Never Let Me Go

Title      : Never Let Me Go

Writer  : Kazuo Ishiguro

Year     : 2005 (Indonesian edition first published in 2011 by Gramedia Pustaka Utama)

Language          : English (translated into Indonesian by Gita Yuliani K.)

If you’re not used to something absurd, then I think you have to prepare yourself to wrack your brain to read this one. That, if I can you call it absurd. For me, it’s like reading Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (and his other novels, I assume, since I never—or haven’t—read those other ones). Well, if you’re as crack-brained as I am, you have to be prepared!

I know of the movie first, though haven’t watched it, then some reviews told me that it was adopted from a novel. Thank God I have a chance to read the novel first, this novel. Let get to the point. In a nowhere place in England, there’s this school named Hailsham. Inside, human beings are being ‘created’ (if I may say so) to provide organ donation for people outside in the real world. Those human beings are not only  ‘created’, but also educated and prepared to be donors, the great one.

Problems come when those donors are not being told what will they be in the future, what will they do with their ‘bodies’. The guardians guarding them in this Hailsham only raise them as ‘normal’ kids, ‘normal’ teenagers, whom then are being released to the outside world to do whatever they ‘assume’ they have to do.

So, when Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, three best friends in Hailsham come to this ‘assumption’ and then realized what they are and what they have to do outside Hailsham, they’re kind of “Okay, that’s what we’re gonna do, right? Let’s just do it!”. But inside, they know that they want something more. They want the real life of the ‘real’ people. Which they cannot get.

Okay, when I say this novel is absurd, I mean it. But luckily, the plot is great and the story-telling style of the writer is just nice to follow. That helps, actually. And the idea is very much humanist: talking about how these modern people think that they can do whatever they wanna do with technology with no concern for the consequences (in this case are on the donors), and also how the arrogance of those modern people is all just about politics (who supports who, who stands for who).

This novel is great, and will be better (for me) if not that absurd. It’s really nice of Ishiguro to have such kind of idea. Worth reading, indeed.

Well, now I’m looking for the movie. So late, I know. But I just wanna know the outcome of the this story on screen, knowing that Keira Knightly playing a role there.

Rating: 3

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