For those who haven’t read this book in a while, here’s a recap. Our narrator is Kathy H., a 31-year-old English woman who was once a student at an elite boarding school called Hailsham with her friends Ruth and Tommy. All students at Hailsham are actually clones, created so that once they are grown, their organs can be ‘donated’ to cure basically any ailment. Miss Emily, the headmistress at Hailsham, created the facility as a more humane alternative to the barebones conditions clones are usually raised in. At Hailsham, the students live relatively normal lives, and spend their time creating art to be displayed across the country, helping convince normal people that clones are real people with souls and therefore deserve better lives. After their time there, the students move to halfway houses where they are trained to care for clones who have already started their donations, before they eventually become donors themselves. Kathy has been a carer for a very long time and has overseen the deaths of both Ruth and Tommy. She only has a couple of months left before the start of her own donations. The novel involves her reminiscing about her short life and her relationships with Ruth and Tommy as they follow the path that was predetermined for them.
The thing that sets this apart from other dystopias was that at no point during the novel does anybody try to meaningfully change the status quo. Well, that’s not quite true - there are several small perturbations, which I will discuss in due course - but fundamentally, nobody goes “hey, we should stop raising obviously sentient children so we can harvest their body parts”, or even “we should work on non-murder alternatives so we can eventually stop killing these people”. Obviously, we are disconnected from the wider political discussion around the donation programme, but within the scope of Kathy’s story, everyone takes the fact that she will die young and donate her organs as a fact of the universe. To me, this was the most disturbing part of the whole book, because it is frighteningly similar to the way that people act about real-world atrocities, ranging from conflicts to climate change. Think about how many people still shop at Primark despite knowing about the sweatshop conditions that enable their low prices, for example. Sure, many people can’t afford many clothes at all unless they shop at Primark, just as thousands of people in the Never Let Me Go universe would be dead if not for the donor programme. But we can all agree that both sweatshops and clone murder are morally wrong. I acknowledge that average people can’t do much to prevent any given atrocity - we all live extremely busy lives, and try to help where we can, but we hold limited power. However, there are numerous characters in the novel who could make a change. They fail to act for numerous reasons, and as such, the status quo is maintained.
The most obvious non-actors are Kathy and her compatriots. Kathy is no Katniss, of course - she’s naturally shy and bows easily to authority. Ruth and Tommy, though, are made of sterner stuff; Ruth constantly acts to improve her own circumstances and Tommy sees the cracks in Hailsham’s system from a very young age. At the end of the day, it’s their naïveté that prevents them from trying to change things, and that naïveté is the fault of Hailsham. They do have some awareness of their impending fates, but they are intentionally given very little time to consider it and have incomplete information on pretty much every aspect of the process. The whole plot of the book revolves around Ruth’s final attempt to prod her friends into action - convincing them to try and get a deferral - but this, too, is the result of false information, and even if it succeeded it would only delay their murders, not avert them. As Kathy says, Ruth is a believer, and given that she has nothing to believe in but the system it makes sense that she would only try to grab power within it. Tommy is more capable of putting together the whole story, but it goes to show how sheltered the children were that he wasn’t able to fully break out of the way of thinking Hailsham intended for him. Finding out what was really going on at the end of the story seemed like it may have spurred him into action, but by that point he was far too sick to do anything about it. Meanwhile, Kathy clings desperately to her memories of Hailsham and the life she knows. She resists change. Her predetermined future is terrifying enough - anything else would surely be worse.
None of the clones even consider escape as a possibility. There doesn’t appear to be anything stopping them beside their lack of education - they simply don’t know that there was once a world where they would not have been killed for their organs, or that there could be places they could go where they could live a normal life. Miss Lucy deserves credit as the only character that recognises this and tries to change it, but she is quickly removed from Hailsham to prevent the children from becoming too well-educated. Clones are kept separate from people who may aid them, even when they live a relatively free life as carers - they only interact with their donors, and are so busy that they don’t have time to form relationships with anyone else. It takes a certain amount of education for an oppressed people to be aware that there is an alternative, and that therefore there could be change. Similarly, a normal person could go their entire life without meeting a clone, and therefore would believe whatever they are told about them. It’s possible that the clones are even subtly told that most people are repulsed by them to prevent them from talking to others. It comforts me to think that somewhere in Kathy’s Britain, a campaign group may be desperately trying to end the donation programme and free the clones. But if there is one, Kathy isn’t aware of it. I suppose this is a further reminder that activism should always include the people you are trying to support - otherwise the whole endeavour is pointless, and you are giving hope to nobody.
Hailsham is presented (by Miss Emily at least) as a revolutionary activist scheme, designed to change the donation programme for the better. On that matter she would be right, if Hailsham was intended as a stopgap rather than a permanent solution, but it is clear by the end of the novel that she has no intention to push for the end of programme. Instead, Hailsham acts to hamstring the clones, removing any possibility of them initiating their own change. I have already discussed how the lack of information on their situation prevents the clones rebelling or leaving. Furthermore, life at Hailsham is comfortable, and discomfort is necessary to prompt change. But I think the main way that Hailsham harms the students is by mollifying the public. It is implied that before Hailsham was built, there was significant discomfort about the way that clones were brought up, but afterwards the public was fine with it. Additionally, while Miss Emily claims that the students’ art was displayed to convince the public that they had souls, I think there is a more pragmatic use for it - to convince the public that the children were happy. I highly doubt that a large portion of people thought that the clones were somehow inhuman, and even if they did, I imagine there would be uproar if pigs, for example, were kept in similar conditions. But if the children are happy, creatively satisfied, and living good lives? Even making it to adulthood? It’s a lot easier for people to turn a blind eye, especially given that this was a positive change from before. Compromises and incremental changes can do more harm to a movement than good if they stall momentum and convince some people that the problem is solved.
There is no revolution in Never Let Me Go because the children do not know what revolution is and the public do not believe that revolution is necessary. At the very end of the novel, Kathy is perhaps the only person in the world with the means to make a change - she knows the whole truth (or close to it), and she is, for now, a free woman. But her career as a carer has exhausted her, and she finds herself ready if not to die, then to rest. As with all activist movements, the success of a struggle comes down to education, momentum and motivation. Over the course of the novel, Kathy becomes more educated at the cost of her motivation. Her momentum dies with her friends, and perhaps momentum on the public side of things never existed. So, in Kathy’s world and in ours, change does not come.
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