Told and Not Told

Never Let Me Go | Chapters 7-12

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, subscribe to my newsletter and make sure to select “Books and Brews” from the manage subscription page.

Warning: spoilers abound, discussion on death, sex

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In case you missed it, read Part One here!

Table of Contents

1. New Characters

2. Recap

3. My Thoughts

4. Discussion & Things to Think About

5. Next Up

The Characters

Chrissie and Rodney

A couple at the Cottages, who is in awe of the Hailsham students. They hold believe Hailsham students have special privileges that don’t apply to anyone else.

Recap

This week, we transition from Hailsham to the Cottages. But first, some important things happen. We finally have The Conversation with Miss Lucy that we’ve been waiting for. The “You’ve been told and not told” discussion. I have a lot of thoughts on this below, but what happens is, while trapped at a pavilion during a downpour, Miss Lucy stops these two boys while they are talking about what kind of life they would have if they were to become actors in the future. She bluntly tells all the children they will never live normal lives because their destinies are already laid out for them: to be organ donors.

Kathy and Tommy talk about this later, and they are perplexed. In their view, they’ve always known they would be donors, that the Hailsham guardians had never made it a secret. However, Kathy reflects that everyone at the school, students and guardians alike, avoid the topic of donations; if it’s brought up, it’s done jokingly.

Until Miss Lucy’s monologue, after which, Kathy states, “It was after that day, jokes about donations faded away, and we started to think properly about things. If anything, the donations went back to being a subject to be avoided, but not in the way it had been when we were younger. This time round it wasn’t awkward or embarrassing any more; just sombre and serious.”

Kathy and her friends are now in their teens. Raging hormones, coupling up, etc. Students begin having sex (or trying to, what with guardians everywhere and curfews).¹

Ruth and Tommy begin dating each other. And then they break up, just as Kathy plans to have “practice sex” with someone she doesn’t fancy “that much” but isn’t disgusting.

After Ruth and Tommy break up, people around Kathy start suggesting to her that she is the “natural successor” because of her close friendship with Tommy. However, as Kathy is trying to wrap her head around the idea, Ruth asks Kathy to her help get back with Tommy.

As Kathy talks with Tommy, he first tells her that the break-up is not what’s upsetting him, but rather a conversation he’d had with Miss Lucy. Tommy recounts to Kathy how Miss Lucy told him she’d been mistaken all those years before when she said he didn’t need to be creative, that it actually was important.

‘Look, there are all kinds of things you don’t understand, Tommy, and I can’t tell you about them. Things about Hailsham, about your place in the wider world, all kinds of things. But perhaps one day, you’ll try and find out. They won’t make it easy for you, but if you want to, really want to, you might find out.’ She started shaking her head again after that, though not as bad as before, and she says: ‘But why should you be any different? The students who leave here, they never find out much. Why should you be any different?’

While Kathy finds this somewhat interesting, she pushes ahead with the purpose she started the conversation and tells Tommy he should get back together with Ruth. This is especially important because they’re about to leave Hailsham that summer and running out of time.

The day after, the students get the news that Miss Lucy is leaving the school.

At the same time, Ruth and Tommy get back together, and the trio ends their time at Hailsham.

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With that, we follow Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy to the Cottages: the next phase of their donor journey. At this point, students disperse to several different areas. Kathy and her friends went to the Cottages, a rundown farm maintained by Keffers.

This phase of their lives is a two-year transitional stage between childhood and when they would start donating.

Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and—no matter how much we despised ourselves for it—unable quite to let each other go.

At the Cottages, Ruth becomes much more showy with affection toward Tommy. Kathy notices other couples, including Ruth, copy behaviours from what they see on TV.

When Kathy points this out to Ruth and adds on that Ruth ought to be looking out for Tommy more, Ruth defends herself, and in true, nasty Ruth fashion, starts attacking Kathy in return and using something Kathy had told her in confidence against her.

Kathy had told Ruth about having had one-night stands with a few “veterans” at the Cottages, also confiding that sometimes she had strong sexual urges.

In another incident, Tommy walks in on Kathy frantically paging through some porn magazines and asks what she’s looking for. She isn’t ready to process that yet, though.

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This week’s reading teases the Norfolk trip, which we’ll learn more about next week. Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth head to Norfolk because a couple at the Cottages is convinced they’ve seen Ruth’s “possible” there.

Possibles are the originals from which the clones are modeled.

The couple, Chrissie and Rodney, claimed to have seen someone who could be Ruth’s possible working in a nice office. Incidentally, that’s close to Ruth’s actual dream job, which she had painted vividly for all the residents at the Cottages.

My Thoughts

Now on the second week of this read-through, I’m thinking that I should go even slower next time. There is just way too much to unpack in this book, and one post a week does not seem to do it justice. Or I’m just long-winded and should practice being more concise. Hmm…

First, the “told and not told” discussion from Miss Lucy. It is always one of my favourite points in the story, one that nearly always gives me goosebumps no matter how many times I read it.²

Miss Lucy doesn’t agree with the school’s stance of teaching the students about their future while allowing them to live as though they could have different futures. The effects of this upbringing becomes clearer when we get to the Cottages and meet clones who hadn’t grown up with the same experience. For example, when Ruth shares about her dream life working in a beautiful office as though it was even a remote possibility, Kathy reflects that Chrissie could never have talked about herself in such a way. Non-Hailsham students cannot even imagine a different life than the one they know they will have.

Which leads me back to Miss Lucy’s point. By teaching the children they are beings created for a specific purpose while encouraging them to dream, to hope, to create, is cruel, in her view. She tells them exactly how it will be: none of them will be movie stars, or travel, or even work in supermarkets. They will grow up, and before they reach middle age, they will begin to donate their vital organs.

This is the first time the whole situation is laid out for us so clearly. It is brutal.

Miss Lucy tells the students to stop talking about futures that will never exist for them. She wants them instead to focus on who and what they are, because time is running out for them, and they need to be aware of that in order to lead decent lives.

Eventually, we will hear Miss Emily’s justification for how she decided to raise the students of Hailsham, but for now, I want to talk about Miss Lucy’s point.

Her whole philosophy that the students should be more aware of the reality of death is a thought-provoking one. Like them, we all know we will die one day. But do we really? For most of us, death is an abstract, faraway concept. We don’t think about dying every moment of every day (unless you’re me, but I have problems, so never mind). While we don’t really think we will live forever, we certainly act like we will most of the time. Part of it is pure self-preservation.

And part of it is naivety.

Until death has made a home in your life, whether through actual loss, risk of loss, terminal illness, or some other life-threatening experience, it remains a concept we only vaguely know about.

Yet as Miss Lucy knows, we need to be acutely aware of death to not take life for granted. In reality, the reaper could take any one of us or our loved ones away at any moment. If we really thought about that, how fleeting and fragile life is, perhaps we’d stop focusing so much on relatively minor things. Perhaps we’d hold tighter to the ones we love. Kathy begins to realise this as she grows older.

Knowing about death but not knowing it, is the tragedy of our human experience. It normally takes coming face to face with mortality to fully appreciate life’s brevity³. By then, though, it’s too late. Chances have been missed, moments passed by that can never be retrieved, and time wasted.

By now, it’s pretty obvious Kathy and Tommy have a strong connection (if it wasn’t before already). It’s so obvious that those around them fully expect them to get together. With Ruth’s interference, however, Kathy and Tommy don’t have the chance to be together for quite a while to come. They confide in each other and know each other deeply.

When Tommy comes upon Kathy flipping through porn magazines, he knows she is looking for something. He even knows what she’s looking for, as we will find out later. Even though we don’t get to see from Tommy’s perspective, Kathy still knows he knows, and that feeling of being understood gives her a sense of safety.

Like other important themes in this book, this is hinted at through Kathy’s narration, her observations of others. And like other things, it’s so subtle I would miss it if I didn’t pay attention. That’s one of the things I love about this book.

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While it makes sense for the clones to be designed as infertile, does that get anyone else’s hackles up or is it just me? The last time I read this book was in 2020, just before I started experiencing the infertility of recurrent miscarriages. Now that I’ve gone through that journey, this particular aspect disturbs me. I’d never considered the implications of how that would have felt for the clones as they start entering adulthood. Kathy herself doesn’t talk much about it, besides to reiterate that reality in a matter-of-fact manner.

But given what we know about how Kathy hides deeper feelings from herself, however, we can find evidence of her barrenness affecting her. Take, for example, how profoundly moved she is by the song, “Never Let me Go,” and how she interprets it (as a mother who was unable to have children, then miraculously has one), the way she dances with her imaginary baby in that scene.

It’s a stark reminder of just how devastating their lives are. The way Kathy is so nonchalant about everything makes it all the more tragic. This is just how it is. This is their fate.

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Onto the Cottages. Here is where we first see the huge contrast between Hailsham students and others. As usual, Kathy does a lot of observing, from which we learn the assumption that those from Hailsham have special privileges. This will come into play soon, so keep it in mind.

For now, I want to point out Ruth’s imagination again. She has the ability to dream up a detailed future for herself. To us, it seems like a small dream, being an office worker. The fact that these clones don’t have the freedom to make even this kind of choice hits me harder because of how small it seems.

The way Ruth is able to make up such elaborate scenarios reflects her idealism and underlying belief in the impossible. Ruth is willing to push her dream life far past where everyone else is willing to imagine.

In that same vein, the fascination the clones have with their possibles is equally heartbreaking. The idea that their possibles are somewhere out there in the world, living full lives and making their own choices, probably provides some odd comfort. Like a parallel universe where they can live.

Discussion

1. What are your thoughts on Miss Lucy’s talk?

2. Is there a way to balance not taking life for granted with being paralysed by fear of death?

3. What are some signs of Kathy’s feelings for Tommy? Do you think she’s aware of them herself, or is she trying to hide them from us?

Next Up

We will be reading chapters 13-17. That’ll give us two break days this week because chapter 18 marks the beginning of Part Three, making it a natural stopping point. As always, you are welcome to read faster or slower as you please. These posts will stay up for whenever you are ready to jump into the discussion. Happy reading!

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Until next time,

1. The whole debacle with Kathy getting ready to have “practice sex” with Harry is just hilarious to me.

2. As a brief aside, Miss Lucy makes a remark about electrical fences just before this pivotal discussion, and how “You get terrible accidents sometimes.” It’s one of the subtle, yet chilly, hints that clones’ lives outside of Hailsham are downright inhumane—a reminder of the real privilege these students experience.

3. Teach us to realize the brevity of life, so that we may grow in wisdom (Psalm 90:12).