Pod Insights The Rest Is Science Introducing: The Book Club - Never Let Me Go About this episode 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?
Dominic Sanbrook joins Hannah and Michael to discuss all this and Dominic's new show, The Book Club, available now.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Hannah Fry? Hello, it's Hannah here.
0:06 Michael Stevens? And Michael.
0:07 Hannah Fry? And welcome to The Rest Is Science. And today, we're doing something a little bit different because we are here with Dominic Sandbrook of Rest Is History fame. Dominic, welcome to our side of the fence.
0:19 Speaker 02 Thank you very much. It's lovely to be on a properly professional podcast for once, one where the presenters actually know what they're talking about. This is an absolute first for me, so it's very exciting.
0:28 Michael Stevens? Dominic, I love bringing the literature into the lab. Would you consider this podcast a lab, Hannah?
0:34 Hannah Fry? Sure, it's a lab of the mind.
0:36 Michael Stevens? It's an ideal lab, at least. But Dominic, you've got a new show out that's called The Book Club. And so I wanted to hear about it. And I wanted to talk to you because I love books as well.
0:45 Speaker 02 Amazing.
0:46 Hannah Fry? We all love books.
0:47 Speaker 02 We can have a lovely relationship. So, yes, I do a podcast called The Rest Is History normally. And a long serving producer on The Rest Is History, Tabitha, and I would often talk about books when we're on tour and when we're preparing the shows and stuff. And we did a mini series for our Rest Is History club members, our subscribers, all about books. So we looked at The Hobbit, and we looked at Dracula, and some kind of great classics. Anyway, those went down quite well. So we decided to launch it as a standalone show. And actually, our second episode is a book partly about science. So it's a book called Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. So it's a book in which it turns
1:29 Speaker 02 out, this is a massive spoiler, by the way, so your listeners should prepare themselves. So the narrator is one of a group of children who have effectively been created as clones to be organ donors. And so the book is asking deep questions about what it is to be human, and what it is to be a clone, and all of this kind of thing.
1:49 Hannah Fry? Do they know that they've been created for that purpose?
1:52 Speaker 02 When it starts, it looks like Kazuo Ishiguro has written a kind of classic British boarding school story. And quite early on, so it's not a colossal spoiler, there was a moment when they're talking about what they're going to do when they grow up. And some of the kids are saying they want to go to Hollywood. Yeah, some of the boys, they want to become actors. And their teacher, who is not a clone, Kind of loses patience with them and says, this is not right that you're having this conversation. It's not right that you haven't been told. Or she says, there was this line, which I think is, is, is so true, because it's how we, we learn about our own mortality, for example. She says to the kids, it's not right, because you've been told and not told. It's been allowed to kind of seep in, but you have, no one has really sat you down and
2:35 Speaker 02 had this blunt conversation with you, that you will never go to Hollywood, you will never have a job, you will never have a normal life. You have been bred for a purpose of giving your organs to other, to human beings. And you are not, effectively, you are not fully human. And of course, this is, the funny thing is, it's kind of a shock for these kids. But at the same time, they react as thirteen year olds always do, when a teacher sits them down and wants to give them a lecture about their health, or sex education, or their own mortality. They're a bit embarrassed and a bit bored of the conversation. And so it's really, really brilliantly handled. And the rest of the book is about how these
3:15 Speaker 02 characters cope with the reality of the fact that they are clones and that other people don't regard them as human, and that their lives are going to be shortened, that they're going to have to give up their organs for donation, and then they'll be dead.
3:28 Michael Stevens? So they're clones of the people who will need these organs in the future. That way, it's a perfect match.
3:35 Speaker 02 We never really know how they have been created, but they come to believe, some of them themselves, that they've been made from, as it were, the losers of society. So there's a bit where they're having an argument, and one of them says to the others, you know what we are? We're trash. That's the, that's the quote from the book. We are winos, we are prostitutes, we are criminals, we are all of these kinds of things. And that's, those were our models. And that's what we've been created from. And we are basically, we're just organ donors. That's all we are. And it's a really troubling idea.
4:11 Michael Stevens? But how, how did you pick this book?
4:13 Speaker 02 It is an incredibly haunting, troubling book about nostalgia, about melancholy. There's lots of themes. It's not just the science element. There's lots of these kinds of themes to it. But actually, like a lot of Ishiguro's books, and like a lot of science fiction books, actually, going back to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's book, which is another book that we're doing on the show. It's a book that asks What is it? What does it mean to be human and to kind of confront your own mortality? Like, what do you do with the time that is given to you? So one of the questions we talk about in the show is, it's one of the things that critics actually leveled at the book. They said, why don't they run away? Why don't they go mad, knowing that this is their reality? And Tabitha, my co-presenter, when I was having this conversation, I said, yeah, but you and I are gonna die.
4:57 Speaker 02 And, you know, that that moment is faster, is approaching more quickly than we would like. And yet, we haven't run away. We haven't gone mad. We're actually doing this podcast. That's what we're choosing to do with the limited time that we've been given. And that's the question that ultimately we all have to face, isn't it? When we contemplate our own very short time on this planet. That that's what, what do we do with the time that's given to us?
5:19 Hannah Fry? I'm so intrigued by something that you said there, that these people aren't considered as fully human, or they don't see themselves as fully human. Why is that? I mean, presumably they are a full human form.
5:32 Speaker 02 Of course, yeah. So, and, and as we discover, they believe that they have emotions just as valuable as any humans. And they believe that they have souls. It's really important to them that they have souls. And there's a group of people who are trying to prove that the, that the clones have souls. They get them to do artworks and they collect their art. And they want to basically say, you know, they are able to express themselves artistically. And that's one of the attributes of being human. Why wouldn't people think of them as human? Well, you guys are the science experts. Do you not think that if we were to clone human beings as organ donors? One of the ways that we would cope with it, and the moral implications is we would tell ourselves they're not really human beings like us. I mean, this is what people will say.
6:16 Speaker 02 This is the theme of Blade Runner, or indeed Frankenstein, or all these kinds of things.
6:21 Hannah Fry? I mean, I think if you take that logic and start applying it more loosely, then you would say that only one twin, only one of two identical twins gets to be considered the human.
6:31 Michael Stevens? Twins are clones of each other. So which one got the soul and which one didn't?
6:37 Hannah Fry? Surely the first one out, the first one out always wins.
6:40 Michael Stevens? Yeah, psychologically and historically, it's been very common to say, you know what? These people were exploiting, they're not really fully people, so it's not that bad. And then when the Pope says, actually, you can save their souls, they go, oh crud. Okay, they've got a soul. Uh, what do we do about this? So is that why they're clones then? The hope would be that they could be exploited for their organs without guilt.
7:04 Speaker 02 Yes.
7:05 Michael Stevens? Because why wouldn't you just breed a bunch of humans? And after all, if I wanted organs, I would want them to come from the cream of the crop of society, not the trash.
7:14 Speaker 02 So you're asking the difficult questions that really, I mean, I'm just to be clear, I'm not Kazu Ishiguro, and I therefore cannot, and I think he would say his book is a metaphor rather than a a serious investigation of what a future with cloning would look like.
7:30 Hannah Fry? I mean, sure, I still want Michael Phelps's lungs, you know?
7:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, okay, fair enough, fair enough. I think you'd be very hard on these kids' lungs, I think they're good lungs.
7:38 Michael Stevens? You know what? I would like Albert Einstein's spleen.
7:43 Speaker 02 Would you?
7:44 Michael Stevens? It'd be a funny story to tell people. I'd be like, oh yeah, I got an organ from Albert Einstein. They're like, that's why you're so smart. And I'm like, no, I got his spleen.
7:51 Speaker 02 What would you take, Hannah? If you could have the organ of anybody from history?
7:54 Hannah Fry? The organ of anyone from history? Oh, I don't know, the like, the courage of Joan of Arc, there you go.
8:02 Speaker 02 Courage, that's not an organ.
8:03 Michael Stevens? Courage organ.
8:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's not an organ. Though your science podcast.
8:06 Hannah Fry? You put me on the spot, my biology is weak. I've exposed myself.
8:09 Speaker 02 I'd have Nelson's liver, that's what I'd do.
8:12 Hannah Fry? Fair, I'm sure he could take it.
8:13 Michael Stevens? You know what you could do, Hannah, is you could ask for the guts of Joan of Arc.
8:18 Speaker 02 Nice.
8:18 Hannah Fry? There you go, see? You know, the thing is also, Dominic, that
8:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:22 Hannah Fry? A lot of this is actually possible, you know this? Like, you could, you could probably do this with humans. People thought you couldn't clone any primates in particular for a really long time. And then some people managed to clone some macaques and it's all, it's all gone. So the only reason why, why this, it's not a scientific reason that is stopping this from happening. It's much more of an ethical one.
8:44 Speaker 02 It's just ethical. Because Ishiguro got the inspiration for his book from Dolly, the sheep that was cloned in the 1990s. And I've often wondered why, if you can clone a sheep, you can't clone a human being. But then, of course, that causes, you know, if they cloned another Hannah Frye. Which one is the real one? Would you be happy to die knowing that Hannah Frye, the other one, lived on? I mean, obviously not, surely.
9:07 Hannah Fry? I'd consider her my nemesis and do everything I could to take her down.
9:10 Speaker 02 Of course you would. You'd do everything to undermine that person, wouldn't you?
9:13 Michael Stevens? I want to say it really depends on how the cloning happens. Like, to clone her today, we would wind up with a newborn Hannah Frye twin. Because twins, which naturally happen all the time, are clones. They have the exact same DNA as each other. If we wanted to make an adult Hannah Frye clone, that's the same age as the one we're talking to right now, we don't know how to do that. We'd have to make a baby, we'd say it has the same DNA, it's going to have completely different life experiences, it's going to grow with different technology. Even if we had her parents raise it, her parents are different now than they were when she was a child. So, it would wind up quite different. This is what confused me as a kid when Dolly was cloned. The little magazine we all had to read in school about
9:55 Michael Stevens? it had a picture of two adult sheep that looked the same, but they were clearly just this one image mirrored. And we were like, no, no, this is exactly the same image, just mirrored. And the teacher didn't understand that they'd actually created a baby of Dolly.
10:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, this raises the question, doesn't it, that what are you? What makes you you? Is it your DNA and all that stuff, or is it the sum of your memories and your life experiences? And I think most of us instinctively would say it's the latter, that a Hannah Frye with different memories is not the real Hannah Frye.
10:24 Michael Stevens? Well, so if Hannah had a head injury and suffered from amnesia, is she now a different person? That's a major problem for people who are amnesiac. They wake up, they're told, here's your wife, here's your job, and they're like, oh, I don't get to choose? Like, wait, but who am I?
10:44 Hannah Fry? There's also some ideas about the memory, when you do clone something, that there's some lingering memory that gets transported. I mean, we were talking about bamboo the other day on our show. And bamboo, you clone it, it sort of retains this kind of internal genetic clock. So bamboo, it's very dramatic, right? It sort of flowers and then dies. It takes about 100 years. So for it to happen. And there was one particular, very beautiful fountain spray bamboo that um some Russian explorer found in the mountains of China. Took it back to Saint Petersburg. It got cloned and cloned and cloned and cloned and cloned until it was all over Europe. But it retained this memory, the clock of when it was going to flower and die.
11:28 Hannah Fry? And so there was basically an apocalypse, a bamboo apocalypse across all of all of Northern Europe simultaneously a few years ago, where just everything was like, well, and died. So I I like the idea that maybe in this book, all of the kids, you know.
11:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:41 Hannah Fry? Die at the same age as the the elders that they've copied.
11:44 Speaker 02 They but they don't know, you see, this is the thing, because there's this terrible heartbreaking sequence at the end of the book, when some of the characters that we've come to really know and love. When they start to have to give up their organs for donation. And you can normally do, I think, three or four donations. And then you're dead. And they just passively, the thing that a lot of readers find fascinating, but also quite troubling about it. Is that they don't rebel. They just passively go along with it. And I mean, that's effectively what we all do with our own mortality, isn't it? Unless we freeze ourselves, which you will know much more about than me, but I think is probably bonkers.
12:16 Hannah Fry? It's probably bonkers.
12:17 Michael Stevens? The freezing, the freezing isn't bonkers. It's the unfreezing that we haven't figured out yet. But the hope is that if we freeze you. In five hundred years, we'll be able to figure it out. Now, whether whether we'll honor the contract and say, yep, let's bring them back. Is another question, because we could find ourselves with, you know, hundreds of thousands of frozen people.
12:39 Speaker 02 Right.
12:39 Michael Stevens? And we figure out how to bring them back and we all go, yeah, but where are they gonna live? Like, we we basically would have this migrant crisis.
12:47 Speaker 02 Right, exactly. People are so grumpy about immigrants now. Imagine if people start saying, oh, these people who are coming out from five hundred years ago, taking all our jobs and like, that's insane. That would never happen.
12:57 Hannah Fry? Coming here in their frozen carriers.
13:01 Michael Stevens? It won't be a bunch of migrants who are thawed and will take jobs. Because at the moment, all these frozen people, there's, there's like hundreds of them. They're super old because you cannot freeze someone unless they're dead.
13:14 Speaker 02 Yes, that would make sense, actually, yeah.
13:16 Michael Stevens? If you were to freeze me, you would be murdering me, according to the law.
13:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:19 Michael Stevens? And so people who sign up to these services, they usually stay in like a hospice or a nursing home near a freezing facility. And at the moment that they're pronounced dead, the companies can come in, they flush out the blood, replace it with an antifreeze solution, they gotta cool the brain really fast. And they just, they, they cover you with liquid nitrogen and they pump your heart with this machine to get to suck in the antifreeze and out the blood. And then they put you in a big duer of liquid nitrogen. And that's where you stay, in a big warehouse.
13:52 Hannah Fry? But they hang you upside down like a bat. Did you know this?
13:54 Speaker 02 No, I didn't know that. They're freezing you at a point when you wouldn't want to be frozen. So you would want to be frozen, surely, at your peak.
14:01 Michael Stevens? Exactly.
14:01 Speaker 02 In your physical prime, wouldn't you? I mean, if I was gonna be frozen, I wouldn't wanna be frozen now, I'd wanna be frozen when I was 25.
14:07 Michael Stevens? Ooh, I, I wouldn't mind being frozen now, but I'm excited for what's coming next in my life. I think the problem is everyone who's being frozen right now is being frozen at literally the worst part, their death. Like, when they come back, they're gonna be like, oh, but I'm still dying. Like, I'm still, I'm still 107 years old.
14:25 Speaker 02 Exactly.
14:26 Michael Stevens? So, of course, the real hope is that we'll be able to copy their brains and give them, uh, computer bodies and robot bodies and
14:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:36 Michael Stevens? reproduce their consciousness digitally.
14:39 Speaker 02 But then that gets you back to that question, Michael, doesn't it? If you could upload your brain into the cloud and then download it again into another vehicle, would you still be you?
14:50 Michael Stevens? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Whoever woke up would definitely think they were me. Because they would have the continuous life story that I've already built for them.
15:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:02 Michael Stevens? But yeah, it's weird to think, when I close my eyes and die and then I'm re-thawed, am I gonna be like, oh?
15:07 Speaker 02 Exactly. It's serious about the thing about Hannah, is that the real Hannah Frye? Or is this now yet another impostor?
15:13 Hannah Fry? Profound question.
15:14 Speaker 02 Profound question. That's what I expect on the rest of the science, you don't get these questions on my shows. Anyway, here is a clip from our episode of the book club that we did about Never Let Me Go, and I hope that your listeners enjoy it. 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 wins its prizes. It becomes a film with Anthony Hopkins' name at Thompson.
15:38 Speaker 03 Great film.
15:39 Speaker 02 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.
15:46 Speaker 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, but none of it seemed
16:29 Speaker 03 to work. And then, um, 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. We're very scientific. But he said he 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.
16:51 Speaker 02 H.G. Wells is kind of the Morlocks and the Eloi from The Time Machine.
16:54 Speaker 03 Exactly that. And at the same time, there was massive publicity around this sheep called Dolly.
17:02 Speaker 02 Okay.
17:02 Speaker 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
17:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, we won't give it away.
17:27 Speaker 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.
17:54 Speaker 02 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
18:33 Speaker 03 No.
18:34 Speaker 02 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.
18:43 Speaker 03 Beautifully.
18:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:45 Speaker 02 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.
18:52 Speaker 03 Carey Mulligan, eat a heart out.
18:54 Speaker 02 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.
19:07 Speaker 03 Yeah.
19:09 Speaker 02 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, Toby.
19:21 Speaker 03 So Hailsham is obviously this very idealized place and
19:26 Speaker 03 It's kind of Ishiguro plays with light a lot and 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. 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.
19:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, he's very good, Andrew Garfield. Now, do you want a fascinating fact? So do you know who, 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.
20:12 Speaker 03 Johnny Depp.
20:14 Speaker 02 It's a good guess, but it's not right. It's somebody very different. It's.
20:19 Speaker 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.
20:26 Speaker 02 Okay, I'm just going to put you out of your misery. It's Wayne Rooney.
20:29 Speaker 03 Stop.
20:30 Speaker 02 He thought, yeah.
20:31 Speaker 03 No.
20:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's Wayne Rooney. That's sporty for you, hasn't it?
20:35 Speaker 03 In one, in one blow, you've totally destroyed Never Let Me Go for me. What?
20:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:40 Speaker 03 How does that work?
20:41 Speaker 02 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.
20:49 Speaker 03 But Wayne Rooney looks like an orc. I imagine Tommy looking like kind of quite in his feet.
20:54 Speaker 02 Do you?
20:54 Speaker 03 Floppy head.
20:55 Speaker 02 You basically imagine him as Andrew Garfield.
20:57 Speaker 03 I do, yeah. I mean, I know we have to move on, but I'm totally staggered by that, by that reveal.
21:02 Speaker 02 So you've got Tommy, Wayne Rooney, then you've got.
21:04 Speaker 03 Then you've got Ruth, who is, who is in a relationship for most of the book with Wayne Rooney.
21:10 Speaker 02 And she's Keira Knightley.
21:11 Speaker 03 She's played by Keira Knightley, yeah.
21:12 Speaker 02 That Keira Knightley, Wayne Rooney relationship.
21:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, that's the meet cute we've all been waiting for.
21:18 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, if Keira's listening, yeah, take our advice. 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. High stakes at Hillshire. And she kicks her out of the group.
22:00 Speaker 03 You know, it's classic, kind of bitchy, you know, childhood children, female politics.
22:07 Speaker 02 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.
22:13 Speaker 03 Clearly.
22:14 Speaker 02 How convincingly do you think, does Ishiguro capture that world of kind of, you know, pre-pubescent or teenage girls?
22:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, 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.
22:35 Speaker 02 Oh, really? Of this book?
22:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Interestingly. And 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.
23:04 Speaker 02 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.
23:15 Speaker 03 Weird going on at this school.
23:16 Speaker 02 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 a 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.
23:35 Speaker 03 I mean, you, you were at boarding school too, and evidently embroiled in. Cathy, female politics.
23:41 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
23:42 Speaker 03 I hope this isn't too affecting for you, don't it?
23:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's bringing you back all kinds of terrible memories about arguments about pencil cases or whatever it is.
23:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, marching around pining after Wayne Rooney.
23:51 Speaker 02 But.
23:52 Speaker 03 Pretending you know you knew how to play chess.
23:54 Speaker 02 What? Come on. This has got you gone mad now, it's having.
23:57 Speaker 03 I am. The Wayne Rooney thing, it's totally blown me off course.
24:00 Speaker 02 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.
24:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, creativity is the big thing.
24:25 Speaker 02 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. And there's a brilliant bit when Ishiguro 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.
25:08 Speaker 02 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?
25:24 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:25 Speaker 02 It's a really chilling moment. It's like they, she's frightened of them and horrified by them.
25:31 Speaker 03 She actually says she was afraid of us in the way someone might be afraid of spiders.
25:35 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a really kind of unsettling moment.
25:38 Speaker 03 Spine crawling.
25:39 Speaker 02 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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. Well,
26:24 Speaker 02 I hope you all enjoyed that clip from our episode about Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. And if you want to hear more, please search for the book club wherever you get your podcasts.
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