Lost Time
Never Let Me Go | Chapters 18-21
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You are reading my weekly review of our November read-through of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. If you would like to join in future readings, subscribe to my newsletter and make sure to select “Books and Brews” from the manage subscription page.
Warning: spoilers abound
In case you missed it, read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three here.
Ok, I have to confess: I wrote the recap and my thoughts for up to chapter 21. As I started on the last two chapters, I quickly realised the post was getting away from me, and I had far too much to say about that whole segment when the truth spills out. To make it less overwhelming, I’ve decided to split the post into two parts instead, so you’re getting the recap for chapters 18-21 today, and I will post the conclusion on Friday. Thanks for your patience!
Table of Contents
Recap
We’re almost caught up to where the book began now. Kathy is now a carer. Through a series of circumstances, she becomes Ruth’s carer. They’d been apart for around seven years now.
Things are super awkward between them because of how they’d left off, especially since, as per usual, they don’t talk about what happened directly. Just as Kathy is about to tell authorities she doesn’t want to be Ruth’s carer anymore, Ruth suggests visiting an abandoned boat near Tommy’s centre. Bringing up Tommy cleared the air a little.
By this time, Hailsham has been closed. Kathy touches briefly on how unmoored she and other former students feel, now that their childhood home is gone.
Kathy and Ruth drive to pick up Tommy, and together, they go to visit the abandoned boat. While there, the topic of the Norfolk trip comes up, and they finally get to the heart of what has been simmering beneath the surface of their relationships for nearly their entire lives.
Ruth suddenly starts apologising for the way she has acted, especially the way she kept Kathy and Tommy apart, even knowing they belonged together. She tells them she found Madame’s address and pushes them to go to Madame to try for a deferral. Kathy resists, saying it’s far too late for them.
After this conversation, the walls between Kathy and Ruth crumble. They are able to rekindle their friendship, and spend Ruth’s last days talking over everything without any barriers. When it becomes clear Ruth won’t survive past her second donation, Kathy promises to become Tommy’s carer and try to find Madame.
Tommy and Kathy finally get together after this, but their time is marred by the knowledge of how belated it is. The feeling of having lost so much time looms over both of them, despite Kathy’s best efforts to keep it at bay.
“Yes, we’re doing this now and I’m glad we’re doing it now. But what a pity we left it so late.”
We find out Kathy has been staking out Madame’s address to confirm it’s correct, and one day after she tells Tommy it really is her, they make the drive to visit.
When they get to Madame’s house, she displays the same revulsion she did when they were children, before she locks it away and invites them in. Kathy tells Madame what they are there for, saying they are deeply in love, that they know her Gallery was meant for situations like this, because their art could display their souls.
As they continue talking about the Gallery, Kathy realises someone is listening in the darkness behind them.
It’s their former head guardian, Miss Emily.
My Thoughts
And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever.
Kathy’s reaction to Hailsham shutting down is when she finally faces the shift between childhood and adulthood, and realises how little time she has left. She describes seeing a clown with a fistful of balloons and “worrying that one of the strings would come unravelled and a single ballon would sail off up into that cloudy sky … I thought about Hailsham closing, and how it was like someone coming along with a pair of shears and snipping the balloon strings just where they entwined above the man’s fist. Once that happened, there’d be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each other any more.”
It’s through losing this anchor that I think Kathy is willing to reconnect with Ruth after all these years. It goes back to what she also said in the beginning of the book: how their differences paled in light of their shared experiences at Hailsham. It represents her childhood innocence, when life was still full of possibilities, when she and the other students were still allowed and encouraged to dream of different futures than the one in store for them.
If Hailsham symbolises childhood, then what is the significance of the abandoned boat? I’ve never thought too much about it, but I’ll take a guess this time.
The beached boat lies on open marshland, surrounded by “ghostly dead (tree) trunks.” The boat itself is crumbling, with cracking and faded paint. It calls to mind something that was once alive, but like the trees around it, is now decaying.
I thought of how the book is a sort of treatise of mortality; the boat may be another illustration of that—the way everything dies and crumbles to nothingness.
It’s while they are looking at this scene when Tommy wonders if this is what Hailsham now looks like and Ruth shares about her dream about Hailsham. Right after, the three discuss others who have already completed, including Chrissie. They are now at a point in their lives when they can no longer skirt around the issue of death. Tommy and Ruth are both already donating.
“How could he possibly know what Chrissie would have felt? What she would have wanted? It wasn’t him on that table, trying to cling onto life. How would he know?”
Even Kathy is outside this small circle at the time, which Ruth points out. She’s a carer and sees a lot firsthand, but she still does not fully understand what it’s like to be near the end of one’s life. And it’s true; of course Kathy has seen deaths, but none of them have been particularly significant for her so far. She has not yet lost someone dear to her like Ruth or Tommy, and she has not personally faced death herself either.
It made me think of grief and how it divides us from those who haven’t experienced it. Like there is some invisible threshold you cross once you know it, while everyone else is still on the other side. They haven’t yet stepped out of the woods into the clearing. They can’t see the boat.
But once we have crossed that threshold, suddenly there exists an urgency—to act on things we’ve put off, to cling more fiercely to those we love, and to not let any more chances pass us by.
Isn’t it interesting how the first time we ever see Kathy lose control of her emotions is when Ruth confesses that she kept her and Tommy apart, and Tommy asks how it can be put right? She doesn’t even lose control when they find out the deferrals don’t exist.
After all these years of suppressing her feelings, this is the first glimpse we get into the depth of Kathy’s love for Tommy. But as she kept saying to Ruth, it’s too late, way too late.
This continues even after Kathy becomes Tommy’s carer, and they both know they’ve lost so much time they could have had together. Some criticisms I’ve read on the book center around questions like, why don’t the clones ever try to run away, or why don’t they ever try to fight back? And I think those questions don’t have much to do with this story.
The real question is, what do we do with the time we have, knowing it is limited?
As an aside, I thought the description of the dark corridors in Madame’s house was a fitting metaphor for the subsequent conversation with Miss Emily. Society wants to stay in the dark about what the existence of clones really means. Kathy and Tommy have been kept in the dark all their lives about what things were truly like for people like them.
Discussion
Why do you think the clones seem so resigned to their fate?
What do you think of Miss Emily’s defense of how they raised the children at Hailsham? Was her approach right, or was Miss Lucy’s?
How do our characters try to make sense of their lives and live with dignity in spite of their fate? Are they able to do so?
Next Up
The post for the last two chapters will come to your inboxes on Friday! Stay tuned.
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1. I wonder if they are resigned to their fate because they were conditioned to believe that their lives were predetermined, and whatever is meant to happen, will happen. Miss Emily seems to touch on this in Chapter 22. Perhaps the idea of rebelling never occurred to the characters, since to their knowledge, no one had ever done so before. At least until the idea of deferrals came up and disrupted their perspectives on the future, in a way. Also, as you mentioned, I believe Ishiguro intentionally wrote the story this way; the purpose isn’t to show how the clones might fight back, but to highlight their limited amount of time, and the inevitability of death. I know we might further discuss Chapter 22 in the next post, but at the end of the chapter, Tommy rages and Kathy says, “Back then, at Hailsham, when you used to go bonkers like that, and we couldn’t really understand it…I was thinking maybe the reason you used to get like that was because at some level you always knew.” This makes me think maybe this was Tommy’s small way of rebelling.
2. I’m not sure there was a right approach. Both are very nuanced and reveal the complexities and fallacies of the system. I think Ishiguro does a good job of exploring these two different perspectives on the same situation, and perhaps there isn’t meant to be one correct answer. Overall, both revelations are heartbreaking, because in the end, the clones will still meet their fate. I wonder if this is intended to show the inevitability of it all as well, that not one person or group was truly able to bring about tangible change.
3. In Chapter 23, Tommy tells Kathy to stop taking his dirty washing to the laundry because he can do it himself. A small detail, but it makes me think of how, in spite of how little the characters have under their control, they still try to cling to what they can control. Tommy’s suggestion that he might want a different carer in the end also brings to mind the idea of dying with dignity. I’m not sure if the characters are able to successfully live with dignity in spite of their fate, but perhaps they try.