Send in the Clones

Author Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo Steve Carty.

Kazuo Ishiguro sits alone on a corner couch in a downtown Toronto hotel lobby, unnoticed and blank-faced as he awaits his interviewer. Like the balding, almost identical businessmen who wander the lobby in suits, he is in his vocational uniform, that of world-renowned author: head to toe in black.

The quiet steadiness and near invisibility that Ishiguro displays at a distance is in his writing, too, though his work has met with loud applause since he debuted as Britain’s latest hot young literary thing more than two decades ago. His novels, most famously the 1989 Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, bury meaning in detailed, unfussy language; his epitaph is bound to contain the words “deceptively simple.”

In the same vein, Ishiguro’s new book, Never Let Me Go, is narrated by Kathy H., a young woman looking back on her life at an idyllic English prep school called Hailsham. Set in the recent past, it is equal parts elegy, detective story and, in some respects, dystopic teen novel. Slowly, we learn that the special, almost elitist upbringing shared by Kathy and her two closest friends — two other points in a love triangle — was perhaps a simulacrum of life. (Warning: it is difficult to discuss this book in any depth without revealing a half-cloaked plot secret, so if you fear spoilers, don’t read on.) Kathy and her parentless peers are “donors ” (Ishiguro’s word) or “clones” (anyone else’s). Bred to save the rest of us by handing over their organs and dying young, they are an abstract debate made flesh.

Despite having wandered into the genetic-engineering fray, Ishiguro is wary of the spokesperson mantle, looking mildly horrified at the phrase “hot-button issue.”

“Just as I used to worry about history when using a historical setting — have I done justice to the historical complexities of this time? — now I worry, have I done justice to the moral complexities of the issues around cloning and biotechnology?”

In part to duck the fallout, Ishiguro sticks firmly to emotional terrain; there is no mention of stem cells or body parts. For an informed treatise on bioethics, Ishiguro has a suggestion, offered only half-jokingly: “Go buy another book. This is fiction.”

It is science fiction without the science, a story told — chillingly — through the ill-informed vocabulary of young people, experimental subjects kept purposely ignorant of their fate. As one of the children’s “guardians” tells them: “The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told.” She tries to explain their circumstances to the puzzled children, and vanishes from Hailsham’s bucolic campus soon after.

The book first sparked to life in 1990, when Ishiguro was struck by the idea of students living in abandoned farmhouses in the countryside. “I knew what I wanted the story to be about, and how I wanted the relationships to be, but I couldn’t figure out what the fate was that hung over these characters,” he says.

Ishiguro abandoned the project, instead writing the Kafka-esque tome The Unconsoled and the Shanghai noir When We Were Orphans. Distinctly different books and genres, they nonetheless share similar themes: the unstable memories of people in search of their origins, much like Kathy H.

In 2001, Ishiguro went back to Never Let Me Go for the third time. Headlines in Britain were consumed with cloning after the birth of Dolly the sheep.

“Cloning was actually one of the last things to fall into place, but I thought, ahhh, if I had that framework, I could put these characters in the position I want them to be in. The controversy has effectively become my setting. You could fill the space with any breakthrough in science that seems to be running ahead of moral controls,” he says. “Ultimately, it’s a metaphor. It’s a book about all our lives, the fact that we are all mortal and have only a limited lifespan and we try to build something in our lives with that knowledge. All the questions these kids face, I wanted them to be the universal questions all human beings face. What do you hope for when finding love, or when creating art? What is the point if it’s all just going to come to an end?”

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Courtesy Knopf Canada.

Adolescence is the fumbling period when one can’t yet articulate those questions, and Ishiguro succinctly captures its frustrations, particularly the mental games between girls. Kathy analyses everyone’s motivations with a private eye’s scrutiny, and a small item like a missing cassette tape takes on the importance of Desdemona’s kerchief at Hailsham, a universe as hermetically sealed as youth. Any uncloned woman will recognize her girlhood in the schoolyard drama of Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro, who lives in London, is married and has a 13-year-old daughter, the perfect age for girl tortures.

“She wasn’t much use to me when I was doing the writing. She was only eight or nine,” he says. “But the school passages don’t come from observation, actually. I find it alarmingly easy to think like an adolescent, probably because I am still an adolescent. Maybe most of us are. Those adolescent urges and jealousies, that kind of adolescent pride, is close to the surface for most of us. When we grow up, we learn to package it better. But perhaps below the surface, it doesn’t go away as much as we’d like to think.”

Years ago, Ishiguro worked as an advocate for the homeless in London, attempting to get street people into housing, which may be one source of his fiction’s great empathy for society’s outcasts — clones, youth or otherwise.

“In a horrible sort of way, [working with the homeless] was a crash course in human nature because I was meeting one person after the next who didn’t have the ability to disguise his emotions. They broadcasted them and shouted them out to the world. Adolescents are a bit like that, too. It’s almost like they’re us, with one surface removed.”

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to England as a child. He is 51 now, though the only suggestion of age is a patch of grey at the temples. Before writing, he aspired to be a singer-songwriter in the mould of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, though he claims, smiling, that he “was not great.”

“I kind of served my writing apprenticeship by singing. I went through a lot of phases that I would have gone through as a novelist — my autobiographical phase, and finding a tone or voice. I went though a whole period when I was experimenting with the power of words in a Joycean sense, a lot of hyphens everywhere musically,” he says. “But by the time I finished, in my early 20s, I’d gotten my songs very, very pared down. I wanted the language to be very simple on the surface, but quite mysterious. My last songs and my first short stories are quite similar.”

Now his passion for music appears in his writing. The title of Ishiguro’s latest book comes from a fictitious song that Kathy H. adores, and last year, Winnipeg director Guy Maddin released the extraordinary film The Saddest Music in the World with a surprising credit: screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro. Art-house eccentric Maddin made a dark comic fantasy about an heiress (Isabella Rossellini) with beer-filled prosthetic legs who hosts a competition to find the saddest music in the world. It did not feel like a typically restrained Ishiguro project.

“He makes beautiful films, but they’re Guy Maddin films. The amputees, the beer-filled legs — not in my script,” laughs Ishiguro. “What Guy made was completely his own, and I’m glad. The original idea about the music contest was mine. I was interested in the idea of how different people suffering in different parts of the world have to compete for the attention of the international community.”

Never Let Me Go picks up a thread of this notion. Once again, Ishiguro demands that his readers deepen their compassion.

“I thought the book could ask how cruel can a society become,” says Ishiguro. “That cruelty is almost inadvertent. It’s not out of malice, but we stumble into heartlessness to make our own lives more comfortable. To some extent, you can say we have that kind of society now.”

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.