# ‘The definition of a classic’: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go at 20

A Booker-winning author, a Nobel prize-winning scientist, and the directors of the film and stage adaptations on why Ishiguro’s dystopian tale still speaks to us today



## Anne Enright
_Anne Enright_  
_Featured in _Booker-winning_ book and professor of fiction at University College Dublin_

My writing students all know and love . 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 might look like a duck and swim like a duck, but this novel takes flight like a beautiful swan

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_  
_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 , 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 .



**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 , 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 .
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