A grave new world

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Pascal, in the Pensées, says: " 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 easily be forgotten, for they express a truth. To Pascal, it is not necessarily the whole truth, because this is man without God. But for those who are without God, it is a pitiless sentence.

The characters in Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, Never Let Me Go, are just as horrendously condemned. This strange book is not easily described. As with Ishiguro's previous novels, its narrator, Kathy, does not fully grasp the consequences of her own story as she tells it to us and as readers we only gradually come to realise its implications, with a dawning sense of dismay.

The setting is "England, late 1990s". Kathy, now 31, says at once that she has been "a carer" for 11 years, looking after "donors" - and she is immensely proud of being "a Hailsham student", evidently the name of some kind of school. Soon she begins to reminisce about her childhood in this mysterious institution and introduces the other two principal characters in her story, fellow "students" Ruth and Tommy.

As the routines of Hailsham are described, the reader becomes more mystified, not less. The children, looked after by "guardians", never leave the grounds, so they have no way of judging the conditions of their lives against others.

None appears to have any family. They acquire their paltry possessions with tokens at regular sales at the school. The artwork they produce is entered into "collections", and the best of it taken away to a mysterious Gallery. As they reach adolescence, they are encouraged to have casual sex with one another, for it is impossible for them to have babies.

Then, when the children are 15, in their last year at Hailsham, one of the guardians, Miss Lucy, blurts out what they are and what awaits them. "Your lives are set out for you. You'll become adults, then before you're old, before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs. That's what each of you was created to do."

These children are clones, parentless and sterile. Although they may go on to live in sheltered accommodation in the outside world, they will never have much contact with "normals".

First, they will serve for a time as "carers" for other clones who have already become "donors" - and then they themselves will in turn have
organs removed until, by their third or fourth donation, they "complete", as it is euphemistically known. In other words, they die. In other words, they are murdered, young, for spare parts.

Never Let Me Go is thus sciencefiction of a kind - a very odd kind, for Ishiguro shows no interest in the mechanics of his invention. The bulk of the story is set in the past, some time in the Seventies and Eighties, before cloning and organ transplant were possible - and this England is ordinary and out of date (the cars mentioned are old Rovers, music is recorded on cassette, the buildings are shabby postwar conversions).

We are never told which organs are removed, nor how the donors survive without them, nor how the clones have been created.

Instead, all Ishiguro's interest here is once again in how difficult it is for any individual to escape his upbringing and gain any perspective on his society - as it always has been, for example, in his tale of Masuji Ono, the painter who embraced Japanese imperialism in An Artist of the Floating World, or of the butler, Stevens, who worked for a Nazi sympathiser in The Remains of the Day.

But the poor lost children in Never Let Me Go have even less chance of comprehending, let alone escaping, their plight. As they go down, instead of resisting, they grasp feebly at straws. They search hopelessly not for parents, but for "possibles".

"Since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life", they believe. Ruth and her friends scan people in the streets on their rare trips into the wider world, longing for an origin.

And they dream not of being spared their gruesome exits but of winning a "deferral", having heard a rumour that such a reprieve may be granted if a couple of clones can prove they are truly in love and

deserve to live a little. Perhaps the artworks taken away to the mysterious Gallery can prove the sincerity of their feelings?

But as Kathy, Ruth and Tommy pursue this illusion, they learn only that the centre of their lives, the place for which they feel such nostalgia, Hailsham, was no more than a failed experiment - and that most of their kind have been treated even worse. There is no escape.

If this were not crushingly sad enough, Ishiguro has also woven in an unhappy love triangle. Ruth and Tommy become partners, although Tommy should always have been with Kathy, as Ruth well knows, and admits to Kathy, much too late. Love offered and not recognised until lost for ever is another of Ishiguro's recurrent themes - notably, in Stevens's obdurate incomprehension of Miss Kenton in The Remains of the Day.

In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro has made the terms of life - which even for the fortunate among us, the well and the prosperous, are so brief, so limited, so inadequate to our desires - systematically more terrible yet. These children have no chance to make any sense of their lives. They are butchered, unconsoled.

Ishiguro's very refusal to offer scientific plausibility and his choice of a weirdly anachronistic setting oddly make Never Let Me Go all the more emotionally convincing. So, too, does the way that, again like previous Ishiguro novels, it proceeds through a kind of damaged language, limited in vocabulary, flinching from the pain it relates.

Never Let Me Go is not offering a salutary warning about the potential dangers of future human cloning. It is a vision of the way we live already, transposed to an invented realm. It is peculiarly pure fiction in this way, abstract, uncluttered by reference, claiming no great knowledge other than of the heart.

Ishiguro's harrowing sense of dislocation, of the loss and waste in all life, may well have some source in his own upbringing, separated as he was from his Japanese parents and background by growing into another language and culture.

Then again, everything he has written responds to the history of the 20th century, the involvement of ordinary people in the atrocities of fascism and what was revealed there about human nature.

In Never Let Me Go, there are distant but specific echoes of Nazi crimes both of genocide and twisted science, and the dreadful acceptance of them by whole societies.

But Ishiguro doesn't call on such historical resonance. "In the game of serious fiction, there is a great temptation to pillage certain things from history for their seriousness value, to give your book that added woof. I think one has to be careful about that," he said once.

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.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is published on 3 March (Faber, £16.99)

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