Never Let Me Go
Rated M  Warning: Spoilers

There is a kind of English literature that delights in fitting snug as a cardigan before gradually unpulling all the threads. Never Let Me Go follows this peculiar knit.

It opens at Hailsham House in the 1960s, a school in the English countryside which could be any of the thousands of public schools of English story. The toys are wooden, the teachers patrician, the games and hobbies cruelly energetic.So far, so familiar. Now pulls the thread.

When the headmistress of Hailsham House calls the students ‘special’, she does not mean it nicely. This ordinary school is anything but. These are the children of the National Donor Scheme, a government policy that sees children of destitute parents raised for future organ harvest in the interests of the National Health.

Part of the genius of the story, written first as a novel by Japanese-English writer Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains Of The Day), is to place such a new-millennial theme deep in the fusty historical heart of National Health Service-era England. This placement of the matter in the middle past, rather than in the more typical near future, changes everything.

The ethics of organ replacement and social engineering have been covered before by films such as Gattaca and The Island but always in landscapes too fantastic to ever draw the matter close. But Never Let Me Go is an England we know exactly, only one government policy away from complete familiarity.

Abstract reality

Like some Ian McEwan novels and most Iain Banks, Ishiguro’s novel and Mark Romanek’s film tread a precise line between the real and the fantastic. This one change in one government policy makes the familiar strange and the mixture is unnerving.

It creates a simulacrum, a ‘vague semblance of the world’ – or in this case, a very real semblance.

Any good simulacrum works in a tight space between what is and what could be. Tilt us towards what could be and we see life from new angles but tilt us too far from what is, and the thread to life is cut. Matters become more thought than felt. The woman in the seats in front of me was not crying in abstract. This film treads the line exactly.

Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are our entry point to this simulacrum. The argument of the film is admittedly hard to nail. What appears as an argument with the cold science of bio-ethics veers off into a critique of class. A reflection on orphan life follows. An essay on discrimination is hinted at. But these are all fronts. The film lands the matter much closer to home – with the lives and lost loves of Kathy, Tommy and Ruth.

These three and the poor unfortunates they represent are purposed for the briefest of lives. With each due to donate organs soon after 20 and with few donors surviving three or four donations before ‘completion’ (the scheme’s euphemism for death), their life span is brutally short.

We have seen the skeletal figure of Keira Knightley in many films before but here she hangs over a walking frame like her skeleton has finally won the argument. Here, as Ruth, she is as sick as she often looks. Andrew Garfield is brilliant as the picked-on but lovable Tommy and you want to hold him up like you would an old man, which is an uncomfortable response to a charming 20-something. It pains you to feel it. Anyone who has had children die young would surely find this film much too much.

Carey Mulligan's Kathy holds the contrast. She keeps her health for a while, at least, as she has been enrolled in the Donor Scheme as a carer for fellow donors. It is just a stay of the scalpel. She must inevitably donate herself. And soon.

These characters barely breathe, know and love. And then they die. They ‘complete’ when there is nothing complete at all. Everything is unfulfilled. Loves are severed before they grow. Foreboding eats the days of youth. Bodies fail early.

Fulfillment?

This film takes us to the house of mourning (Ecclesiastes 7:2). This is the short edit of life. Some literary fragments the film brought to mind, snagged on the film’s tight wire, are these:

‘Even this space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live.’ (Seneca)

‘When God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work — this is a gift of God. He seldom reflects on the days of his life, because God keeps him occupied with gladness of heart.’ (Qoheleth)

‘I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold’ (William Carlos Williams)

I remember a preacher at an infant girl’s funeral insisting, under the sovereignty of God, that hers was a life complete. I’m sure he was right.

Watch this film if you can bear to feel your bones.