SOMETHING ABOUT KATHY.(Never Let Me Go)(Book Review)

Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (Knopf; $24) is a novel about a young woman named Kathy H., and her friendships with two schoolmates, Ruth and Tommy. The triangle is a standard one: Kathy is attracted to Tommy; Tommy gets involved with Ruth, who is also Kathy's best friend; Ruth knows that Tommy is really in love with Kathy; Kathy gets Tommy in the end, although they both realize that it is too late, and that they have missed their best years. Their lives are short; they know that they are doomed. So the small betrayal leaves an enormous wound. As is customary with Ishiguro, the narrator, Kathy, is ingenuous but keenly desirous of telling us how it was, the prose feels self-consciously stilted and banal, and the psychology is not deep. The central premise in this book is basically the same as that in the book that made Ishiguro famous, "The Remains of the Day" (1989): even when happiness is standing right in front of you, it's very hard to grasp. Probably you already suspected that.

It is always a puzzle to know where Ishiguro's true subject lies. The emotional situation in his novels is spelled out in meticulous, sometimes comically tedious detail, and the focus is entirely on the narrator's struggles to achieve clarity and contentment in an uncooperative world. Ishiguro is expert at getting readers choked up over these struggles--even over the ludicrous self-deceptions of the butler in "The Remains of the Day," the hopeless Stevens. But he is also expert at arranging his figurines against shadowy and suggestive backdrops: post-fascist Japan, in "A Pale View of Hills" (1982) and "An Artist of the Floating World" (1986); an unidentified Central European town undergoing an indeterminate cultural crisis, in "The Unconsoled" (1995); Shanghai at the time of the Sino-Japanese War, in "When We Were Orphans" (2000). It seems important to an understanding of "The Remains of the Day" that the man for whom Stevens once worked, Lord Darlington, was a Fascist sympathizer. But it is not particularly important to Stevens, who has no political wisdom, and who is, in any case, preoccupied with enforcing his own regimen of emotional repression.

The shadowy backdrop in "Never Let Me Go" is genetic engineering and associated technologies. Kathy tells her story in (the novel says) "England, late 1990s," so the book seems to belong to the same genre as Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," counterfactual historical fiction. Conditions in this brave-new-world Britain, and exactly how Kathy and her friends fit into them, are all spooky authorial surprises, and (as is the case with most things) when you're reading the novel it is best to begin without too many prior assumptions. Kathy is a "carer"; her patients give "donations," occasionally as many as four. Inch by inch, the curtain is lifted, and we see what these terms mean and why the world is this way. The strangeness, like the strangeness in Ishiguro's most imaginative novel, "The Unconsoled," is ingeniously evoked--by means of literal-minded accounts of things that don't quite add up--and teasing out the hidden story is the main pleasure of the book. In "The Unconsoled," the story is never fully sorted out; at the end, we remain in the hall of mirrors. Unfortunately, "Never Let Me Go" includes a carefully staged revelation scene, in which everything is, somewhat portentously, explained. It's a little Hollywood, and the elucidation is purchased at too high a price. The scene pushes the novel over into science fiction, and this is not, at heart, where it seems to want to be.

But where the novel does want to be is even less obvious than usual. Ishiguro ...