2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: Cloning, Free Will, and Soulmates

What inspired Kazuo Ishiguro’s timeless story about mortality, growing up, and the human condition? How are its characters so relatable, and yet entirely unique? And, why does the dark secret at its heart challenge scientific innovation? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the story behind Kazuo Ishiguro's literary masterpiece, the context in which it was written, and the wonderful story itself. Email us: ⁠[email protected]⁠ Instagram: ⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠ TikTok: ⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠ X: ⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠ YouTube: ⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠ Exec Producer: Dom Johnson Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Joe Pettit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:40Speaker 03

  My name is Cathy H. I'm 31 years old and I've been a carer now for over 11 years. That sounds long enough, I know. But actually, they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That'll make it almost exactly 12 years. Now, I know my being a carer so long isn't necessarily because they think I'm fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who've been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of 14 years, despite being a complete waste of space. So I'm not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact that they've been pleased with my work. And by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  Their recovery times have been impressive. And hardly any of them have been classified as agitated, even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. So, hello Dominic, hello everybody. That was our narrator Cathy H. kicking us off in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go, published in 2005. And you can tell from that opening reading alone that Cathy, as our narrator, has a very distinctive voice. Oddly banal. It's very specific, it's very hundrum, it's almost conspicuously dull. But it's also quite strange and haunting because she references all sorts of quite kind of drastic

• 4:08Speaker 03

  or atypical procedures or words in a very typical way, kind of almost conversationally. And you can tell from that reading alone that she's remembering things, she's drawing on the past.

• 4:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's a, so this is one of my favourite books. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. This whole story is her looking back on the past, as you say, Tabby, Never Let Me Go. Cathy is a carer, which we know from the beginning she's a carer, and she's remembering her life, isn't she, with her school friends Ruth and Tommy? And basically, this is a book that falls into three parts. So first of all, she's remembering their lives together, her Ruth and Tommy, at a boarding school called Haylesham. Then there's a scene where they have gone to a place called The Cotages as young men and women. And then in their adult working lives, where she is now, they're either carers or they are donors.

• 5:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  And right from the start, what I love about that passage is you're plunged into this world, but so much of it is mysterious to us and yet at the same time oddly familiar. So those words, carers and donors, we know, we kind of think we know what they mean, but they seem to mean something different. We don't know if this is our world or a parallel world.

• 5:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, the mystery unfolds, and I have to say, Never Let Me Go, I can vividly remember reading it for the first time. It is, it's a brilliant mystery story, you're trying to work out what's going on, but it turns out to be this kind of dystopian science fiction fable. It's a book, it's a love story, actually. It's a book about kind of a love triangle. And it's all about, actually, I know this sounds terribly pretentious, and this is exactly what listeners expect.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  We'll forgive you.

• 5:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they'll, okay, that's.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Your soft-hearted sentimentality.

• 5:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'll probably end up saying this about all the books that we do in this, in this series, but I think it's, I think it's profound meditation and what it means to be human.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Oh, wonderful. But I have to say, I don't think you're wrong. Because, you know, you spoke there about how it's, you know, simultaneously a love story and dystopian and stuff. But I think one of the best things about this book is it's, it's very hard to classify. And I think that's in part because its author, Kazuo Ishiguro, really resists genres. And also because it's so much more about the interior than the exterior. It's so much more about kind of a set of emotions, rather than the idea, the ideas to which those emotions pertain. But I've, I've been a massive fan of it, probably for that reason, from, since I was a teenager, really. And I think that's true of a lot of people. You can draw from it whatever you will, because, as you say, it's so, it reflects any human experience in a funny way. Those three stages you spoke about

• 6:46Speaker 03

  reflect in microcosm, the three stages of kind of human life. And as you say, it is undoubtedly one of the greatest books of the 21st century. You know, it's, it's won all sorts of prizes. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Time Magazine named it one of the 100 best novels of the last 100 years. And obviously, it was made into a very successful film in 2010, which I think a lot of listeners will, will know it for above all, you know, starring Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield and, and Keira Knightley. And then Ishiguro himself won the Nobel Prize in 2017. But, you know, if, if that glittering catalogue of world-class attestations isn't enough to convince people of its quality, why don't you, Dominic, tell us a bit about what

• 7:31Speaker 03

  you think about it, despite your woeful podcasting credentials?

• 7:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, so, um, thanks. That's nice. So, I first read it when it came out, which is 2005, when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And I thought it was brilliant. And it kind of stayed with me. And I saw the film. And then actually, it's a great example of a book that you kind of think, oh, when I reread it, will it be more flimsy than I remembered? You know, will it not have the same appeal? But actually, for me, reading it again,

• 8:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  I I I've always been massively drawn to it because as you know, I mean, people who listen to The Rest Is History will be bored, sick of this, but basically I'm obsessed with school stories. I love boarding school stories. So I loved it for that reason. In fact, I think it's it's an absolutely superb book at capturing that experience. But what I really admire, reading it again, was how Kazuo Shigeru constructs the mystery, which we'll get into, judging when to release information. So he draws you deeper and deeper into the story. I don't think you have to be young to appreciate the book, actually, because I think so much of the book is about remembering youth as much as it is actually experiencing it. So Cathy, looking back, I think that works brilliantly. And I mean, everybody, every reader has been young. And I think that

• 8:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  experience of nostalgia and melancholy and loss, I mean, that that sort of stays in your mind after you've read it, for me, anyway.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  Definitely. I mean, I I completely agree. I said earlier, you know, I first read it when I was about fourteen, and I was at boarding school. So obviously, for that reason, the Helsham section of the book, the school section of the book, was particularly evocative. And actually, also, and this will sound totally mad, when we reveal later, you know, the secret at the core of the book, and if you've read the book, you'll know what I'm referring to. But I found it really relatable, because it deals with very kind of teenagey, childish human concerns, you know, love, fancying people, friendships, breaking up friendships, you know, the minute concerns of a teenager's life. And so I loved it for that reason. Then the second section, we discussed, the cottages, which are kind of like, you know, the characters

• 9:32Speaker 03

  growing up, they're moving to the next stage of of life. I didn't really care about much. It kind of floated past me, which is odd, because that was Kazuo Shigeru's original idea, you know, the thought of an odd group of students in the grey English countryside over whom hung this strange fate, this strange sense of doom. And then I kind of, I loved the last section, because I read it very much as a love story. And that wasn't so much the case this time. I loved the second section, the cottages. You know, I really wanted to understand what they stood for, what they meant. And I really didn't, I didn't see the romance in it much at all. Tragedy, for sure, which is odd again, because Kazuo

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Shigeru often describes this as his most optimistic book. And he says that people always laugh when he says that, and I would too. But the love story wasn't there for me so much this time.

• 10:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, well, we can get into the love story further on. You see, you're not ultimately as sentimental and romantic a person as I am, which is probably why I respond to the love story.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 10:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  But let's talk about the author. Let's set up some of the context. So Kazuo Ishiguro, I mean, for me, he's the outstanding British writer since the 1980s. So people who haven't read this book may well undoubtedly have heard of The Remains of the Day, books like The Buried Giant or Clara and the Sun. They are, I always think they're very precisely, carefully written, but there's always so much kind of subterranean emotion in them. And he's a big favourite of yours, isn't he, Tabby?

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love him. I've always loved him. I always thought I loved him in part because every book was so different. You know, he plays with so many different subject matters. But actually, you know, because he goes from like The Buried Giant, which is kind of like an Arthurian legend set in Old England, and then you have Remains of the Day, which is kind of an English manor house before the Second World War. And then you have a book like this, which is technically like a dystopian sci fi novel. But actually, there are recognisable themes that run through all of his books, and he has a very recognisably restrained style, doesn't he?

• 11:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, totally. So you've often got an unreliable narrator, somebody who doesn't understand the story they're telling. They don't really understand the implications of what they're telling us. The narrator's often looking backwards, so remembering maybe some traumatic incident that they don't quite, you know, they haven't quite admitted to themselves, and it only slowly becomes apparent to us, the reader. There's always a sense of mystery and being drip fed information. And there's always this tension, I mean, especially in books like The Remains of the Day, between this very flat narrative voice and these kind of incredibly deeply repressed emotions that are sort of simmering underneath.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I know you've done some digging, haven't you, into Ishiguro's background?

• 12:12Speaker 03

  So much digging.

• 12:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  So much digging, oh my word. So how much do you think this reflects, you know, how much does the author's life basically dominate his writing here?

• 12:22Speaker 03

  So it's a really interesting question, because, so, I mean, how can an author's work not in some way reflect their life? And this is actually, I thought, when I was kind of researching him, I thought quite a lot about another episode that we did in a mini series that we did back in October and September, and that was Margaret Atwood, you know, where more modern authors, you often have less to say about how they influence their books. And Kazuo Ishiguro himself, so, I mean, spoiler, he was born in and is originally Japanese, but he is often kind of resisted. Interviewers or people saying that his books reflect this Japanese background because, you know, he was born in Nagasaki in nineteen fifty four, but he moved to the UK at the age of five in nineteen sixty because his father was an oceanographer and he got funding from

• 13:06Speaker 03

  the UK government. They hadn't planned to stay on for more than a couple of years, but they did. But interestingly, both of his parents came from samurai families and his mother actually survived the atom bomb in nineteen forty five, which is

• 13:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wow.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I watched an interview where he spoke about that and he was very reluctant to go into great detail about that. And they showed him his home growing up and it's, you know, it's as I said, it's traditional samurai home. And he, he was like, oh, I'm very unfamiliar with this. I find this very, very odd. But the thing is, there definitely is some influence from his past in his books. The fact that his writing is very restrained, it's quite mannered and like it's a little bit repressed. You know, samurai culture is all about strict codes of conduct. And, you know, there's this thing called Bushido and it's all about service and loyalty.

• 13:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  But then he ends up so unglamorously in Woking. He goes to grammar school.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  What's wrong with Woking, Dominic?

• 13:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I don't know. I'm, I hope listeners from Woking, I mean, if you have any listeners

• 14:00Speaker 03

  I hope they forgive you.

• 14:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I say, I hope so too. But basically, there's that sort of, I mean, you might say, gosh, what an exotic background, but his life in many ways is quite unglamorous, quite humdrum, right? He goes to grammar school in Woking, he went to the University of Kent, he went, he worked as a basically a charity worker, didn't he, for a homeless charity?

• 14:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he, and he kind of subliminally, I think that massively impacted Never Let Me Go, because he described his kind of attitude to the people he was working with. And he said, you know, I know that was the right thing to do. I felt that my work was very noble, but the way that he felt about the homeless people he was working with, there was kind of like a, almost like a distaste. And I think that's the way that the main characters in this novel, that these students with a strange fate have hanging over them, who are somehow other. That's how a lot of people in the normal world react to them and we'll explain why later.

• 14:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's interesting.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Isn't it? It's so, so interesting.

• 14:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then a couple of other things. So one of them, you, you pointed out to me before that he wants to be a songwriter rather than a

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that undeniably, and he would admit himself. Has had a massive impact on his writing. I mean, the title of this book, Never Let Me Go, for one thing. But just his writing alone, because he considers himself a songwriter at heart, and he always says that writing novels is kind of what the world allowed him to do. But what he really wanted to be was a musician. And he uses this wonderful phrase about writing, which is leaving meaning between the lines. And that speaks so much to songwriting, because the music speaks for the lyrics. You don't need to say anything. It's all about conveying emotion through subtext and atmosphere. And that, his books are all over that.

• 15:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, I love that. That's a really, really good, because actually, so often, that's actually more interesting than him being Japanese, I think, in some ways.

• 15:40Speaker 03

  I totally think it is, yeah.

• 15:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because he's often said, you know, people have said, are you a Japanese writer? And he's said, well, no, I don't even, you know, I don't write Japanese fluently. I can't really speak it. Formal Japanese fluently. I haven't, you know, there was thirty year period in his life when he never set foot in Japan. I mean, obviously, his relationship with English is slightly more detached, and he said that himself. Than it would be if he had English parents, because his parents are Japanese.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  But, you know, his style, that the style of like The Remains of the Day, the very cautious narrator who doesn't understand their own story, whose language is suppressing the meaning and all of that kind of thing. That's a very English kind of style, I think.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Totally is. So actually, I was gonna say, you know, you know, I said earlier that that kind of that that's the influence of maybe Japanese culture in his writing. But then I watched an interview where he said, you know, people have said, surely your writing reflects the manners of of of Japanese culture. But he said, no, not at all, because in that way, the Japanese and the English are very, very similar.

• 16:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, so interesting. But here's the other thing, his favorite writers, have you seen this? His favorite writers were Charlotte Bronte and Dostoevsky. So two writers who are totally, you know, there's a lot of passion sort of under the surface. I mean, Dostoevsky, not always under the surface. There's a lot of kind of strong feeling there. And that's the, that's the lovely thing with Ishiguro, that when you open one of his books, the first thing you encounter is this very flat, precise, careful voice.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, cautious, it's almost cautious.

• 17:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, very cautious. But then underneath that, there is always this, this pain and this unrequited love and this anguish and all of this. Which is obviously, which comes out in Never Let Me Go as much as in any other book, I guess.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  And I think that actually does his writing a service because because of that caution, which you might actually, which he might have just as a result of language of English, not actually having been his first language, it gives him such a discipline. He's so unselfindulgent. It's almost like he writes, his writing is like, it's like a pressure valve. And it creates this backlog of suppressed emotion.

• 17:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  So tell us a bit about the book itself. So Never Let Me Go, he's written The Remains of the Day. The Remains of the Day is a great hit. It's a, it wins it surprises. It becomes a film with Anthony Hopkins' name at Thompson.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  Great film.

• 17:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then he starts work on this book. And he sort of struggles at first, doesn't he? He doesn't really know where it's going to go.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  He said he had this kind of binder on his shelf that just kind of haunted him. And it was called the student novel. So basically he'd made two previous attempts back in the early 1990s to write this novel, the novel that became Never Let Me Go. And as I said, it was called the students' novel. And then he said, both times, I felt there was a key piece missing to the jigsaw, a piece whose shape and colour I couldn't determine, and I'd moved on to work on a different book. The story eluding me, I knew, would feature students who lived in wrecked farmhouses in the rainy English countryside. They'd be a segregated group whose lives had become strangely shortened. And he just couldn't get past that idea. He couldn't work out, you know, why they were doomed. And he kind of played around with the idea of viruses or nuclear contamination,

• 18:49Speaker 03

  but none of it seemed to work. And then one day he was listening to the radio and he heard about all these advances. I mean, obviously, you and I obviously know exactly what we're talking about.

• 18:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Very scientific. But he said he'd had all these advances in biotechnology. And he'd always been interested in the idea of how new technologies could create a kind of two-tiered society, which is a very dystopian concept.

• 19:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  H. G. Wells is kind of the Morlocks and the Eloi from the time machine.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  Exactly that. And at the same time, there was massive publicity around this sheep called Dolly.

• 19:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Big clue there. Born in 1996 and announced to the media in early 1997. And this was the spur for his book. It allows him to turn his students' novel into something a bit like science fiction. And, you know, simultaneously, in that way, he was inspired by writers like David Mitchell, Alex Garland. And he said that the amazing thing about this breakthrough. The dystopian element of the book, which is still a secret, but

• 19:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, we won't give it away.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  We won't give it away, but stay with us and we might at the end, though. Was that it allows him to kind of wrestle with these very, very mature, big themes, the big questions that haunt people about like human nature, love, all of this kind of thing, the kind of stuff that in Dostoevsky, you know, you get 20 pages of people nattering about, you know, existential crises and God and whatever it is. But these days, authors can't really get away with that. And so this was like his way in. It was like his cipher to deal with those big questions.

• 20:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the title, the title comes from a song, doesn't it? The Never Let Me Go. It's basically the idea of clinging together and not being parted. And that's sort of, well, we can come back to the song because I know you've got lots of stuff to say about it. So let's get into the book. So obviously there's different elements to it. The school story, the coming of age story, the mystery story. We're learning information the whole time. When we kick off, it's England, late 1990s. That's what we're told, but it feels kind of to me quite timeless, doesn't it? They're still in a world of cassettes rather than CDs. There's, you know, they're not in a world of computers and

• 20:53Speaker 03

  No.

• 20:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  smartphones and things like that. There's a sort of dreamlike side to it. We have this narrator Cathy, you read it at the beginning.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Beautifully.

• 21:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  I was gonna say something nice, but actually you beat me to it, which is, you obviously anticipated. You anticipated that I wouldn't say something nice, so that's disappointing.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Carey Mulligan, eat a heart out.

• 21:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So Cathy is talking to us. She's been a carer. She thinks clearly that we are just like her and that we will understand all the terms she's using. As we'll, we'll find out, we may not be like her at all.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  So she is haunted throughout, isn't she, by memories of this school? And that's what we get right into, her memories of her time with these two friends, Ruth and Tommy. So tell us a bit about them, Debbie.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  So Hailshim is obviously this very idealized place and it's kind of, Ishkri plays with light a lot in it. It's the only sunny part of the book. And so that's how we meet, as you say, Ruth and Tommy. And their relationship, their love triangle is kind of the emotional heart of the book, I think. Um. It's the emotional core. And so there's Tommy, who's kind of very sweet, naive, he's very lovable. But he has these massive inexplicable tantrums. And he's one of the only students in the novel, as we'll call them, to show this massive degree of emotion. And in the movie, he is played by Andrew Garfield. Very well, actually, I think, yeah.

• 22:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's very good, Andrew Garfield. Now, do you want a fascinating fact?

• 22:21Speaker 03

  I do.

• 22:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know who Kazuo Ishiguro? I'll give you one guess. It's somebody from the early 2000s, when he's writing the book, who he thinks Tommy should have been played by.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Um. Johnny Depp.

• 22:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a good guess, but it's not right. It's somebody very different. It's, um.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  I can see. You are so smug. You're you're sitting on, you're sitting on a, yeah, on a volcano of information.

• 22:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, I'm just gonna put you out of your misery. It's Wayne Rooney.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Stop.

• 22:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  He thought, yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  No.

• 22:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's Wayne Rooney. That's sporty for you, hasn't it?

• 22:55Speaker 03

  In one, in one blow, you've totally destroyed Never Let Me Go for me. What?

• 23:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  How does that work?

• 23:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Andrew Garfield. So in the book, Tommy is one of his defining things, is he's very good at football. So actually Wayne Rooney could have played him, I think, magnificently.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  But Wayne Rooney looks like an orc. I imagine Tommy looking like kind of quite in his feet.

• 23:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you? You actually imagine him as Andrew Garfield?

• 23:17Speaker 03

  I do, yeah. I mean, I know we have to move on, but I'm totally staggered by that, by that reveal.

• 23:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  So you've got Tommy, Wayne Rooney, then you've got.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Then you've got Ruth, who is, who is in a relationship for most of the book with Wayne Rooney.

• 23:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  And she's Keira Knightley.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  She's played by Keira Knightley, yeah.

• 23:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  That Keira Knightley, Wayne Rooney relationship.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's the meet cute we've all been waiting for.

• 23:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, if Keira's listening, yeah, take our advice. Um. Anyway, Ruth is probably the least attractive of the characters in the novel. She's quite mean. She's very manipulative. She's kind of like the school popular girl. And she has this very disquieting thing called the secret guard that she sets up. And it's where she kind of promotes or assembles a group of her and other girls, who creates this idea that one of their favourite guardians, Miss Geraldine, is going to be kidnapped. And it's their job to protect her. And for instance, at one. Point Cathy, who is technically Ruth's best friend, exposes the fact that Ruth can't play chess.

• 24:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  High stakes at Hailsham. And she kicks her out of the group. You know, it's it's classic kind of bitchy, you know, childhood children.

• 24:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Female politics.

• 24:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I was going to ask you about this, Tabby. So I mean, you said earlier on that you were at boarding school yourself, so you know this better than anybody.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Clearly.

• 24:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  How convincingly do you think, does Ishiguro capture that world of kind of, you know, prepubescent or teenage girls?

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's it's very, very, very powerfully done. And but then there is one thing about, and also I read this article with Margaret Atwood, who often writes about that dynamic. And she said for her, that was kind of the most potent part of the book in many ways.

• 24:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, really? Of this book?

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Interestingly. And the the very cruel manipulative thing that she does above all else is that she keeps, she sees and understands, possibly even before they do, that Tommy and Cathy are in love. And she keeps them apart and she drives herself between them. But there is one sympathetic feature about Ruth, and that's the fact that you get the sense, and more so later on, that she's kind of craving a mother figure, and that might explain some of her odd, you know, her odd behaviour with Miss Geraldine.

• 25:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So I think one of the lovely things about this book, actually, is that there is this sort of science fiction or existential mystery about what does it mean that they're donors and carers? And, you know, clearly there is something.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Weird going on at this school.

• 25:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Something very weird and serious going on at the school. And yet, that is coupled with a portrait. It's so interesting that Ishiguro didn't himself go to one of these schools. He went to Woking Grammar School. Because I think it's as good a portrait of what it is, the sort of day to day relationships of people at boarding schools, as any book I've ever read.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  I mean, you you were at boarding school too, and evidently embroiled in Cathy female politics.

• 26:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Absolutely.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  I hope this isn't too affecting for you, Don't it?

• 26:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's bringing you back all kinds of terrible memories about arguments about pencil cases or whatever it is.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, marching around pining after Wayne Rooney.

• 26:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  But.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Pretending you know you knew how to play chess.

• 26:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  What? Come on. This has got you gone mad now, it's heavy.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  I have. The Wayne Rooney thing, it's toasted. You've blown me off course.

• 26:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, okay, so just before we come to the break, let's talk, I mean, there are some, some very strange elements of life in this boarding school section that give us a clue that this is not a normal school. So a classic example of this is they have to do every now and again, these things called the exchanges, where basically they don't have any money, their currency is the kind of artwork and crafts that they've created.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, creativity is the big thing.

• 26:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they're obsessed with art, they're told to put a lot of emphasis into their art. They have an idea themselves that there is a, there's a, they have this sort of place called the gallery. And somebody is going to come who they call Madame, who is not like one of their teachers, but kind of, you know, somehow associated with the school. And Madame is going to come and take away their artworks and they'll be exhibited. And that this is somehow incredibly important and life changing. And to get into the gallery, you know, means everything.

• 27:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  And there's a brilliant bit when Sugar is talking you through this, where he says, it's clear now to me, this is Cathy talking, she says, it's clear now that we did know things about ourselves. We kind of suspected them. And, and we'd kind of been prepared for the truth about ourselves, but it had never really hit home. And she says, one of the first moments when it hit home is when they walk past this woman, Madame, who's come to pick up their art in the corridor. And she kind of shrinks from them, doesn't she? It's a really chilling moment. It's like they, she's frightened of them and horrified by them.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  She actually says she was afraid of us in the way someone might be afraid of spiders.

• 27:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a really kind of unsettling moment.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  Spine crawling.

• 27:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Cathy says, the first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, quote, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life. And suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange. It's like for the first time. Something about herself has dawned on her through this this moment where she's brushed past this woman who's horrified by her. And I think I that when rereading it for the second time, I thought, okay, that's the moment. It's a bit like when you're a child.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  And you realise your own mortality, that the life, the world doesn't revolve around you and one one moment you'll die or whatever it might be.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  That sort of sense of something dawning on you that really that changes everything and you can never unthink it again. I think it's really, really brilliantly done.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  It is. I mean, it's it's superbly done. But the thing about it, though, and which is almost more effective is we have these moments throughout the book, these kind of dawning moments, but none of them are ever so dramatic, you know, that they form a crescendo, a crescendo of sudden knowledge. They're not like that climactic.

• 29:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Which means that you still get a sense of of like of growing truth. Kazuyuki Shigeru kind of drip feeds you knowledge throughout. And and another odd detail in in terms of that is this idea of Norfolk.

• 29:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Norwich.

• 29:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's great to get Norfolk.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Norfolk.

• 29:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  So we've just been watching Alan Partridge. So basically, this is massively spirals.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  It's the reason we did this episode. This is what we've been working towards. Norwich.

• 29:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Norfolk for them is like, it's where all lost property goes. That's the maddest thing.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. North Norfolk digital for one.

• 29:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  They've seen it. I've seen it on a map and they think that all lost property will somehow end up in Norfolk. And you can go to Norwich or whatever and pick it up. That's brilliant.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  I mean, it doesn't sound it from the way that we're talking about it now because we have Partridge hanging over us.

• 29:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Flinch and Sun Tanning Centers.

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. But anyway, Ishiguro did, you know, he had a a role in mind for this. And he was hoping that the this idea of the lost property, it would be a crucial point in a kind of altogether much more shattering way later. So he's kind of giving you a clue and then later on, you'll see why it's so. It reveals a massive truth about who these people are.

• 30:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  And then we learn another truth in what I think, and I thought as a young girl when I read this, and I think now as well. You get this other scene where we learn something else about them, something else that makes them different from us. And this is actually where the title comes from. And this is where Cathy, she gets hold of this little tape and it's called Songs After Dark by an imaginary singer called Judy Bridgewater. And there is a song on that tape called Never Let Me Go, and that's where the title comes from.

• 30:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  It's actually, I actually read something rather lovely, which is that Kazuo Shigeru said that he was looking at a Ray Evans.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Album cover and on the back there was this song Never Let Him Go and it struck him as a bizarre concept. Because you can say to someone in life, you don't let me go for a long time. But you can never say to someone in life, actually, it's totally unrealistic to expect someone to never let you go because the truth is we all die.

• 31:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  So it's not possible. So he was really kind of struck by that. And then there's this beautiful scene where Cathy dances as a little girl, dances to the song, this song on the tape. And she's clutching a ba-, a pillow. Because she imagines that the song is about a woman who's been told that she can't have children. And then she finds out that she can and she holds this baby for dear life. And it's totally tragic because it's like, it's so relatable, you know, all little girls have dolls and clutch them to their chests. But few little girls are as aware, as in some strange way Cathy is, of their impending doom.

• 31:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Because I think most of us get to live longer than the characters of this book get to live.

• 31:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  And yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Again, will it, will it explain why later?

• 31:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  And we, we learn at this point, don't we, that they can't have children?

• 31:55Speaker 03

  And then exactly, we discover that they can't have children. And Madame, who you spoke about earlier, she watches Cathy doing this and Cathy turns around and sees her. And, and she's crying and Cathy doesn't understand why. So you see, she doesn't entirely understand yet the truth of her condition. And it's, it's, the, the idea of them not being able to have children is an interesting thing because there are no parents mentioned in this book. And it's almost as though the absence of parents means that these children are utterly unprotected from the realities of death. Because I think it's almost every parent's job to shield their children from the realities of life. Anyway, so that's where the title came from. And I always thought it was a nice detail that Kazuo Shigeri, you know, thinking about his days as a musician or wanting to be a musician, he invented the song, which he

• 32:40Speaker 03

  then later recorded with his friend, the jazz musician Stacy Kent. And then he subsequently taught himself to play it.

• 32:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  So Tabby, you mentioned that we are getting a sort of dawning realisation

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  about the truth of their situation, the truth of their condition. And maybe after the break, we can do the big reveal, we can get to the big scene when finally one of their teachers, the guardians as they're called,

• 33:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  kind of cracks and tells them the truth about themselves. So we'll come to that in a few moments.

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• 35:16Speaker 03

  Welcome back, everybody. Dominic, we were on the brink of a great revelation about the dark secret at the core of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. So, do you want to spoil it for everyone?

• 35:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm going to spoil it for everybody. Now, if you haven't read the book, I mean, I hate to say this at the point, we should stop this, the podcast. This is, clearly, you should carry on listening to the podcast, but then it basically erases your memory banks, if you don't want to be spoiled. So, basically, the children are all in a pavilion, and one of their teachers, Miss Lucy, who has always been a little bit of, she's kind of like the cool teacher, the friendly teacher, who doesn't quite follow all the rules. She overhears two of the boys talking about how they'd like to go to Hollywood and be film stars. And she cracks, it's like something has snapped in her. And anyone who's read the book will remember this moment. She says to them, "Look, enough of this. Like, stop talking about going to Hollywood." And she says, "You've got to face the truth about yourselves." And she

• 36:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  says very bluntly, "You have been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand." She goes on to say, "None of you will go to America. None of you will be film stars. None of you will be working supermarkets," as I heard some of you talking about the other day. "Your lives are set out for you. You will become adults, and then before you are old, before you're even middle-aged, you will start to donate your vital organs. That is what each of you was created to do. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided." And so, it's at this point that we realise they are not... Human beings like us, well, or are they? But they are clones.

• 36:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  They have been bred as organ donors and they are going to be harvested for their organs. It's a really, really, I mean, what an extraordinary thing to have this boarding school story and they're in the pavilion and it's raining outside. And yet they're being told the most awful and chilling thing that you could possibly imagine.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  It's the horror that's kind of been nestled at the heart of the novel throughout, you know, thinly veiled. And the interesting thing as well, you know, we mentioned the drip feeding before. There are about three moments in this, in this book where that appalling grotesque, actually sort of almost quite violent truth is directly alluded to. And it's here, it's a moment later with Tommy and it's a moment later with Ruth. But the rest of the time, it's kind of wrapped up in allusions and kind of hints. Because, you know, there again, we have that thing where the idea of this book being about a human life in microcosm. Most of us, you know, for most of us, the truth of our reality is gradual and so too with them. You know, the truth about their situation is gradual.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  This is the most startling reveal that we get. And so it's a bit like life, you know, there's no grand climax in life. You don't live out the stages of life consciously or directly, or, you know, we'd all be having existential crises all the time.

• 38:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, I do, but then I'm an unusually contemplative person. But the characters in this book, it's so funny because little children in the real world. Gradually, it's like the scales are lifted from their eyes about the fact that they will die. But the little students at Hailsham, it's said so directly, you know, their lifespans will be so much shorter. But they don't seem appalled or shocked, do they? They don't like stand up and start running or start, you know, shouting or anything. There's no, and nor is there any point in the novel where they have to, you know, face the reality in the mirror and address it and digest it and accept it. There's no, there's no point where that's possible.

• 38:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's the cleverness of it, right? So some of the critics said at the time, oh, I don't find Ishiguro's vision plausible. Why don't they rebel? Why don't they run away? But here's the thing, what happens to them at school when they learn gradually? And then in this sort of supposedly shattering moment that they are going to be harvested for their organs and their clones. That's not really that different from what happens to all of us.

• 39:12Speaker 03

  Definitely not, yeah.

• 39:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  We're alive and we're thinking about, you know, oh, Peppa Pig, or whatever we're thinking about.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Do you spend much of your life thinking about Peppa Pig?

• 39:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  I genuinely think about Peppa Pig all the time.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  God, I'm learning about you every day.

• 39:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, okay, you're a child, you're thinking about Paddington Bear. And then, and then at some point, right, it dawns on you. Well, does it dawn on you? I mean, there's a point at which you know, you know, you're going to die. I mean, no one, no one sits you down and tells you, right?

• 39:35Speaker 03

  All of the big truths in life are like that. Like, no, you don't suddenly go like, oh, my God, that's how people have babies.

• 39:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  And actually, Ishiguro, Cathy, she compares the two. She makes this point explicitly. She says, you know, she has a chat with Tommy afterwards. The kids, when they hear this, are not shocked, they're embarrassed.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Like sex ed or something.

• 39:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they're embarrassed that she has snapped and sort of let herself down by coming out with what they all kind of suspected, but are almost a little bit bored by, in the way that you are bored in sex education lessons. And she, Cathy and Tommy have this chat and they say, yeah, well, maybe the guardians have been kind of drip feeding us this sort of stuff, a bit like how they did about sex. You know, you kind of start to know about it. And of course, that completely mirrors how all of us learn about these great truths of life, right?

• 40:22Speaker 03

  But even, even the not great truths, like how many people in life just walk through life doing a job that they hate? Or, I don't know, even in relationships they don't like, I mean, how many people lived under regimes that they didn't like? You all just try to make the best of it. And that's actually what Kazuo Ishiguro meant when he said, this is my most optimistic novel. When you read it, it's, it's hard to comprehend this, but it's the fact that we are all doomed to die. Like, we're all, it's quite camou that, actually. We're all kind of walking to our execution. But these characters in this novel, they just try to grab a little bit of sort of joy in the time that they have and make the best of things. And he finds that to be very optimistic.

• 41:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is in a way.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  I find it quite sad.

• 41:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is quite sad. Well, it's both those things, isn't it, though? It's quite, it's very sad. It's very, you know, they're, they're walking, they are walking towards their own execution. But we all do that. I mean, I mean, otherwise, Tabby, you and I wouldn't be wasting our time doing this podcast.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  God, I so wouldn't be wasting my time doing this podcast.

• 41:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, my God. What are you saying about the podcast?

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd be like, I don't know, walking through the Himalayas or something.

• 41:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  What would you be doing? Yeah, but why aren't you?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  I don't know, I'd probably be reading.

• 41:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. So you might as well just talk about it.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  That's a sad confession. Anyway, we digress.

• 41:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, we have. It's not meant to be a therapy session.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  So, anyway, they've learned the truth about themselves.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  You know, or did they always know it? Anyway, they leave school and they go to the section that Ishiguro had always wanted to write, his original idea for the book, which is The Cottages. And you were saying that when you first read the book, you didn't care for this, but now you're all over it.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  It's actually the most relatable part of the whole novel. And it's the time at which they wrestle the most kind of banal and yet crucial human questions. You know, they're kind of like, they're sort of at university, they're in these East Anglian fields, huge skies, bleak vistas, and the book is very good on that, you know, versus the rosy tinted hues of Hailsham. And the atmosphere is like university, you know, long languid afternoon, good, robust chats about philosophy, long breakfasts in which everyone lies about having read War and Peace, like all of us do.

• 42:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Did you talk about philosophy and claim to have read War and Peace?

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, nonstop, nonstop.

• 42:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  I just do not believe that for a moment.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  I was like a young Sartre. But it is still, as you said before, it's still quite institutionalized, it's kind of dreamlike. And this is the twilight period of their adult lives, they're stepping into adult life. And yet, their lives are still very constrained, they're still very fenced off. And they start to get limited access to the outside world. In the movie, they illustrate this quite well, I think, by showing that they have to tap in with these little wristbands that they have every time they go in to show that you still are kind of in a dystopia. But they have to write these essays to fill their time at the cottages, because I suppose, I don't know, the lords on hire at Hailsham are like, God, what do you give people to do while they wait to give their vital organs?

• 43:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's exactly. They're giving them something to do. But in a way, you know, a person writing an essay on George Eliot now, I mean, what's the point? I mean, that's a terrible thing to say.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Wait, what do you mean?

• 43:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, I mean, students do that now, right?

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, yeah, totally.

• 43:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, you could say, well, what's the point? I mean, because it's fun, because it's a useful way to spend your time, whatever. But them writing their essays at the cottages that nobody will ever read.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  It's really pointless, because they're like, years away from death at this point. But then, this is quite interesting, too, thinking about George Eliot, because... Cathy writes her essay about Victorian fiction and that's quite an interesting reminder of how Never Let Me Go, you know, funnily enough.

• 43:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's quite a Victorian.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's quite like a Victorian novel. It's like Jane Eyre or something where the narrator is figuring out everything. She doesn't really understand her world and information's been gradually released.

• 43:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  And actually, the sentimentality of Hailsham and the children at Hailsham, that's quite Dickensian in itself, isn't it?

• 44:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it is, it is. So basically, at this point, the Ruth, Cathy, Tommy love triangle is getting a bit toxic, isn't it?

• 44:09Speaker 03

  As things would when, when, you know, sex is thrown into the mix and...

• 44:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and they've all gone, it's like they've all gone to university together effectively. Cathy has gone to the cottages and she's having loads of sex, very, very casually, because they can't have children, so that's kind of, you know, consequence free. And she is having so much, in fact, that she worries that she's not right. She says, "I worry, something's not quite right with me." And she says, "I think it might be something to do with the different food that's explaining why I'm having so much sex."

• 44:37Speaker 03

  Ah. So because Cathy can't understand these incredible sexual urges that she's having, she spends a lot of her time flicking through porn magazines. And they do this in the movie, and it's actually quite funny, Carrie Mulligan's looking through it in a very kind of, you know, disengaged manner.

• 44:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  And this is because she's trying to explain why she is like she is, where these urges come from. And this introduces another major concept in the novel, and this is the possibles idea, or possible theory. And the possibles are the people that the clones are based on. And so by discovering your possible, by meeting them maybe, or seeing what they look like.

• 45:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  You'll get an insight into yourself and a glimpse into your own future. But the interesting thing about the possibles is, they're kind of, in the eyes of the clones, they're almost parents. So Ruth is obsessed with the idea of finding her possible. And as I said earlier, you know, Ruth is a character more than any other that I sort of thought was preoccupied with the idea of finding a mother. And I think it's almost as though she's looking for her mother in the way that if you were orphaned, you try to find your parents, or if you were adopted, you might want to know where you come from by meeting your original parents.

• 45:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So the reason that Cathy has been going through these magazines in particular is that she assumes that because she has these sexual feelings, therefore, a model, basically, the person she's based on, must have been, you know, a porn star or something.

• 46:00Speaker 03

  Porn star, yeah.

• 46:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  And therefore, yeah, that's where she's looking. And... You know, it's great to get Norfolk, North Norfolk back in the show.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  It's great to get North Norfolk.

• 46:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because they go on a trip, don't they, to Cromer? Because Ruth thinks that she has found her possible, isn't that right?

• 46:18Speaker 03

  It is, yeah, it is. But just very quickly, just to dwell on this, on this family element. Kazuo Shigeru said something very interesting and he was saying how he could have created this whole distinct subplot from this aspect of the story and created like a rich thread about a clone and his or her model and their relationship and stuff. And I remember the first time, I don't know about you, but the first time I read this, I remember thinking, oh, I wish you had gone into detail with that and explored the idea of these families and stuff. But actually, I suppose that wouldn't really work because the whole thing about clones is they're never defined in and of themselves. They're never kind of individual beings because the whole point of giving away your organs is that you're defined by someone else.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  And they, they give value to their lives through objects, you know, whether that's the cassette or the pencil case or whatever it is. And so I think in this, it's like Ruth desperately trying to find agency or, or a sense of kind of independence. Like she's trying to find meaning in and of herself outside of the destiny that she knows.

• 47:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  But that's what we all do, isn't it? I mean, we, A, projecting the, try to project meaning onto things like the tape or whatever. You know, people with their possessions defining themselves by what they're by. Or, you know, the search for your parents, the search for meaning, the search for roots. I mean, that feels very human. Anyway, they go off, don't they? They actually follow, they follow this, this, this woman.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  This poor woman.

• 47:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Into an art, into an art gallery, ironically, given the importance of art in the whole book. And it's not Ruth. And Ruth is really gutted. She's absolutely gutted. And I found this a very moving moment where she snaps and she says to the others.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  I love this.

• 47:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  She says, we all know it. We are modeled from trash, junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps, convicts, maybe. Just as long as they aren't psychos. That's what we come from. We all know it. So why don't we say it? But again, how is that different from what, I mean, most of us ideally don't think of our parents as trash. But we're conscious of our. Yeah, we're nothing special. We're just ordinary, right?

• 48:22Speaker 03

  Definitely, we're constant, nothing special. I think that is a bit of a departure from the kind of human life analogy, though.

• 48:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  The thing that's interesting about that scene is it's, it's like, that's never alluded to at any other point in the novel, apart from when Cathy's flicking through the porn mags. And it's like, you get a real sense of how much their knowledge of them, their knowledge of what they come from and where they're going, how much they actually do know. And I actually love that scene because it makes you quite sympathetic towards Ruth, possibly for the first time. And also because, you know, I mentioned there are kind of three moments where the reality of this world is articulated, and that is one of them. Yeah, I love it.

• 49:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  And, and at this point, they, they start to, to, to play, don't they, with another idea?

• 49:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tommy's idea, Wayne Rooney's idea.

• 49:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Wayne Rooney has this idea that basically, um, this is sort of based on gossip among the kids themselves.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  It's like a mythology that they create for themselves.

• 49:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's like a religion they've created themselves. They've created this cosmology. And it's basically, if you, if you're brilliant at art, you know, the art is a window into your soul. And so people can learn about you through your art. And he basically says, um, maybe, well, the, the lot of them have been saying, there's a theory that if you're in love, if you're truly in love with somebody, and, and this can be proved by them looking into your soul through your art, then they will allow you to defer donating your organs. Because in a way, you have proved your humanity. And so they'll give you a postponement.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Because the implication is that by truly loving someone, in a way that this kind of idealist couple could, you have a soul. And it's interesting that not, not, you know, Tommy, Cathy, Ruth, none of them ever questions for one minute that they do have a soul. But I think, again, this really mirrors how we think about dying, all of us, and our, and our desire to escape it, because. I suppose somewhere irrationally, none of us can entirely accept our fate because otherwise how could we live? And Ishiguro explains, and we long for this special dispensation. I think that it's not just because we want to carry on living on and on and on. I think it's because we don't want to face the pain and sorrow and loneliness that comes with death.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  We fear the loss of loved ones. We fear the parting, you know, and, and that's what Tommy's doing. He, he, he's desperate. He, he, he's hoping that like love will save him from the inevitable.

• 50:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's like the last lines of that Philip Larkin poem, um, the Arundel tomb poem where he says, you know, people, we have this almost instinct, almost true that what will survive of us is love.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  We all deny it. We, we all deny that. We all think that like, if you find someone that you love enough, you'll go out of this world as a pair, you know, like the notebook or something like that. But we come in alone and we go out alone. And that's the perfect articulation.

• 51:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  Your view of, your view of the world is so bleak, but I admire you for it. I think it's great.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  Thank you. Yeah.

• 51:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's good. All right. So talking of bleakness, let's move on.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  Let's pull ourselves back from the

• 51:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  The cliff edge.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  Depressing, yeah, existential stuff. And actually Kazuo Ishiguro does that very well because he brings back the love triangle, which is kind of banal and normal and human.

• 51:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  And because Tommy shows Kathy his animals, his art that he draws. And I also, it's really weird because they're very articulate.

• 51:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, they're very, very ornate, you know, minute detail on the inside of what they look like. And it's really, they're kind of like little clocks.

• 51:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  And I was thinking that's kind of weird because obviously these characters do everything they can. I imagine not to think about their insides because their insides are literally going to be

• 51:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Like handed out.

• 51:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. They've been created in the same way. But Ruth is horrible, isn't she? She basically says that, um, she betrays Kathy to Tommy and says, you know, your animals are rubbish and Kathy's been laughing at them. Kathy thinks your drawings are useless.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Kathy thinks your drawings are horrid.

• 52:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  So do you know why this resonates with me?

• 52:04Speaker 03

  And that gets him. Oh no, it's going to be a sad, a sad insight into your traumatic teenage years.

• 52:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Art teacher, even younger, actually, when I was quite small, my art teacher, Mrs. Salt, who was a massive chain smoker like you, Tabby, she,

• 52:18Speaker 03

  That's a terrible revelation.

• 52:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  She, at the parents' meeting, told my parents that she said, you know, I've been teaching for 30 years.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he is the single worst person at art I have ever taught. I've never encountered a more incompetent person, a more useless.

• 52:36Speaker 03

  Your eyes are glittering.

• 52:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Recollecting the pain of the past. My eyes are glittering. If you're not watching this, if you're just listening to this, you'd be very moved by the emotion in the presenter's eyes at this harrowing moment.

• 52:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Um.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  I'm so sorry.

• 52:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, well, anyway, that's massively.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Shall we move on?

• 52:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Let's move on because it's too traumatic.

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Break down in tears. Yeah.

• 52:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Let's move on to the third section. So basically, they leave the cottages.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Well, Cathy leaves because then also Ruth also says to Cathy this really mean thing about, they do it very well in the movie, where she says, you know Cathy, you know, Tommy's really fond of you, but he just doesn't see you that way. So Cathy just kind of has enough. She kind of puts her hands in the air. And so she goes on to the next stage of their lives, which is the donations, the donation centres. And this is where we really come into the horror of the story. You know, the horror of the donations is totally inescapable now. There's a real sense of the walls closing in and time running out. And again, this is a mad comparison, given the fact that, you know, they're running out of time because before they have to give over their vital organs. But I actually felt when I was reading this, like that feeling you get at the end of the summer holidays, when you've got a

• 53:44Speaker 03

  day left to go before you go back to school or something, that sick, kind of churning feeling in your stomach. It's very, very powerfully done. And Cathy's very lonely. And then she eventually becomes Ruth's carer in Dover.

• 53:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So she, so they're kind of reunited. It's like they're old sparring partners at the end of their lives together. They know that the walls are closing in. There's this very haunting scene, isn't there, where they go to on this trip to visit an abandoned boat?

• 54:11Speaker 03

  They love an exciting day trip, don't they?

• 54:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, a brilliant day trip.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they're kind of, this boat is in the marshes and they're kind of staggering across the marshes.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  Ruth is dying, basically, because she's given so many donations. And I always think it's a bit like, it's like it's an allusion to the River Styx or something like that.

• 54:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, I hadn't thought of that. So that's interesting because that's that shows your greater profundity than me because I thought it was like a the famous five or something.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. You've exposed yourself there.

• 54:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  A children's adventure to go and see an abandoned boat. You could absolutely imagine somebody in a Blitzen book doing that. But in this case, it is so dark. Because they're dying because, you know, well, Ruth is dying and for the others, the kind of, you know, fate is

• 54:52Speaker 03

  They will be dying.

• 54:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Sharpening, you know, its axe or whatever. I don't know what that analogy is. Anyway.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Potent and moving.

• 54:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thank you. Well, actually, talking of potent and moving, there's a moment in this bit when they go off to the boat, this huge fatalism. So.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 55:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ruth says to Tommy, she says, I was like you, Tommy. I was pretty much ready when I became a donor. It felt right. After all, it's it's what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it? And this goes to that thing of why don't they fight? Why don't they run away? Why don't they rebel? It never even occurs to them for a single second that that would be possible. Like, it's what we're supposed to be doing. They just fall into line and they do it.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  They're like the prisoners in Plato's cave. If if your reality is one thing all your life, why the hell would you question it?

• 55:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  If you had no cause to.

• 55:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. So Ruth is basically, she accepts her fate, doesn't she? She gives up on Tommy. She basically says to Cathy, you and Tommy should be together. You know, I've been keeping you apart. And it's a really moving scene, actually, because although Ruth has been a little bit, dare I say, a tiny bit bitchy throughout the book. She's actually, deep down, a vulnerable, worried, frightened person.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  She's a girl longing for a mother and she is vulnerable. And I think she's actually the one that has always wanted to be something more than her destiny. And so she really has accepted. And it's this moment where they're driving in the car back from the boat, the three of them. And when Ruth says to Cathy, you know, the two of you should be together. Cathy breaks down and she starts crying and that's really, really unusual because Cathy never shows that much emotion.

• 56:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Hmm.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  That's the moment that Cathy and Tommy do come together. But you know, it really isn't like some great romantic moment from a movie or whatever it is. It's very sad, it's very melancholy. It's a bit more like an old couple together in a care home or something.

• 56:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, completely.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  Their time is running out.

• 56:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's effectively what it is, right? I mean, he's, she's a carer and he's a donor.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  And there's this really, really sad line that I always, always think about from the book when Tommy says to her a bit later on, but says to Cathy, "It's a shame, Cath, because we've loved each other all our lives, but it's the end. We can't stay together forever." And that haunts their every single moment together.

• 57:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's very sad.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  But they try to put off fate, don't they?

• 57:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, they make one last go, don't they? They basically track down their old guardian, their old teacher, Miss Emily.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  Charlotte Rampling.

• 57:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, Charlotte Rampling, who is living with Madame, who is the person who used to collect their art. And they go, and again, this is a massive spoiler for people who haven't read the book. They track them down, they go to Littlehampton to find them in their house.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  To show them Tommy's art, right? To show that they are truly in love and therefore should get a deferral.

• 57:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's basically, they think they'll be able to get a deferral and postpone their donations, postpone their deaths.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  I don't think Cathy ever really does believe that. I think she always kind of knows deep down and is humoring Tommy.

• 57:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Humoring Tommy. Yeah, he's more idealistic, isn't he? Which is why he's had these tantrums all his life.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  Classic Wayne Rooney.

• 57:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, classic Wayne Rooney, exactly. He is more hot tempered because he's been trying to fight against the fate, whereas Cathy, I think, has always accepted it.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And the teachers basically say to them, you know, the whole point of the school was to try to, it was almost like an experimental school. It was to try to prove that you had souls because we were actually campaigners, kind of on your behalf. We wanted to kind of prove your humanity.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  That you deserved respect.

• 58:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but there's no escape. There's no way out. I mean, actually, Miss Emily there, our guardian, says to them at one point, "Your life must now run the course that has been set." Set for it, which is a shattering thing for Tommy in particular to hear. And when they're going out, Madame says to, now, this is the person who you said in the first half, you said she sees them almost like spiders, like creatures and frightened of them.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  And yet she campaigns for them.

• 58:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  And she has campaigned for them.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  It's like people, some people might view animals, they're not like us.

• 58:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  But, you know.

• 58:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  She's like an animal rights person, right? She says to them on the way out, poor creatures, I wish I could help you, but now you're by yourselves. And her final words, you poor creatures. Like she, deep down, has never really seen them as human. She's felt sorry for them. But she's felt sorry for them like you would feel sorry for a rabbit that's being experimented on or something like that, which is a, and when they go, they drive back, Tommy has this massive meltdown, doesn't he? Where he's, he's in a rage and he's crying and he's screaming and he's covered in mud and it's, it's like, that's the moment when, yeah, yeah, it's a really, really sort of shattering.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  In so far as this book or any Kazuo Shigeru book has a climax, this is it. And there's this moment where Kathy just like holds him and they cling together. Even as they know kind of, you know, the tide of fate is going to rip them apart, you know, they try to never let each other go. But it's, it's actually just awful. Makes me want to cry even thinking about it.

• 59:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  I know, it's terrible, isn't it?

• 59:52Speaker 03

  It's like, and it's also, it's like, he knew all along, I love wouldn't actually save him.

• 59:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  He knew as a little boy on the football pitch.

• 59:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Even back then, yeah, which is why the book, his book ended by these two tantrums. Yeah, his two great meltdowns from Tommy. So he's heading towards his end. They have a last heartbreaking day together, which is again, is classic Ishiguro, but just like life, it's very humdrum. There's no great drama. He's just, you know, they have a sort of melancholy end and his very last memory, he says to her, I've been thinking about scoring goals at Haylesham when I was a boy. And remembering running back and I always used to think I was splashing through water when I ran back. Just this tiny little detail, which feels so hu, actually ironically, so human, right? Because ultimately that's what they are. I mean, you know, I know they're clones, but they are us. That's the point of the book.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  That in itself, I mean, I know it's not the point of the book and I don't think it's something that Kazuo Shigeru thought about much when he was writing it. But I think if, if, if you were examining from this book, whether or not the clones of it, the clones in it have souls. I think that's all the proof you need because it's such a human thing to think about kind of on your deathbed.

• 1:00:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. And then the very last image of the book, Cathy says she has this image of Norfolk and imagines all the, all the lost property, all the rubbish caught on barbed wire fences in the fields. And she imagines that her, all the detritus since her childhood has washed up there. And then she has this image of Tommy coming towards her across the fields. But of course, she knows he never will. It's kind of really sad. It is a really sad moment, I think.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Oh, God, I'm, I'm welling up. It's, it's devastating. I don't know how, he says this is his most cheerful book.

• 1:01:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  It's so sad.

• 1:01:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's a brilliant book, actually, because it is a book that makes you think about your own life, you know, nostalgia, melancholy, the stuff you've accumulated and lost along the way.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  And how none of it kind of really matters.

• 1:01:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  And he, she has this, the, the last line of the book is, is wonderful. She says, I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. And that, wherever it was, there's such a kind of fatalism in that, but also kind of a, a casual kind of shrugging of the shoulders.

• 1:02:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  You know, what will be, will be. Anyway.

• 1:02:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Very human.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Crikey. Yeah. But anyway, now that we've, we've gone through it.

• 1:02:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  So buddy, what does it all mean? No, no book episode would be complete without a sort of soupçon of rapier sharp analysis to close us off.

• 1:02:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Thanks. I guess it's a book, it's a book about mortality, isn't it? That's ultimately what it's about. It's a book about how we, and what it is to be human. I mean, that's the irony that they are his.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  It is ironic, yeah.

• 1:02:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  They are, they are not human characters or, but they are the most, some of the most human, it's some of the most touching stuff, I think, that Ishiguro has ever written, that relationship between the three characters. And I think it's absolutely beautifully observed, the kind of, the, the emotion, the, the combination of the deep emotion and then the banality of it, I think is what makes it so powerful.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's the mundane versus the stoicism of their characters versus the tragedy.

• 1:03:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  And it's, it is, it's just a prototype of every human life, isn't it? Everyone can relate to it in some way or another.

• 1:03:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So Tabby. We're going to give, as always, we give these books, because this is a really serious and scholarly thing to do. We give the books marks out of 10.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  We, yeah, exactly. Like every kindergarten teacher.

• 1:03:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, exactly. So we're going to, different index each time. So I think.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  What are we using today?

• 1:03:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Heartbreaking organ donations out of 10.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Love it. Yeah, I love it. Yeah.

• 1:03:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  So how many, how many would you give this out of 10?

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  I am going to give it nine out of 10. And I'm going to take off one point. No, first of all, I'm going to, I'm going to take off a point five for the fact that I didn't always find Cathy's love for Tommy in the first half of the book entirely convincing. And then I'm going to get, take off another point five because of the fact, the mad fact that he thought Tommy looked like Wayne Rooney.

• 1:03:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the Nobel literature laureate Kazuo Shigeru has been told by you there. I'm going to give it 10 out of 10.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  Big fan of your work.

• 1:04:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  I'm not going to disagree with the Nobel Prize committee, but also because I just think it is a fantastically written book. I think the construction of it is perfectly judged. And I think you can read it on so many different levels. So I'm going to give it the maximum points. I'm just a more generous person. I'm a more generous person.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, you are. You're blinder and more generous, more naive.

• 1:04:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay. On that bombshell, goodbye, everybody.

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  Bye.

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