Kathy, Ruth, Tommy, and their ilk live among normal people yet virtually never approach them, willing segretating themselves from the rest of society as though they were lepers. They live in Skinner boxes without boundaries, conditioned to believe they exist only to sacrifice their lives for the continued life of others. We never see the bioengineers or social scientists who create and maintain this horrifying use of humanity. Instead, they are represented (only on a limited scale) by Hailsham's headmistress, Miss Emily, and the mysterious, art-collecting Madame Marie-Claude.
In 1963, after attending the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel, the renowned Hannah Arendt wrote a profound and controversial book entitled EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: THE BANALITY OF EVIL. Arendt went to the trial expecting to see a monster. Who else could be responsible for such evil as the Holocaust? Instead, she found an accounting clerk. Not only were the most normal of people apparently capable of mindless cruelty, but their evil was senseless, meaningless even to themselves. In this way, their evil was banal. Ishiguro creates a similar feeling, using the triteness of Kathy H.'s reminiscences and Miss Lucy's behaviors and rationalizations to illustrate the banality of their own peculiar form of evil: science practiced for its own sake, without the application of moral standards. NEVER LET ME GO is neither preachily anti-science nor moralistically pro-religion. It is simply a call to include our consciences in the application of science. Perhaps the fact that the first identified character in the book to speak other than Kathy and Ruth is a student named Hannah (who never appears again in the text) is Ishiguro's way of telling us to beware the dangers of banality, that sliding over the edge from ordinariness to "Ruth-less" evil is easier than we think.
I puzzled for a while over the setting - England in the 1990's - until I realized that the first sheep clone, Dolly, was created in England in 1996 and died prematurely a few years later. In a sense, all of Hailsham's students are sheep, raised in out-of-the-way rural settings, separated from society and isolated from knowledge of both the practical world and the world of ideas, limited in their human interactions except with one another, and, of course, bred to be consumed (for their vital organs). On several occasions, I was reminded of the cowlike creature in Doug Adams's RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE who greets diners by declaiming the tasty virtues of his best parts and declares: "..it was eventually decided to ... breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am." like the Schmoo or whatscalled in that comic Little A~~ whatshisname. Adams presented his creature for comic effect; Ishiguro presents his "poor creatures" (as Madame repeatedly calls them) for a low key but nightmarish effect.
--The Banality of Amoral Science, April 13, 2005 -Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews