After I posted my review of Remains of the Day, a few readers mentioned this book as another Ishiguro recommendation so I recently picked it up. Written in 2005, it’s a dystopian novel set in 1990s UK where clones are raised to become carers and then donors. In other words, as humans need body parts/organs/internal systems replaced, the cloned humans donate until they eventually “complete.”  And in the years between being raised and becoming a donor, their job is to care for the donors who are already in the pipeline and recovering after a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd donation. Few make it to a 4th. 

But interestingly, the book really isn’t about becoming a donor, and for awhile, we don’t quite know what’s going on except that something’s feels off. 

The story centers around three students at the “privileged” Hailsham boarding school : Kathy, the narrator who tells the story at 31 and looking back; Ruth, her best friend; and Tommy, Ruth’s boyfriend at Hailsham and beyond. So, in some ways it’s not terribly different from other coming-of-age boarding school stories of friendship, jealousy, the antics of independence, relationships with teachers and so on. Yet they all seem to (sort of?) know they are clones raised to be donors. But maybe not exactly? They are told they’re “special,” that they can have sex but won’t have children, that they’ll become carers and donors, that they don’t have parents, and that their teachers are guardians. 

So it’s strange that they rarely talk about any of this or about who and what they are. Yet they talk about other things with a depth that’s absent when analyzing their own identities. Maybe the point is that they either don’t really know who they are or they know it doesn’t matter since they can’t change their trajectory. 

I’m not quite sure if I liked this book or not. It felt slow and distant and underdeveloped but also imaginative and creepy. I think its premise is more interesting than the actual book. It has a bit in common with his 2021 dystopian novel “Klara and the Sun” (about artificial friends) though I liked Klara better. 3.5 ⭐️