Never let me go by Kazou Ishiguro

I have a book dealer at work – a very switched on gal that orders 30 books on Book Depository before going on holiday, and gets through them all. She’s been giving me the good stuff for some time now; she knows my taste quite well and I trust her literary judgment. Like a good dealer, she is reliable and trustworthy.

So when she handed me this book with a reverent look in her eye, I took it to be a good sign. This book was going to be AWESOME.

But it was not to be for this little black duck. I had read Ishiguro’s When we were orphans when I was at uni, and remember being completely underwhelmed, but I swept these reservations to the side, thinking that perhaps age and maturity would allow me to read his works in a different light. Also since then I have discovered the zany, eccentric joys of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (the most excellent The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - remember reading this in Argentina?) so I thought I'd see if this Asian bro came up with the goods.

The blurb describes the mood of this book as ‘disquieting’ and that is certainly true. There’s this weird creepiness, and you know something odd is up, but the author never gives much away…very much of the ‘I’m going to start telling you some of this story, but the rest is for another time’ school of suspense. Which works – to a point. It’s such a slow reveal that I found by the end, I was waiting for something so much bigger, that I felt a bit cheated.

And maybe that says something about the way I view things, because the whole plot revolves around this one large ethical dilemma (I won’t give it away if you haven’t read it) that I didn’t find all that alarming or revolting. There just wasn’t enough context, or enough of the emotional side of the main characters, for me to feel they were losing out all that much.

Or maybe I’m just a cold-hearted wench…