Judge not, that ye be not judged, Jesus advised, a ruling that had always appealed to me despite having had a career as a critic. In my years as literary editor of the late London Evening Standard, instead of zealously supporting all literary prizes as I should have done, I annually scoffed at their mishaps, mirthfully describing the Booker Prize as the equivalent of a literary harvest festival, brightly observing that the judges were being called upon to choose between an apple and an orange and so forth. Yet, of course, when, in 2005, I was invited to become a judge myself, I was flattered and accepted. At this time, the Man Booker Prize was in its heyday, its standing not yet squandered by the decision to include American writers or befuddled by identity politics.
That year the harvest was spectacular. An astonishing number of good novels were published. Among those on the longlist that did not make it to the shortlist were books by Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, Dan Jacobson, Rachel Cusk, Ian McEwan (Saturday) and JM Coetzee (Slow Man) that might have progressed in any other gathering. The shortlist we eventually decided upon contained not a single dud: The Sea by John Banville, Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry, The Accidental by Ali Smith, On Beauty by Zadie Smith – and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Still, I knew quite well what I wanted to win. I’d reviewed several of Ishiguro’s novels and had interviewed him early on, in February 1986, shortly before the publication of his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World. Unfortunately, this interview did not appear in the magazine that had commissioned it, the Literary Review, until January 1987, because its editor, Auberon Waugh, perhaps honouring his father’s abundant prejudices, did not believe that anybody Japanese could possibly write creditable English. He was only persuaded to run it after the novel had been Booker-shortlisted and won the fiction category of the Whitbread Literary Awards.
I reviewed Never Let Me Go in the Standard on publication, and I was nothing less than stunned by it. The book reminded me of a reading experience I had had, in adolescence, with Pascal’s Pensées: “Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death. Every day some are butchered before the eyes of the rest, and the survivors see their condition reflected in that of their fellows. Sorrowfully and hopelessly, all gaze at one another, awaiting their turn. This is an image of man’s life.” These few phrases, once read, cannot be forgotten for they express a truth – at least for those without God. In my review, I concluded that Ishiguro’s novel belonged in their company: “In the end, this deeply dismaying book is, like Pascal’s paragraph, no more and no less than an image of man’s life, painful to receive, hard to put away.” I wish now I’d been more simply and loudly a cheerleader for such an obvious masterpiece.
In preparation for judging the prize, I read Never Let Me Go for a second time a few months later, all in one take, on a day ferry from St Malo to Portsmouth, and was glad to be in a windowless cabin, not in public, so tearful it made me. The story became an alarming part of my dream life for a time, a development much rarer with a novel than with films or music.
Judgement day arrived. In the course of an afternoon’s discussion, it became clear the judges were split. Lindsay Duguid, a former colleague as fiction reviews editor at the TLS, wanted Ishiguro, as I did. The book dealer and writer Rick Gekoski argued very forcefully for the literary distinction of John Banville, and the Irish novelist Josephine Hart supported him. We went on to the Guildhall, where the big dinner was to be held and continued arguing without anybody changing their view, until shortly before the festivities were due to begin. The chairman, Professor John Sutherland, who had not so far declared his preference, then asked each of us if we would abide by his decision if he took the casting vote. We had friendly, enjoyable meetings. Time was up. We all said yes. Then Banville wins, said Sutherland. Subsequent Booker judges, similarly unable to decide, have feebly chosen two winners, as when Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo could both claim to have been the winner. Thanks to our chairman, we avoided that – but I still believe we got it wrong.
Luckily for me, it mattered not at all in the long run. Never Let Me Go has now sold millions of copies and been translated into more than 50 languages. It is Ishiguro’s best-read work, having rapidly overtaken The Remains of the Day, published 16 years earlier. It is widely studied in schools and universities, and has been adapted for television, theatre and a 2010 film by Alex Garland starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield. In 2017, Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature and the following year he was knighted for services to literature. The publisher Ishiguro has remained with throughout his career, Faber & Faber, are now proudly re-issuing Never Let Me Go in a 20th anniversary edition, both as a natty paperback and a clothbound hardback, both with a short, new introduction by Ishiguro, recalling the novel’s genesis.
Never Let Me Go, for anyone yet to read it, is a novel like no other. Ostensibly science fiction, it is nothing of the sort. The narrator, Kathy H, 31 as the book opens, looks back over her life, fondly recollecting the special school she is proud to have attended, then describing her life afterwards, initially living communally with other “students”, before becoming a “carer”, looking after a series of “donors”. Being a “carer” is a role in which she has excelled for 11 years now, she boasts in her opening paragraph.
Only gradually do we understand the reality these euphemisms and gentilities conceal. Kathy and all her schoolmates are clones, although the word does not appear until far on in the novel. Without parents, destined never to have children themselves, they have been created purely to be butchered for their organs while still young. Even now, though, Kathy does not rebel against these terms of life and she addresses herself only to others like her. As readers, we have been quietly, gently, inducted into absolute horror.
Reflecting on the questions he has been asked about the book over the years, Ishiguro doesn’t say much, “partly because I don’t wish to give spoilers in an introduction”, he says (not a discipline I observed when given a chance to write a long introduction to a new edition for Everyman a couple of years ago). But he does address whether the book is more of a metaphor for the threat of uncontrolled innovations in science and technology, or one for “the fundamental human condition – the necessary limits of our natural lifespans, the inescapability of ageing, sickness and death; the various strategies we adopt to give our lives meaning and happiness in the time we have allotted to us”. It may be “both a strength and a weakness of this novel that it often wishes to be both of the above at one and the same time, thereby setting certain elements of the story in conflict with each other” he writes modestly.
Ishiguro remembers that when he suddenly saw the entire story before him one day – “a kind of ‘eureka’ moment – though I was in the shower, not a bath” – his feelings were not just those of relief but “a kind of melancholy, mixed with something almost like queasiness”. Readers might feel a little the same. Revisiting Never Let Me Go once more I found it unnerving all over again, compulsively readable but at a cost of being yet again deeply unsettled by it; unsettled 20 years later not only by its concentration on mortality, but, at this point of my life, by its revelation of how childhood needs to be protected, even at the cost of lies, and by its astonishingly severe conception of how little art can ultimately help us, compared to common kindness.
Some readers value novels above all for their “poetic prose”. For these, the language used by the novel’s narrator, Kathy H, seems unimpressive, even threadbare – “dear-diary prose”, sniffed Frank Kermode. They cannot see the artistry and originality with which the novel is constructed, or understand why it is imperative that Kathy cannot comprehend more than she does, or express it more eloquently. This language has a poetry of its own, a poetry of inadequacy that, by the time Kathy drives off “to wherever it was that I was supposed to be” – “supposed” being a word that has taken on a grim suggestion of compulsion in the course of the novel – has become utterly heartbreaking.
Ishiguro, while remaining ever courteous, has acknowledged that his writing is the opposite of his contemporaries such as Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, who prided themselves on their demonstratively capable sentences. Such writers don’t build worlds as he does, he has hinted.
In discussion with the Japanese novelist Kenzaburō Ōe, Ishiguro acknowledged: “There’s a surface quietness to my books… But for me, they’re not quiet books, because they’re books that deal with things that disturb me the most and questions that worry me the most. They’re anything but quiet to me.” Or to the millions of readers Never Let Me Go has found since it was published, despite any hindrance offered by us judges.
Never Let Me Go: 20th Anniversary Edition
Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber & Faber, 368pp, £20
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[See also: The rise of Gracie Abrams]
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