Book Reviews
Review of Kazuo Ishiguro,
Never Let Me Go.1*
Reviewed by Daniel Vorhaus, Harvard Law School
At its core Never Let Me Go is a love story. Kazuo Ishiguro’s
novel traces the twists and turns of romance between Kathy
H. and Tommy D. from our first encounter with them at Hail-
sham, a well-manicured boarding school lost in the English
countryside, to their final goodbye outside a dilapidated
hospital, more than two decades later. But it is not in the
details of how this particular romance develops that Kathy
and Tommy become such irresistible characters. Rather, it is
the particular detail of between whom the romance unfolds
that renders Ishiguro’s novel sublime: Kathy H. and Tommy
D. are clones.
To many, the clone remains the boogeyman of science.
Nameless and faceless, the clone is the science-fiction ana-
logue of the zombie. Distilled from test tubes, the clone is
animated, like its horror movie counterpart, by unnatural
means and walks amidst normal, natural men and women,
frightening and threatening. In the past century Aldous
Huxley described a society populated by “standard men and
women. . . millions of identical twins. The principle of mass
production at last applied to biology” (Huxley 1932 [1998],
7), and we worried that Hitler would attempt an army of
Gobineau-inspired Aryan clones. This century has seen the
completion of the Human Genome Project, foreshadowing
a day when the reproductive cloning of human beings may
become technically feasible. And still the clone is cast as
a nameless and faceless being, the perfect enemy combat-
ant depicted in the film Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the
Clones.
Although Never Let Me Go is a story about clones, it in-
verts the traditional image of clone qua zombie in order
to suggest an inspiring alternative. As we follow Kathy,
Tommy, and the rest of their clone cohort from their early
days at Hailsham to the “completion” of their lives, it is
painfully obvious that these clones carry unique names,
faces, and personalities. By the time Ishiguro lets us in on
his dirty little secret—that society has created these children
to serve as biological vessels, intended to exist only long
enough to reach maturity before their organs are harvested
through forced “donations”—it is too late, his clones have
already established themselves as ordinary people. They
laugh, cry, squabble, reconcile, grow older and, ultimately,
they fall in love. While Ishiguro’s tale has an unmistakable
air of science fiction to it, it is difficult for the reader to view
its protagonists as anything other than remarkably normal.
It should come as no surprise, however, that the soci-
ety that created them views clones as anything but normal.
∗ Spoiler
Alert: The following review contains revealing information about the plot and the characters of this work of fiction.
1. New York, NY: Vintage, 2006. 304 pp. $14.00, paperback.
Address correspondence to Daniel Vorhaus, 101 Madera Lane, Chapel Hill, NC 27517. E-mail: dvorhaus@law.harvard.edu
February, Volume 7, Number 2, 2007
This reality is pointedly driven home by the headmistress
of Hailsham, Miss Emily, who reveals to Kathy and Tommy
why she collected the students’ most inspiring works of art,
removing them from Hailsham to be displayed in what was
known to the students only as The Gallery:
Why did we take your artwork? Why did we do that? You said
an interesting thing earlier, Tommy. . . .You said it was because
your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like
inside. . . .Well you weren’t far wrong about that. We took away
your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to
put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.
As Miss Emily reveals the purpose of The Gallery, Ishig-
uro simultaneously exposes the true aim of his novel: to
demonstrate that the reign of the nameless, faceless clone is
drawing to a close. Whatever our other concerns about the
inevitable emergence of reproductive cloning, to continue
to imagine the clone as a soulless non-human entity is the
mark of a scared and closed-minded society.
Tommy and Kathy are every bit the intelligent, compas-
sionate human beings that you and I are, exactly the sort of
people that you would want to befriend. If they differ from
the society surrounding them it is because of their society’s
inability to conceive of them as anything more than “shad-
owy objects in test tubes”; not because of their conception in
a laboratory. Despite this, even those that know them best
remain afraid. Afraid, as Kathy explains,
. . . in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. . . .
[And] the moment when you realize that you really are dif-
ferent to them; that there are people out there, like [that], who
don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless
shudder at the very thought of you – of how you were brought
into this world and why – and who dread the idea of your
hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse your-
self through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment.
It is the fear of the unknown, shadowy clones, in addition
to the instrumental treatment of those clones, that is both
cause and effect of society’s fear, and that represent all that is
inhuman in Ishiguro’s story. None of that inhumanity be-
longs inherently to the clones themselves.
In 2002, citing concerns about cloning that “would af-
fect not only the direct participants but also the entire so-
ciety that allows or supports this activity,” the President’s
Council on Bioethics concluded that reproductive cloning
is “morally unacceptable, and ought not to be attempted”
ajob 99
The American Journal of Bioethics

(President’s Council on Bioethics 2002, xxix). In January of
this year, in his 2006 State of the Union address, President
Bush formally urged Congress to “pass legislation to pro-
hibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human
cloning in all its forms . . . ” And the 109th Congress con-
sidered five separate bills that would prohibit cloning in its
various forms.2
There is no dispute that, today, human reproductive
cloning must not be allowed, and it must continue to remain
prohibited until the day comes when it is demonstrably safe
and effective. But concerns about cloning have not been lim-
ited to questions about its safety and technical feasibility.
While further ethical questions remain open to discussion
for many, the idea of living side-by-side with clones simply
feels unnatural; it makes our skin crawl ever so slightly with
an unnamed fear.
We should thank Kazuo Ishiguro for shining a bright
light on that fear. Thank him for illuminating its absurdity
and irrationality by way of a fictitious society, not so differ-
ent from our own, which lives in fear of Kathy and Tommy,
relegating them to the shadows because it cannot face them.
Ishiguro shows us that they—the normals, the non-clones—
are jumping at shadows, frightened by a horror movie that
plays out only in their minds.
Some day, perhaps not long from now, the first cloned
child, sputtering and crying out, will exit the womb and
enter our world. It is inevitable that the announcement of
her birth will be tinged with uncertainty, and with fear. But
what we will fear, one hopes, is not a soulless clone but a
soulless society, incapable of acceptance. And, just perhaps,
when the pictures of that newborn are transmitted around
the globe for all to see, we will recall Never Let Me Go, and
our introduction to Kathy H. and Tommy D., as the moment
when the clone first received its face.
REFERENCES
President’s Council on Bioethics. 2002. Human cloning and human
dignity: An ethical inquiry. Washington, DC: President’s Council on
Bioethics.
Huxley, A. 1932 [1998]. Brave new world. New York, NY: Perennial
Classics.

2. The five bills were 1) Human Cloning Ban and Stem Cell Research Protection Act of 2005, S.876 and H.R.1822, 109th Cong. (2005); 2)
Human Cloning Ban Act of 2005, S.1520 and H.R.3932, 109th Cong. (2005); 3) Human Cloning Prohibition Act of 2005, S.658 and H.R.1357,
109th Cong. (2005); 4) Human Cloning Prevention Act of 2005, H.R.4118, 109th Cong. (2005); and 5) Human Cloning Research Prohibition
Act, H.R.222, 109th Cong. (2005). The full text of the bills is available in the Congressional Record or online via the Library of Congress
(http://thomas.loc.gov/).

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