The story seems mundane enough at first. Girl loves longstanding male bestfriend, but subsumes her love when it becomes clear that her female best friend is also interested in the same boy. Kathy’s narrative is clean and matter of fact, full of the detail of day to day school day memories.

The story of love lost and regained which drives the narrative forward is one which has been played out in love songs (like the fictional “Never Let Me Go” song which Kathy takes to) for as long as love songs have been written. But this is no ordinary coming of age story. Nor is it really about a love story, although the whole concept of love, and artistic power is one which sets off the sinister underlying elements of the story. It takes about 70 pages or so of hints before the reader is made aware that neither Kathy, nor her love interest Tommy or best friend Ruth are ‘like us’ -- usual characters in the sense that the realistic matter-of-fact guise of this novel might indicate. What the reader finally becomes aware of, more or less concurrent with the narrator, is that the characters are clones, ‘created’ rather than born, solely for the sake of providing replacement parts for ‘humans,’ a ‘species’ to which these people clearly do not belong.

And yet, of course they are exactly like us. They hunger, desire, are moved by beauty and feel pain in exactly the same way. And of course however they may have come into being, they have all the same neuro-linguistic perceptions as anyone might. Somehow, and somewhere, one imagines a kind of parental set – the persons, scientists or whatever who have created them, and who has the responsibility for their existence. These missing characters form part of the novel’s setting – the backstory and backdrop which is never revealed.

The gods which created Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are missing from the novel, along with any kind of reference for morality. Not quite missing however are those people after whom the clones are created—the “possibles” -- and there is a kind of touching nostalgia of the sort that an adopted person might feel for his real but utterly inaccessible parents among the characters for their possible. In his usual delicate and understated way, Ishiguro creates an extraordinary tension between the many dichotomies in the setting of this story that begins to take priority over the love story as the novel moves forward. The first point of climax occurs when Kathy sees the head carer of Hailsham, “Madame,” crying in her doorway after witnessing her dancing with her pillow to an old tune, the “Never Let Me Go” of the title:

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