Here’s an exercise for the lazy-minded. Imagine a science-fiction story in which people are cloned in order to become spare parts for the healthy. The cloned humans who are to become transplant donors will be raised in some idyllic environment, and then, at some point, they will realize that the entire purpose of their existence is to be carved up for medical use by some other, more privileged class of human beings.

What you’ll come up with — or to make it clear that I’m not trying to disrespect anyone here, what I would likely have come up with — is something like the Michael Bay film “The Island,” starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, opening this summer at a multiplex near you. In that film, as the trailers make clear, the cloned transplant candidates discover the fates their masters have planned for them, and set out to escape them.

Give the same premise to Kazuo Ishiguro, however, and the award-winning author of THE REMAINS OF THE DAY comes up with something wholly different — a story lacking the likely explosions and chase scenes of a Michael Bay thrillfest, but shedding rather more light on the extent to which human beings, even when steeped in a horrific reality, will find ways to rationalize the horror and to squeeze some semblance of life from whatever constrained existence they are allowed.

Mainstream reviewers of Ishiguro’s latest novel, NEVER LET ME GO, have labored mightily either to avoid giving away what they imagine is the central point of the novel — that its characters are clones who are condemned to donate organs until (most likely) they die in the process — or to apologize for giving that plot point away in the review.

I see no need for such labor here. The cloning aspect of Ishiguro’s novel is almost tangential to what he’s really up to, which is exploring the ways in which his clone protagonists accommodate themselves to the hideously unfair — and implicitly bloodthirsty — world in which they find themselves. Indeed, even a casual reader of NEVER LET ME GO can see how little the author (who has become known in his other work for painstaking craftsmanship) cares for whether this whole cloning-for-spare-parts scenario he has set up is politically or scientifically credible. The story is formally set in the United Kingdom of recent decades, but one that exists in a world only roughly parallel to our own — we have to imagine a world similar enough to have Woolworth’s department stores but different enough to be able to accommodate the almost cannibalistic policy decision to create, educate, care for, and eventually destroy the farmed human beings who are the story’s protagonists. It’s unclear, furthermore, why one would need to develop full-fledged human beings to use in this way — surely a sufficiently advanced cloning technology would allow for spare parts to be grown separately, or at least for the cloned donors to be kept mercifully free of any poignant inner life that they will someday have to surrender.

Nevertheless, the story is emotionally credible, and here’s why — when you listen to these characters talking about themselves, lying to themselves (mostly in small ways), accommodating uncomfortable truths, rationalizing their grim fates, you hear voices that eerily evoke people as they really are, not people as the heroes we might hope they’d be.

We see this reality in the discussion, later in the book, between Tommy and Ruth, the two closest friends of Kathy, who narrates the story. They’re discussing how well each of them fills the two roles — “carer” and “donor” — that all clones must play when they’ve left the confines of the schools where they have been carefully raised. The meaning of “donor” is obvious; a “carer” is a clone who cares for transplant donors as they recover from their operations, and who won’t become a donor until his or her career as a carer is done. Here’s a snippet of their conversation:

[Says Tommy:]”I’m a pretty good donor, but I was a lousy carer.”

No one spoke for a while. Then Ruth said, her voice quiter now:

“I think I was a pretty decent carer. But five years felt about enough for me. I was like you, Tommy. I was pretty much ready when I became a donor. It felt right. After all, it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?”

These are the voices of characters who are not merely resigned to their fates, but who have found a way to be proud of their ability to sacrifice themselves. It’s the kind of almost perverse willingness to fill a sacrificial role that one can find in human beings as diverse as servicemen and saints.

At the same time, however, Ishiguro also shows us that at some fundamental, animal level his characters can’t always fully bear the hand life has dealt them. You see it in their willingness to invent little private mythologies that give them the hope of a life just slightly richer than the ones they are in fact condemned to. His characters spontaneously come up with fantasies about not dying, or about delaying death for love. Whether Ishiguro intends this connection or not, it’s worth noting that this phenomenon at least a nice metaphor for religion. Indeed, maybe it really just is religion.

Just as important, the author paints a picture of how subtly and seemingly painlessly indoctrination can work — that it can create a world view accepting of horror and do so at so fundamental a level that it does not occur to anyone to question it. (We later discover that even those who take advantage of the cloned are trapped in their own mindsets — they occasionally have some qualms about what they are doing, but don’t seriously question or challenge the whole setup.)

Predictably, some mainstream critics may give attention to the (to me) incidental question of whether NEVER LET ME GO is science fiction. The book is science fiction, all right, but what makes it exceptional science fiction is that it doesn’t follow the all-too-traditional path in which the science-fictional protagonist “wakes up” and decides to fight the oppressive order of things. (If that’s more to your taste, see the Bay flick.)

More important than the question of whether the book is science fiction is that of whether it is enables us to see things about ourselves that we might not have seen so clearly before. I think NEVER LET ME GO, like all good fiction, sf or otherwise, meets that test. It shines a light for any thoughtful reader on the extent to which we are all somewhat proud of our ability to accommodate a monstrous state of affairs, telling ourselves that this is, after all, “what we are supposed to be doing, isn’t it?”

—–