Never Let Me Go: Cloning, Transplanting, and the Victorian Novel

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) is, at one level, a horror story of bio-commerce: set in an alternate-universe England of the 1990s, clones are reared by “guardians” (5) at a boarding-school-like institution called “Hailsham” (4) for future live organ donation.1 Yet, at another level, it is also a story of Victorian literary trafficking. The narrator, who goes only by Kathy H., reveals that her final essay “topic was Victorian novels,” and confesses that she considers “going back and working on it [. . .]. But in the end [supposes she’s] not really serious about it” (115–16). Her statement is ironic, given that her entire narrative reworks the Victorian novel. Ishiguro’s experiment with speculative fiction pays homage to Victorian Gothic conventions, but also navigates the terrain between Bildungsroman and female school story. Kathy H. is a narrator every bit as private and withholding of information as Jane Eyre or Lucy Snowe, and small wonder: her ‘school’ is a total institution in the tradition of Jane Eyre’s Lowood and Villette’s Pensionnat, its clones the haunted shades of Charlotte Brontë’s degraded surplus population of teachers and governesses. And like those Brontë characters, Ishiguro’s student clones produce artwork that is co-opted by their institutional masters as an index to their souls. Plots and characters of other familiar nineteenth-century novels are grafted on throughout, as are particularly Victorian questions of commu-