The relationship between memory and identity is the ongoing central dilemma in Kazuo Ishiguro's novels. It troubles the butler Stevens in Remains of the Day, who realises that his self-esteem is based upon his service for a perceived Nazi sympathiser. In An Artist of the Floating World, the self-deluding artist Masuji Ono must come to terms with the fact that his youthful support of imperialism has left him alienated amongst the rubble of post-war Japan. In his study for the Contemporary World Writers series (2000), Barry Lewis identifies this as a preoccupation with how the 'individual sustains a sense of self in the light of changing historical circumstances,' and particularly how memory 'might be used as a tool to keep your dignity.' This last assertion is brought sharply into focus in Ishiguro's sixth novel Never Let Me Go, which for all it's pathos and understatement remains at its core a celebration of how memory functions to secure and locate the individual's sense of self.

Kathy H. is an immediately recognisable Ishiguro narrator. She is 31, and at the opening of the story appears to be some kind of itinerant care worker - a drudge certainly, but redeemed by her competence and self-effacing sense of duty: 'I do know for a fact that they've been pleased with my work, and by and large I have too.'� Kathy drives through the byways of England between jobs, reminiscing on an idyllic past as a Hailsham student, deep in the countryside. Her story, barely connected to the concrete reality outside, is an internal landscape - rooms connected by obscure doorways - through which she guides the reader on an eerie journey of revelation.

For Kathy's nostalgic evocation of sports pavilions and verandas in summertime, of adolescent contretemps and disputes over pencil cases, are overshadowed by a brooding unease. The people she cares for, those she calls 'donors,' are frequently Hailsham students, or 'students' of a lesser establishment. She often considers her own imminent career change, from 'carer' to 'donor.' Slowly, from behind these benign epithets, the true nature of Kathy's existence emerges. Hailsham is no school, but a 'centre' where cloned children are raised to maturity - or suitable donation age. Once their adolescent development is complete, they become 'carers' for a few years according to their suitability, and then they endure a lengthy decline as their vital organs are removed one by one for transplanting into 'normals.' Death, or 'completion,' is attained on or before the fourth 'donation'.

Clones are not new to fiction, Ira Levin's Boys from Brazil and Ben Bova's Multiple Man have both worked the theme, and extrapolated from it. Yet in Never Let Me Go the treatment is far more subtle, more akin to the cautionary fiction of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, where it is the all-encompassing power of ideology and and the way it operates on the individual, rather than its perceived biological preconditions, that focuses the argument. This is reflected in the fact that Ishiguro's novel does not deal at a bodily level, the obvious locus of resistance, one would assume, for an unhappy clone. Instead it's almost as if Kathy's fellow students' physical bodies do not exist - there's never any physical contact beyond a squeezed hand, or a chafed arm. Ishiguro seems to be suggesting that these children understand that their bodies are not their own, hence foregrounding the fact that it is in the memory, not the body, where identity resides.

Kathy's narrative drifts beyond her Hailsham years to her time at 'The Cottages,' a remote halfway house somewhere in the countryside where students are installed to acclimatise to their future life as carers and donors in the 'normal' world. They engage in typical late-teen behaviour - having sex, reading Tolstoy - but the concomitant air of liberation is overridden by more pressing questions about who they are, and how much time they have left. Kathy accompanies her childhood friends Ruth and Tommy on an trip to Norfolk to investigate a sighting of a 'possible' for Ruth - the 'normal' from whom she is cloned - yet the glimpsed figure of a female office worker presents more questions than it answers; what does it mean for clones to have such aspirations? Kathy's narrative leads the reader to the entrance to another hitherto closed space of memory, a remembered rumour: can there be an exit to the outside world?

Never Let Me Go is not a dystopian novel: it is not about a world where 'evil' is visible. It is about 'nowheres': service stations; travel taverns; coastal towns on wet weekends. Memories of a poorly resourced geography lesson lead to Norfolk becoming for the students the 'lost corner' of England. All these are topographies of alienated being; hidden lives sketched in Ishiguro's spare and elegant prose. Never Let Me Go might be set in a present where science has perpetrated a heinous crime in the name of progress, but the novel is, at heart, about fundamentally human issues. Recalling the Vatican's pronouncement (during the 1997 Dolly the sheep crisis) that clones would not have souls, Ishiguro spins the entire debate around: what does it mean for humans to have souls? Can a soul be something like the sense of self and continuity given by memory?

Kathy might exist in an indefinable present, unlocateable, but her precious memories of Hailsham and the relationships that she has maintained - with Tommy and Ruth - right through to her carer years, give her substance and a sense of permanence. They also give her space to ponder on the most important question of existence: how much time there is left, and how important it is to get things right in this time.
 
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is published by Faber.

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