Ishiguro’s novel is set in an alternate version of modern England. In this alternate reality, due to scientific discoveries made in the 1950’s, the UK has been pursuing something called the “donation” program for the past fifty years. In this program, an entire class of human beings has been cloned for the sole purpose of harvesting their vital organs when they reach peak adulthood. These children, having no natural parents, are reared in orphanages until they reach eighteen, and then sent to live in communes until they begin their “donations.” Some of them become “carers”—clones who care for other clones during the convalescent period of their multiple donations. When a clone finally dies, he or she is said to “complete.” (Note the language games that this society has to play to justify such a system.) All of these facts are revealed gradually during the first 80 or so pages of the book.
The novel centers on Kathy H. and Tommy D. (note the lack of last names), who grow up in a “school” called Hailsham. Kathy and Tommy fall in love, and although as clones they are neither allowed to marry nor physically able to beget or bear children, they eventually seek out a way to be together. This excerpt occurs near the book’s end. In it, Kathy and Tommy are talking with Miss Lucy, and elderly woman who served as a “guardian” at Hailsham when they were children. They have come to her asking for a “deferral” on their donations (translated: 'Please don't kill us yet. We'd like a chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'). They have heard rumors that some students, especially Hailsham students, can receive deferrals if they can prove that they’re truly in love. Tommy believes that this is why Hailsham was always taking away examples of their artwork when they children—because the artwork would show what they were like inside, and serve as criteria for which students could merit deferrals.
In this tragic ending, Kathy and Tommy learn that the rumors were false. There are no deferrals. But they, along with the readers, also finally learn the cryptic history behind the entire donation system. As Miss Lucy’s explanation unfolds, Ishiguro paints a frighteningly realistic picture of the lengths to which selfish human beings will go in order to make their lives more comfortable, and the rationalizations they will use in order to silence the voice of conscience.
The excerpt begins with Miss Lucy explaining to Kathy and Tommy the real reason Hailsham took their childhood artwork. Kathy is the narrator, so all first-person references are hers.
"‘We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove that you had souls at all.'She paused, and Tommy and I exchanged glances for the first time in ages. Then I asked, “Why did you have to prove a thing like that, Miss Emily? Did you someone think that we didn’t have souls?”
A thin smile appeared on her face. ‘It’s touching, Kathy, to see you so taken aback. It demonstrates, in a way, that we did our job well. As you say, why would anyone doubt you had a soul? But I have to tell you, my dear, it wasn’t something commonly held when we first set out all those years ago. And though we’ve come a long way since then, it’s still not a notion universally held, even today. You Hailsham students, even after you’ve been out in the world like this, you still don’t know the half of it. All around the country, at this very moment, there are students being reared in deplorable conditions, conditions you Hailsham students could hardly imagine…’
'But what I don’t understand,’ I said, is why people would want students treated so badly in the first place?’
“From your perspective today, Kathy, your bemusement is perfectly reasonable. But you must try and see it historically. After the great war, in the early fifties, when the great breakthroughs in science followed one after the other so rapidly, there wasn't time to take stock, to ask sensible questions. Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. This is what the world noticed the most, wanted the most. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum. Yes, there were arguments. But by the time people became concerned...about students, by the time they came to consider just how you were reared, whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late. There was no way to reverse the process. How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neuron disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren't really like us. That you weren't really human, so it didn't matter.”
-Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go,
http://www.amazon.com/Never-Let-Me-Kazuo-Ishiguro/dp/1400078776
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