystopian fiction. The world on the page seems like our own, but it contains a huge and cruel secret, one that involves sinister doubling and the terrifying disposability of characters who are full of love and hopefulness. As I describe it here, the book sounds worse and worse, but there are reasons why this finely written novel should be treasured by readers who sometimes prefer fiction that is not so subtly done. With breathtaking focus and elan, Ishiguro uses the pleasures afforded by other genres and ignores them at the same time. The dystopia is etherised, it is everywhere and nowhere, waiting to be named. The rush of plot is replaced by steady storytelling and slow heartbreak. This is an impossibly sad novel, it offers no escape.
It is also, and radically, a book about what it is to be human: Ishiguro allows the characters their dignity, he pays them careful attention – even, you might point out, as he kills them by inches (but hush, that is the novelist’s job; that is his burden and tragedy). His skill is to make us forget the fiction, extreme as it is, and experience the emotion as real. In their boarding school, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy spend a lot of time making works of art which are sometimes taken away and displayed elsewhere to prove that they are not just happy, but also fully human. They themselves see their art as a place in which love can be conveyed, and the soul revealed. These beliefs prove not so much false as useless to them, in spite of which, the loveliness remains.
Perhaps this novel stays fresh because it articulates the anxieties of people who grew up in the years after it was published. This is a generation that suspects they are, in one way or another, fodder for an indifferent system. It is one concerned with what it is to be or to feel “real” when it is so difficult to have agency in the world. In his foresight, Ishiguro wrote a book that, like his characters, will not get old. This is the definition of a classic.
Mark Romanek
Director of the film adaptation of Never Let Me Go, starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley
As an enormous fan of Ishiguro’s novels, I would always read them as soon as they came out. In this case, it made me cry several times and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. On the second reading, I started seeing it in my head as a movie.
I inquired about the movie rights and found that they were owned by Fox Searchlight, which felt fortuitous, because I’d just had a very enjoyable and successful experience with them with One Hour Photo. So, I called Peter Rice, who informed me that another director was already assigned to the project. Then, about a year later, I got a call from Peter saying that the director didn’t work out. He asked if I was still interested and I said, very much so.
I flew to London to meet with Alex Garland, the scriptwriter, and producers Allon Reich and Andrew Macdonald of DNA films. They seemed to like my idea of the movie, so that led to a lunch with Kazuo (or “Ish” as he likes to be called), who didn’t seem to think I was a complete idiot, and that’s how it started.
It was made clear to me from the get go that this was a collaborative experience. I would make the aesthetic choices and work with the actors, but on critical decisions related to the interpretation of the novel, it came down to the four of us and (sometimes) Kazuo. It was a very enjoyable collaboration. I felt completely supported in my vision of the film and yet had this brain-trust of smart folks to resolve any thorny creative issues.
Because the novel is so beloved, actors were fighting to be in the film. So, the most amazing experience for me personally, aside from getting to know my literary idol, was working with this astonishing ensemble of legendary or soon-to-be-legendary actors.
Venki Ramakrishnan
Former president of the Royal Society and winner of the 2009 Nobel prize in Chemistry
I was already an Ishiguro fan when he published Never Let Me Go, which is close to my own field of molecular biology. It is no surprise that the novel was written soon after the news of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, which raised concerns about whether rich billionaires would start cloning themselves. But without giving too much away, Ishiguro’s world of cloning is even darker.
Since then, modern biology has made huge strides in our abilities to change entire genomes, including our own. An equally powerful revolution is going on in the field of artificial intelligence. As a result, when the Royal Society was having discussions about the promises and perils of these advances, I felt that Ishiguro would be a thoughtful contributor. I was not wrong. Ishiguro has always thought deeply about how new technologies could create a two-tiered society: those who benefit from them and are enhanced as a result, and those who are in their natural state, eventually leading to almost two different species, humans and super humans. He wrote about these concerns in his 2021 novel Klara and the Sun.
Twenty years on, Never Let Me Go holds up extremely well. Its warnings are ever more relevant in a world where the tools of genetics have become increasingly powerful and are being combined with other poorly regulated technologies such as AI. And of course, it remains a gripping read.
Christopher Haydon
Director of the stage adaptation of Never Let Me Go
There is a haunting simplicity to the way Ishiguro writes. The emotional depth beneath such apparently straightforward prose is what makes Never Let Me Go a great novel. It is also what makes it so difficult to adapt theatrically. The book occupies that ineffable, liminal space that exists between imagination and memory. By contrast, theatre is the medium of the body. The story is told through the flesh, the blood, the muscle, the bone of the actor. Memory may be elastic, elusive, but the stage is tangible, physical.
Another key challenge is how to hold the attention of a very different kind of audience. The gradual, elliptical path of the book is well suited to the individual reader – who can move at their own pace. But in the captive experience of the auditorium, events must have a propulsive momentum to keep the audience hooked. It’s a fine art to balance this with the emotional and psychological subtlety of the central character, Kathy.
Yet I knew from the first draft that Suzanne Heathcote’s adaptation was on to something special. She had created a world where past and present physically coexisted. Kathy’s memories sprang to life around her before vanishing in an instant. The audience could observe her from without, while also having the most intimate access to her mind.
In that early draft, sadness spilled off every page. Given Kathy’s plight, how could it not? So as we developed it, we set ourselves the challenge of telling a story that, to as great a degree as possible, focused on the energy and spirit of the young protagonists. By allowing these kids to exist in all their messy and chaotic glory, we could communicate a key lesson of the book – that life must be lived in the present tense.
When we discussed it with Ishiguro himself, he mused that the story was, in some ways, like a romantic comedy. Baffling as this assertion felt at first, I came to understand exactly what he meant. After all, Kathy and Tommy do get their moment together. It’s brief, but, ultimately, they are infinitely more fulfilled than the protagonists of his other most famous book, The Remains of the Day. There, the butler Stevens and the housekeeper Miss Kenton live to old age, but their love for one other remains unrealised. As Kathy says to Tommy when he rages at the injustice of it all: “It wasn’t for nothing Tommy! We’ve still had some time. And I wouldn’t take that back for anything.”
So we created something that took the simplicity of the book’s prose as a guide for a production that was fast, fluid and light. The kids at Hailsham burned brightly before they burned out. And our ensemble – led by three remarkable young actors: Nell Barlow as Kathy, Matilda Bailes as Ruth and Angus Imrie as Tommy – ran as fast as they could, tumbling with all their energy and might towards their final moment of completion.
• Never Let Me Go: 20th Anniversary Edition by Kazuo Ishiguro is published by Faber on 13 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
