A morality tale for the age of AI

Recently, I re-read Never Let Me Go on its 20th anniversary—my very own copy of it, I am proud to say—half-expecting to laugh off my early reaction as the emotional excesses of youth. I was surprised, though, by the intensity with which the book affected me after all these years. The overwhelming feeling, this time around, was one of heaviness, not the helpless, youthful rage I had felt at the injustices of the world all those years ago.

In the last 20 years, the premise of Ishiguro’s novel has come frighteningly close to reality, or indeed, has been realised in less organised settings. The social, political and economic systems that govern our lives have perpetuated hierarchies that have reinforced the supremacy of one class of humans over others. The idea that some bodies are more valuable than others is hardly novel. The long arc of colonialism and racism has given substance to it, leading to humans being treated as guinea pigs, and acts of cold-blooded crime being perpetrated on them with impunity.

Also, in the interim, the novel had been adapted for the screen by Mark Romanek in 2010—with Andrew Garfield as Tommy, Keira Knightly as Ruth, and Carey Mulligan leading the way as Kathy, the narrator. Last year, Suzanne Heathcote produced a stage adaptation of the book, with Nell Barlow playing Kathy. Above all, Ishiguro had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 and continues to produce fresh work every few years.

I hadn’t seen either of these adaptions of the novel, and don’t intend to, not necessarily because I believe in leaving great books alone and untampered. But with Never Let Me Go, I have, like many of the novel’s readers, cherished an interiority of experience that remains uniquely personal. It feels like a sacrilege to relinquish one’s reading of the novel to the vision of a single director, however gifted. In part, this resistance comes from a refusal to put faces to the names. For instance, I can never see frail and wispy Andrew Garfield as Tommy, though I’m sure he played the role to perfection. For me, Tommy is made of sterner stuff—headstrong, bullish and imposing, a cross between a gentle giant and the proverbial dork, who doesn’t care about carefully curated rules of the social game.

In another sense, Never Let Me Go is really deceptively easy to adapt. Although labelled as a dystopian romance, the novel unfolds in a world that is almost indistinguishable from the one we live in. Except for the quietly devastating purpose with which people like Tommy, Kath and Ruth are brought into being, there is nothing to suggest any overt world-building, or the usual trappings of dystopia. Hailsham, the elite school that the children attend, could be a stand-in for any posh English boarding school, where rules are sacrosanct, and the students mean and menacing.

Only about a third into the book does the reader begin to put the pieces together, slowly deciphering the cruel design that is built into the life cycle of the main characters. Their tentative forays into the “real" world beyond Hailsham, their innocence and naivety in the face of everyday encounters, accentuate the feeling of uncanny. Tommy, Kathy and Ruth are young people any of us could have met during a beach holiday or sat next to on a bus. We see them but also do not see them, carefully hidden as they are in plain sight. As writer Anne Enright said of the novel recently, “The dystopia is etherised, it is everywhere and nowhere, waiting to be named."

In interviews, Ishiguro has mentioned the cloning of Dolly the Sheep in 1996 as one of the early triggers behind the book. Without giving away much, the ethos that lies at the heart of Never Let Me Go is based on a familiar question: What does it mean to be human? Phrased this way, it may sound like a tired cliche, but it’s hard to look away from it, especially in the world we live in, where artificial intelligence is being trained, every day, to become more sentient and human-like. Increasingly, humans are not merely looking to robots for advice on the best route to take to work or the secret behind a successful job interview. AI is now expected to get involved in matters of heart and health, to fulfil a range of emotional needs that fragile and changeable humans cannot.

Ishiguro would go on to explore related themes in novels like The Buried Giant (2015) and Klara and the Sun (2021). With Never Let Me Go, he not only made an early start in this direction, but also shaped a unique genre straddling dystopian tragedy and romantic comedy. One of the reasons why the novel continues to find ever new readers is because of its deft exploration of teenage anxieties, jealousies, high-school drama and petty power struggles that are the stuff of YA fiction. As Ishiguro said in an interview recently, “It’s like a YA book before YA was a label."

However, as its readers will attest, Never Let Me Go frustrates every attempt to club it under categories like fantasy, sci-fi or YA. It is, rather, a work of philosophical fiction—if such a thing exists—where, under the veneer of storytelling, the writer engages with some of the urgent debates that inform our lives. For Ishiguro, related to the question of our humanity is the role that art and creativity plays in making us human. Like the paintings, sculptures, stories and poems that the children at Hailsham create, in the hope of being inducted into the Hall of Fame that is their Madame’s “Gallery," his novel exists as a deterrent as well, against the dehumanising forces of AI and the unethical adoption of technology that is all-pervasive in the world today.

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