Remains of the DNA: how clones, like the rest of us, justify their own misery.

• Author: Godwin, Mike
• Position: Never Let Me Go - Book Review

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, New York: Knopf 304 pages, $24

THE SUMMER OF 2005 offered any number of entertainments to the American public, from the latest (and, one hopes, last) Star Wars movie to Johnny Depp as a weirder-than-Jacko Willie Wonka. Not exactly over-looked, but certainly drowned out, in a frenzy that included the release of the sixth Harry Potter book and the Michael Bay sci-fi thrill lest The Island was a slender novel, released a few months earlier, that disconcertingly combines elements of both J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular series and Bay's latest film.

That book is Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and if it doesn't reach a Potter-sized audience, that won't be because it doesn't deserve one. Formally a science fiction story about people who are cloned to serve as sources of spare parts, thematically Ishiguro's book draws much more from a different literary genre: the British boarding school novel. Never Let Me Go's antecedents include Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days and Rudyard Kipling's Stalky and Company, books about the formation of character in the context of a boarding school, where the social framework is largely constructed by children acting on their own. Something similar can be said about the Harry Potter books, although it was Rowling's innovation to give the boarding school drama a fantasy twist.

Ishiguro takes the form into even newer territory, and not merely by providing a science-fictional backdrop. Where he goes much further than Rowling would dare is in his focus on the extent to which the formation of character is a kind of indoctrination--and an insidious one at that.

On the surface, Never Let Me Go's premise isn't too terribly different from that of The Island. Imagine a science fiction story in which people are cloned in order to provide spare parts for the wealthy. The clones who are to become transplant donors will be raised in some idyllic environment, and then at some point they will realize that the entire purpose of their existence is to be carved up for medical use by some other, more privileged class of human beings. If you saw the trailer to the Bay film starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson, then you more or less knew what was in store for the characters: The cloned transplant candidates suddenly discover their fate and spend the rest of the movie striving to escape.

For Ishiguro, as you might expect from the author of The Remains of the Day and An Artist of the...