The Kind of Book That Stays With You Days Later

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Faber and Faber, 2005. Somebody in the kitchen left this on the shelf above the coffee machine, dog eared, no jacket, and I picked it up on a slow Tuesday close because I didn’t feel like scrolling my phone. Finished it in three nights, which for me is fast, since most nights I get four pages in before my eyes go.

Kathy H tells the story backward and sideways at once, working through a life at Hailsham that reads like a normal English boarding school until it very much isn’t. Ishiguro doesn’t hand you the twist, he drip feeds you clues about their lives and donations until you’re a hundred pages in on words like donor, carer, completing before you register what they’re actually doing. Slow reveal, not a twist, and it works on you like a sauce reducing, you don’t notice the change until you taste it again.

What I didn’t expect going in was how much of the book is small stuff. Kids fighting over a pencil case, a missing cassette tape, who drew what and who said what about somebody’s drawings. It shouldn’t carry the weight it carries but it does, because that’s what a childhood actually is, not the big reveal, the small grudges. There’s a scene of Kathy dancing alone with a pillow to a song called Never Let Me Go, and a teacher watching her cry, and I had to put the book down for a minute after that one.

I won’t pretend I didn’t spend half the book wanting to say it straight out, just run, get in a car, cross a border, do something. Nobody does, and that’s the point, but it still frustrated me the way watching a coworker take abuse from a customer frustrates me, even when I understand why they don’t push back.

Quiet book. Not a page turner in the ticket rail sense, though somehow it kept me reading even with no real mystery driving it, more the kind that stays with you after the shift’s done. Four stars, would’ve been five if the middle stretch didn’t drag a little.