I picked up a special edition of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go at a Melbourne bookstore last week—I buy a new copy virtually any chance I get—with an introduction by British critic David Sexton. Skimming those first few pages, I saw that Sexton had cited an Ishiguro quote following the publication of his best-known novel, The Remains Of The Day, for which Ishiguro won the Booker Prize in 1989. Ishiguro was pushing back on the idea that he is a chameleon capable of writing vastly different books: “I’ve written the same novel three times. I just somehow got away with it.”
This sounds like a typical humble hedge writers make, disqualifying their skills as much as possible in light of widespread renown, but I agree with Ishiguro’s assessment. Don’t get me wrong, he is a brilliant author. I believe Never Let Me Go deserves its place at number nine on The New York Times’ thoroughly flawed 100 best books list. But a shape-shifter Ishiguro is not. Whether in narration, style, or theme, Ishiguro likes to tread the same paths, he just does it exceptionally well.
Ishiguro’s best trick, I think, is to show without telling at all costs for the majority of a novel, then tell at the end to devastating effect. His two highest-profile novels, Remains and Never Let Me Go, follow this blueprint. Remains depicts the English butler Stevens, a man so dedicated to his job that he obliterates his emotions and loses every chance at personal happiness, most obviously by keeping secret his romantic feelings for the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. Such is his fealty to service that he works diligently at the expense of sitting by his dying father's bedside on the floor above him. Stevens’ discussion of emotions is so sparing, so buried are they beneath the weight of overly proper English rectitude, that for chunks of the book I wasn’t even sure I was right in assuming he loved Miss Kenton. Then, at the novel’s end: A hopeful Stevens goes to visit Miss Kenton years after she has left the estate, only to find that she has married and had children, and the reader is hit with the full force of a lifetime’s regret. Stevens finally admits to an honest, painful feeling: “why should I not admit it?—at that moment, my heart was breaking.” Mine does too, despite the fact that Stevens is easy to laugh at in his fanatical dedication to butlering (butlering!) throughout the novel and ends it finally having felt, but not having learned.
Never Let Me Go similarly lulls and jars, as Ishiguro details innocents suffering nightmarish fates in the gentle voice that might tell a bedtime story. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth were bred to donate their organs to a higher-class of unseen recipients. From 80 pages in, their fate is clear to the reader, but they’ve been raised to accept the situation as normal, so it takes far longer for the gravity of it to become wholly clear to them. Reading the book is alternately maddening and tragic, you rage at the system that subjects the protagonists to this amputated life while imploring them to try to escape it, and they never do. Like Stevens, as the book nears its end, they finally look inwardly without squinting. After an attempt to defer their donations fails, Tommy shrieks at the sky, indulging the impotent rage that marked his boyhood. Kathy thinks about the donation process itself—that after four donations with resting and caring in between, the doctors will continue mining their bodies until they have nothing left, with no regard for whether they lie awake on the operating table or not.
“It’s horror movie stuff,” Kathy narrates, “and most of the time people don’t want to think about it.” The admission is obvious, but its power lies in coming so late: This fear of horrific physical pain arrives only after 270-odd pages of the main characters acting as if their inevitable early deaths are normal. After the reveal that the protagonists' deaths may be agonizing as well as premature, the previous bulk of the novel takes on an increasingly brutal tint, and I finished it lying wide-eyed and stunned in my bed in the early hours of the morning. Ishiguro told The Guardian in 2021 that Never Let Me Go was intended to be his cheerful book, which is not completely shocking—the characters are good to each other when it matters most, maximizing the short time they’ve been given. With the horror movie line in mind, it's also not shocking that readers tend to disagree.
Ishiguro’s “show, don’t tell, but then tell at the very end” technique is visible in some of his other novels: an artist coming to terms with his misguided political views after opaquely referring to “mistakes” for most of An Artist Of The Floating World; a grieving mother in A Pale View Of Hills revealing that her fate mirrors that of a woman she observes throughout the novel, possibly a creation of her mind to distance the grief. He dabbles liberally in unreliable narrators, estranged couples, estranged parents and children. He’s like a therapist as he unspools his characters’ memories gradually; there are a lot of almost painfully obvious segues, not much different than “before I can tell you that story, I must tell you this story.” Because his characters often seem to be only marginally more familiar with their own memories than readers are, the transitions work.
That’s not to say Ishiguro never tries new things. Coming off the success of Remains, he published The Unconsoled, a 500-page behemoth in which the pianist Ryder plays catch-up in a world that follows dream logic. Critics were initially mystified and displeased, most notably James Wood, writing that the book “invented its own category of badness.” Virtually everybody Ryder encounters asks him favors and vent to him, bizarrely and extensively, for multiple pages at a time. Ryder’s plight isn’t helped by what is ostensibly short-term memory loss, so he spends the novel trying to help everyone and inevitably letting them all down until he is sobbing on a bus with only a stranger for comfort. Though it is certainly an Ishiguro outlier in many respects, his favorite themes are here too—memories unwind in links, estranged couples fight the currents pushing them apart, familial trauma bleeds into children. Music permeates this story and others. There’s some of Stevens in Ryder, some of A Pale View Of Hills in his family, some Never Let Me Go in the constant lack of time.
Ishiguro’s novels are built on tension between the characters’ lagging awareness of themselves and the reader’s quicker understanding, and at the cathartic moment, the characters seize on the realization the reader has craved for them all along. (Of course, this usually comes too late for them to save themselves.) His stories are like Jenga towers that tumble down at precisely the right moment, which overcomes any possible annoyance I could feel at the repetition in his novels. I’m not even enthralled by his writing on a sentence level—though I know many are—but his management and timing of plot and character development are unceasingly fascinating.
What Ishiguro knows, of course, is that these techniques work. Few things elicit sympathy more effectively than characters with a modicum of relatability who are doomed to lose what they most want. Little is more intriguing than a half-formed past that slowly fills itself in over time. I could not be less bothered that Ishiguro isn't a chameleon. “I think it is perfectly justified [for a literary novelist to repeat themself],” Ishiguro told The Guardian. “You keep doing it until it comes closer and closer to what you want to say each time.” I hear his words more clearly than any other novelist’s.
