Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is a very good novel

When I first saw the poster for Requiem for a Dream I knew I wanted to see the movie. There was a dynamic to that poster that wouldn't let go of me once it got inside of me: the two images, split across the middle, the extreme close up of the eye up top, the pier pushing out into clear blue sky underneath. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia, uneasily distinguishable, forcibly connected.

So when I saw the movie--having by that time read a synopsis, which made the movie sound horribly drab--I went with a girl I was dating at the time. We were weird together and didn't last long. But we saw that movie together. We survived that movie together. When the movie ended, we both felt the same way; in need of contact, some humanity, something reassuring. I leaned my head onto her shoulder, she placed her hand on the side of my face. Like that, we watched the credits. We were sad and overwhelmed. It was a very good movie.

Sometime later I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The opening two chapters are the bluntest yet best (to my knowledge) literary equivalent to the dynamic of that poster. All, closed in, bursting open. Cancer in a living room and frisbees arcing across clear California skies. Escape never felt so overwhelming.

And it's that same dynamic I can feel working its way through Never Let Me Go. But where those opening chapters of Eggers's book reveled in their bluntness, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel works with a nearly imperceptible subtlety. It's easy to read the book, to feel the intimacy of your relationship with the characters developing from page to page, the normalcy of their story, the closeness that envelops their lives. It's that photo of the eye, if the camera was slowly drifting back, with the frame expanding second by second, but never showing much more than what's there, in front of you: people, and their lives. Everything is delicately yet finely focused, and its almost possible to forget the existence of the frame that limits what you see. But the frame is there, and it's holding out the open airiness of existence, the questions and ideas that crowd and crowd and crowd inward and yet never manage to fill all the available space. This quiet division amplifies the story's impact and makes for an awesome novel.

None of that, though, is what I'll remember when I think of this book, years from now.

What I'll remember is this: that when I finished reading the book, I felt a familiar desire. A desire for a shoulder to lean on. A desire for comfort. A desire to not be alone.

The need to be reassured.

Ignore the reviews and read this novel. Or, don't ignore the reviews. But read this novel. And tell me if I'm wrong.