Introducing: The Book Club - Never Let Me Go

Summary

The Rest Is Science: Introducing The Book Club – Never Let Me Go

Podcast: The Rest Is Science
Hosts: Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce)
Guest: Dominic Sandbrook (The Rest Is History, The Book Club)
Date: March 14, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode presents a crossover between science, ethics, and literature. Professors Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens are joined by historian and podcaster Dominic Sandbrook to delve into Kazuo Ishiguro's acclaimed novel Never Let Me Go—with a focus on the scientific, philosophical, and emotional questions the book raises. The discussion revolves around the concept of human cloning, organ donation, and the existential dilemmas about what it means to be human.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Introducing The Book Club Podcast

• Dominic Sandbrook explains the origins of The Book Club, a new podcast spun out from his existing show The Rest Is History.
• Previous Rest Is History mini-series on classics like The Hobbit and Dracula prompted the launch.
• The second Book Club episode covers Never Let Me Go, intersecting themes of literature and science.

2. The Premise of Never Let Me Go (02:00–05:00)

• Dominic summarizes the plot: children raised in a boarding school environment gradually learn they are clones, bred solely to donate organs.
  • "It's a book in which... the narrator is one of a group of children who have effectively been created as clones to be organ donors." (00:47, Dominic)
• The children’s gradual, unsettling discovery of their purpose parallels how we come to terms with mortality.
  • "No one has really sat you down and had this blunt conversation with you that you will never go to Hollywood, you will never have a job, you will never have a normal life. You have been bred for a purpose of giving your organs... and you are not fully human." (01:49, Dominic)
• The reaction of the children is realistic—they’re embarrassed and disinterested despite the gravity.

3. Humanity, Clones, and Ethics (05:00–07:30)

• The clones wrestle with their "otherness."
• Discussion moves to whether humanity is determined by biology, experience, or society's recognition.
  • Art is posited as proof of having a soul or being human.
  • "They believe that they have emotions just as valuable as any humans, and they believe that they have souls. It's really important to them that they have souls." (05:32, Dominic)
  • Societal coping mechanisms for exploitation, e.g., dehumanizing to ease moral qualms: "It's been very common to say... the people we're exploiting, they're not really fully people, so it's not that bad." (06:40, Michael)
• Comparison to twins and philosophical conundrums about the soul.

4. Science Fiction as Metaphor (07:30–10:00)

• The book is less about technical cloning and more about confronting mortality and choices.
  • "What do we do with the time that's given to us?" (04:13, Dominic)
• Analogies to Frankenstein, Blade Runner, and real-world scientific progress.
• Why don't the clones rebel? Parallels to how humans accept their own mortality.

5. Cloning: Science, Memory, and Identity (08:18–11:00)

• Scientific feasibility of human cloning is discussed (reference to Dolly the Sheep and cloned macaques).
  • "You could probably do this with humans... It’s not a scientific reason that has stopped this from happening. It's much more of an ethical one." (08:18, Hannah)
• Philosophical discussion: What makes you "you"?
  • "Is it your DNA and all that stuff, or is it the sum of your memories and your life experiences?" (10:08, Dominic)
  • Michael draws parallels with twins and amnesia.
• Stories about clonal "memory clocks" in plants (bamboo) and poetic speculation if human clones would share such clocks.

6. Cryonics and Life Extension (11:45–14:39)

• The group discusses cryogenic freezing, what happens, and the ethical and logistical questions it raises.
  • "The freezing isn't bonkers. It's the unfreezing that we haven't figured out yet." (12:18, Michael)
  • Michael describes in detail the process of freezing bodies (13:19–13:52).
  • Societal implications if previously frozen people are revived.
• Brain uploading and whether a copied consciousness is truly the same person.

7. Meta-Reflection and Book’s Emotional Core (15:13–17:54)

• Dominic and Tabitha (producer) discuss Ishiguro’s writing process—his struggle to find the book’s "missing piece," which crystallized after hearing about cloning advances.
  • "He'd made two previous attempts... he felt there was a key piece missing... And then one day... he heard about all these advances in biotechnology..." (15:47, Tabitha)
• Inspirations from Dolly the Sheep and the genre's tradition of examining split societies (reference to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine).
• How modern literature uses science fiction elements to interrogate existential questions of love, mortality, meaning.

8. The School Setting & Character Dynamics (17:54–22:35)

• The book’s setting: timeless, subtly alien England, intentionally lacking modern tech.
  • “It feels kind of, to me, quite timeless, doesn’t it? They’re still in a world of cassettes…” (17:54, Dominic)
• Focus on characters: Kathy (narrator), Tommy, Ruth.
  • Tommy’s emotions and outbursts; Ruth's manipulations; insight into female friendship and social dynamics.
  • “There’s Tommy, who’s kind of very sweet, naive, he’s very lovable, but he has these massive, inexplicable tantrums... there’s Ruth... quite mean, very manipulative, kind of like the school popular girl.” (19:21–21:12, Tabitha)
• A lighthearted revelation: Ishiguro once imagined footballer Wayne Rooney as Tommy’s ideal actor, to Tabitha’s dismay. (20:12–20:41)

9. Art and Recognition: Signs Something Is Off (24:00–26:08)

• The school’s strange emphasis on art and creativity; "the exchanges" where art acts as currency.
• The gallery and Madame’s chilling reaction to the children.
  • "She was afraid of us in the way someone might be afraid of spiders." (25:35, Tabitha)
  • "It’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange." (25:39, Dominic)
• The moment when Kathy realizes her own "otherness" is likened to a child’s sobering confrontation with mortality.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On existential parallels:
  • "You and I are going to die. And you know that that moment is approaching more quickly than we would like. And yet we haven’t run away, we haven’t gone mad. We’re actually doing this podcast… That’s the question that ultimately we all have to face..." (04:13, Dominic)
• On identity and cloning:
  • "What are you? What makes you you? Is it your DNA... or is it the sum of your memories and your life experiences?" (10:08, Dominic)
• On cloning feasibility:
  • "It's not a scientific reason that has stopped this from happening. It's much more of an ethical one." (08:18, Hannah)
• On the cold realization of ‘otherness’:
  • "It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange." (25:39, Dominic quoting Ishiguro)
• On the emotional heart of the novel:
  • "Their relationship, their love triangle, is kind of the emotional heart of the book..." (19:21, Tabitha)
• Moment of levity:
  • "Do you know who Kazuo Ishiguro thought Tommy should have been played by?... It’s Wayne Rooney." (20:26, Dominic)
  • "In one blow, you’ve totally destroyed Never Let Me Go for me.” (20:35, Tabitha)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:47–05:00: Setting up Never Let Me Go, initial plot, themes
• 05:19–07:30: Humanity, art, "having a soul," ethical coping
• 08:18–10:08: Science of cloning, memory, identity debates
• 11:45–14:39: Cryonics, consciousness uploading, death
• 15:13–17:54: Book’s writing history, Ishiguro’s process
• 17:54–22:35: Book’s setting, character relationships, school social life
• 24:00–26:08: Art, the gallery, and the moment of realizing otherness

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Tone and Style

The conversation blends intellectual curiosity, philosophical rigor, and light humor. The hosts and guest move seamlessly from ethical debates to playful hypotheticals (“which organ would you want from history?”), maintaining accessibility and thoughtfulness throughout.

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Summary

This episode uses the literary lens of Never Let Me Go to explore deep questions about science, identity, mortality, and society’s moral boundaries. The team draws connections between the fictional world and real dilemmas in bioethics, artificial life, and even technological immortality. The result is a rich, multidimensional conversation that honors both the scientific and human complexity at the heart of Ishiguro’s novel.

Transcript

[Tabitha]

Foreign.

[Hannah Fry]

Hello, it's Hannah here and Michael, and welcome to the Rest is Science. And today we're doing something a little bit different because we are here with Dominic Sandbrook of Rest Is History fame. Dominic, welcome to our side of the fence.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Thank you very much. It's lovely to be on a properly professional podcast for once, one which the presenters actually know what they're talking about. This is a absolute first for me. So it's very exciting.

[Michael]

Dominic, I love bringing literature into the lab. Would you consider this podcast a lab, Hannah?

[Tabitha]

Sure.

[Hannah Fry]

It's a lab of the mind.

[Michael]

It's an idea lab at least. But Dominic, you've got a new show out that's called the Book Club. And so I wanted to hear about it and I wanted to talk to you because I love books as well.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, amazing.

[Hannah Fry]

We all love books.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

We can have a lovely relationship. So, yes, I do a podcast called the Rest Is History normally and long serving producer on the Rest Is History. Tabitha and I also would often talk about books when we're on tour and when we're preparing the shows and stuff. And we did a miniseries for our Rest Is History Club members, our subscribers, all about books. So we'd looked at the Hobbit and we looked at Dracula and some kind of great classics. Anyway, those went down quite well. So we decided to launch it as a standalone show. And actually our second episode is a book partly about science. So it's a book called Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. So it's a book in which, it turns out this is a massive spoiler, by the way, so your listeners should prepare themselves so that the narrator is one of a group of children who have effectively been created as clones to be organ donors. And so the book is. Is asking deep questions about what it is to be human and what it is to be a clone and all of this kind of thing.

[Hannah Fry]

Do they know that they've been created for that purpose?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

When it starts, it looks like Kazuo Ishiguro has written a kind of classic British boarding school story. And quite early on, not a colossal spoiler, there is a moment when they're talking about what they're going to do when they grow up. And some of the kids are saying they want to go to Hollywood. You know, some of the boys, they want to become actors. And their teacher, who is not a clone, kind of loses patience with them and says, this is not right that you're having this conversation. It's not right that you haven't been told or she says this line, which I think is, is. Is so true because it's how we're. We learn about our own mortality. For example, she says to the kids, it's not right because you've been told and not told, it's been allowed to kind of seep in, but you have. No one has really sat you down and had this blunt conversation with you that you will never go to Hollywood, you will never have a job, you will never have a normal life. You have been bred for a purpose of giving your organs to other, to human beings. And you are not effectively, you are not fully human. And of course, this is the funny thing is it's kind of a shock for these kids, but at the same time they react as 13 year olds always do, when a teacher sits them down and wants to give them a lecture about their health or sex education or their own mortality. They're a bit embarrassed and a bit bored of the conversation. And so it's really, really brilliantly handled. And the rest of the book is about how these characters cope with the reality of the fact that they are clones and other people don't regard them as human and that their lives are going to be shortened, that they're going to have to give up their organs for donation and then they'll be dead.

[Michael]

So they're CL of the people who will need these organs in the future. That way it's a perfect match.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

We never really know how they have been created, but they come to believe, some of them themselves, that they've been made from, as it were, the losers of society. So there's a bit where they're having an argument and one of them says to the others, you know what we are? We're trash. That's the, that's the quote from the book. We are winos, we are prostitutes, we are criminals. We are all of these kinds of things. And that's. Those were our models and that's what we've been created from. And we are basically, we're just organ donors. That's all we are. And it's a really troubling idea.

[Michael]

But how did you pick this book?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It is an incredibly haunting, troubling book about nostalgia, about melancholy. There's lots of themes. It's not just the science element, there's lots of these kinds of themes to it. But actually, like a lot of Ishiguro's books and like a lot of science fiction books, actually going back to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's book, which is another book that we're doing on the Show, It's a book that asks, what is it? What does it mean to be human and to kind of confront your own mortality, like what you do with the time that is given to you. So one of the questions we talk about in the show is it's one of the things that critics actually leveled at the book. They said, why don't they run away? Why don't they go mad knowing that this is their reality? And. And Tabitha, my co presenter, and I were having this conversation, I said, yeah, but you and I are going to die. And you know that that moment is faster, is approaching more quickly than we would like. And yet we haven't run away, we haven't gone mad. We're actually doing this podcast. That's what we're choosing to do with the limited time that we've been given. And that's the question that ultimately we all have to face, isn't it, when we contemplate our own very short time on this planet that that's what. What do we do with the time that's given to us?

[Hannah Fry]

I'm so intrigued by something that you said there, that these people aren't considered as fully human or they don't see themselves as fully human. Why is that? I mean, presumably they are a full human form.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Of course. Yeah. So, and. And as we discover, they believe that they have emotions just as valuable as any humans, and they believe that they have souls. It's really important to them that they have souls. And there's a group of people who are trying to prove that the clones have souls. They get them to do artworks and they collect their art, and they want to basically say, you know, they are able to express themselves artistically and that's one of the attributes of being human. Why wouldn't people think of them as human? Well, you guys are the science experts. Do you not think that if we were to clone human beings as organ donors, one of the ways that we would cope with it and the moral implications is we would tell ourselves they're not really human beings like us? I mean, this is what people always say. This is the theme of Blade Runner, od, Frankenstein or all these kinds of things.

[Hannah Fry]

I mean, I think if you take that logic and start applying it more loosely, then you would say that only one twin, only one of two identical twins gets to be considered.

[Michael]

The human twins are clones of each other. So which one got the soul and which one didn't?

[Hannah Fry]

Surely the first one out. The first one out always wins.

[Michael]

Yeah, psychologically and historically it's been very Common to say, you know, what these people were exploiting. They're not really fully people, so it's not that bad. And then when the Pope says, actually you can save their souls, they go, oh, crud. Okay, they've got a soul. What do we do about this? So is that why they're clones, then? The hope would be that they could be exploited for their organs without guilt. Yes, because why wouldn't you just breed a bunch of humans? And after all, if I wanted organs, I would want them to come from the cream of the crop of society, not the trash.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So you're asking the difficult questions that really, I mean, just to be clear, I'm not Kazuo Ishiguro, and I therefore cannot. And I think he would say his book is a metaphor rather than a serious investigation of what a future with cloning would look like.

[Hannah Fry]

I mean, sure, I still want Michael Phelps's lungs, you know?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, okay, fair enough, fair enough. I think you're being very hard on these kids. Lungs. I think they're good lungs.

[Michael]

You know what I would like? Albert Einstein's spleen machine. It'd be a funny story to tell people. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I got an organ from Albert Einstein. They're like, that's why you're so smart. And I'm like, no, I got his spleen.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

What would you take, Hannah, if you could have the. The organ of anybody from history?

[Hannah Fry]

The organ of anyone from history? Oh, I don't know.

[Tabitha]

The.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

The.

[Hannah Fry]

Like the. The courage of Joan of Arc.

[Michael]

There you go.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Courage. That's not an organ. Courage.

[Michael]

Organ.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. That's not an organ. Thought you're a science fiction. You put me on the spot.

[Hannah Fry]

My biology is weak. I've exposed myself.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I'd have Nelson's liver. That's right.

[Hannah Fry]

I'm sure he could take it.

[Michael]

You know what you could do, Hannah, is you could ask for the guts of Joan of Arc.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Nice.

[Hannah Fry]

There you go. See, you know, the thing is also, Dominic, that, yeah, a lot of this is actually possible. You know, this, like you could. You could probably do this with humans. People thought you couldn't clone any primates in particular for a really long time. And then some people managed to clone some macaques and it's all. It's all gone. So the only reason why. Why this. It's not a scientific reason that has stopping this from happening. It's much more of an ethical one.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's just ethical because Ishiguro got the inspiration for his book from Dolly the Sheep. That was cloned in the 1990s. And I've often wondered why, if you can clone a sheep, you can't clone a human being. But then, of course, that causes, you know, if they cloned another Hannah Fry, which one is the real one? Would you be happy to. To. To die knowing that Hannah Fry, the other one, lived on? I mean, obviously not, surely.

[Hannah Fry]

I consider her my nemesis and do everything I could to take her down.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

She would. You'd do everything to undermin, wouldn't you?

[Hannah Fry]

Show.

[Michael]

I want to say it really depends on how the cloning happens. Like, to clone her today, we would wind up with a newborn Hannah Fry twin. Because twins, which naturally happen all the time, are clones. They have the exact same DNA as each other. If we wanted to make an adult Hannah Fry clone that's the same age as the one we're talking to right now, we don't know how to do that. We'd have to make a baby. We'd say, it has the same DNA. It's going to have completely different life experiences. It's going to grow up with technology. Even if we had her parents raise it, her parents are different now than they were then. She was a child, so it would wind up quite different. This is what confused me as a kid when Dolly was cloned. The little magazine we all had to read in school about it had a picture of two adult sheep that looked the same, but they were clearly just this one image mirrored. And we were like, no, no, this is exactly the same image, just mirrored. And the teacher didn't understand that they'd actually created a baby of Dolly.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, well, this raises the question, doesn't it? That what are you? What makes you you? Is it your DNA and all that stuff, or is it the sum of your memories and your life experiences? And I think most of us instinctively would say it's the latter, that a Hannah Fry with different memories is not the real Hannah Fry.

[Michael]

Well, so if Hannah had a head injury and suffered from amnesia, is she now a different person? That's a major problem for people who are amnesic, that they wake up, they're told, here's your wife, here's your job. And they're like, oh, I don't get to choose. Like, wait, but who am I?

[Hannah Fry]

There's also some ideas about the. The. The memory when you do clone something that there's. There's some lingering memory that gets transported. I mean, we were talking about bamboo the other day on our show, and bamboo, as you clone it, it sort of retains this kind of internal genetic clock. So bamboo, it's very dramatic, right? It sort of flowers and. And it takes about 100 years or so for it to happen. And there was one particular very beautiful fountain spray bamboo that some Russian explorer found in the mountains of China, took it back to St. Petersburg. It got cloned and cloned and cloned and cloned and cloned until it was all over Europe. But it retained this memory, the clock of when it was going to flower and die. And so there was basically an apocalypse, bamboo apocalypse across all of northern Europe simultaneously a few years ago, where just everything was like. And die. So I like the idea that maybe in this book all of the kids, you know, die at the same age as the elders that they've copied, but they don't know.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

You see, this is the thing, because there's this terrible, heartbreaking sequence at the end of the book when some of the characters that we've come to really know and love, when they start to have to give up their organs for donation, and you can normally do, I think, three or four donations, and then you're dead. And they just passively. The thing that a lot of readers find fascinating, but also quite troubling about it is that they don't rebel. They just passively go along with it. And, I mean, that's effectively what we all do with our immortality, isn't it? Unless we freeze ourselves, which you will know much more about than me, But I think it's probably bonkers.

[Hannah Fry]

It's probably freezing.

[Michael]

The freezing isn't bonkers. It's the unfreezing that we haven't figured out yet. But the hope is that if we freeze you in 500 years, we'll be able to figure it out. Now, whether whether we'll honor the contract and say, yep, let's bring them back is another question. Because we could find ourselves with, you know, hundreds of thousands of frozen people, right? And we figure out how to bring them back and we all go, yeah, but where are they going to live? Like, we basically would have this migrant crisis, Right?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly. People are so grumpy about immigrants now. Imagine if people start saying, oh, these people who are coming out from 500 years ago, taking all our jobs and, like, that's insane. That would never happen.

[Hannah Fry]

Coming here in their frozen carriers.

[Michael]

Yeah, it won't be a bunch of migrants who are thawed and will take jobs. Because at the moment, all these frozen people, there's. There's like hundreds of them. They're super old because you cannot freeze someone unless they're dead.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yes, that would make sense, actually. Right. If you.

[Michael]

If you were to freeze me, you would be murdering me according to the law.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Michael]

And so people who sign up to these services, they usually stay in, like, a hospice or a nursing home near a freezing facility. And at the. The moment that they're pronounced dead, the companies can come in, they flush out the blood, replace it with an antifreeze solution. They gotta cool the brain really fast. And they just cover you with liquid nitrogen, and they pump your heart with this machine to get to suck in the antifreeze and out the blood. And then they put you in a big dewar of liquid nitrogen, and that's where you stay in a big warehouse.

[Hannah Fry]

But they hang you upside down like a bat. Did you know this?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, no, I didn't know that. They're freezing you at a point when you wouldn't want to be frozen. So you would want to be frozen, surely at your peak.

[Michael]

Exactly.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

In your physical prime, wouldn't you? I mean, if I was gonna be frozen, I wouldn't want to be frozen now. I'd want to be frozen when I was 25.

[Michael]

Ooh. I wouldn't mind being frozen now. But I'm excited for what's coming next in my life. I think the problem is everyone who's being frozen right now is being frozen at literally the worst part, their death. Like, when they come back, they're gonna be like, oh, but I'm still dying. Like, I'm still 107 years old.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Exactly.

[Michael]

So, of course, the real hope is that we'll be able to copy their brains and give them computer bodies and robot bodies and, yeah, reproduce their consciousness digitally.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

But then that gets you back to that question, Michael, doesn't it? If you could upload your brain into the cloud and then download this again into another vehicle, would you still be you?

[Michael]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Whoever woke up would definitely think they were me because they would have the continuous life story that I've already built for them.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Michael]

But, yeah, it's weird to think when I close my eyes and die and then I'm rethought, am I going to be like, oh, exactly.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's serious. About the thing about Hannah. Is that the real Hannah Fry or is this now yet another imposter?

[Hannah Fry]

Profound questions.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Profound questions. That's what I expect on the rest of science. You don't get these questions on my shows. Anyway, here is a clip from our episode of the Book Club that we did about Never Let Me Go, and I hope that your listeners enjoy it. So tell us A bit about the book itself. So Never Let Me Go. He's written the Remains of the Day. The Remains of the Day is a great hit. It's a. It's a. It won, wins lots of prizes. It becomes a film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

[Tabitha]

Great film.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And then he starts work on this.

[Tabitha]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And he sort of struggles at first, doesn't he? He doesn't really know where it's going to go.

[Tabitha]

He said he had this kind of binder on his shelf that just kind of haunted him. And it was called the Student novel. So basically he'd made two previous attempts back in the early 1990s to write this novel, the novel that became Never Let Me Go. And as I said, it was called the student's novel. And then he said, both times I felt there was a key piece missing to the jigsaw, a piece whose shape and color I couldn't determine. And I'd moved on to work on a different book. The story eluding me, I knew, would feature students who lived in wrecked farmhouses in the rainy English countryside. There'd be a segregated group whose lives had become strangely shortened. And he just couldn't get past that idea. He couldn't work out, you know, why they were doomed. And he. He kind of played around with the idea of viruses or nuclear contamination, but none of it seemed to work. And then one day he was listening to the radio and he heard about all these advances. I mean, obviously, you and I obviously know exactly what we're talking about. Yeah, very scientific. But he said he had all these advances in biotechnology and he'd always been interested in the idea of how new technologies could create a kind of two tiered society, which is a very dystopian concept.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

H.G. wells is kind of the Morlocks and the Eloy from the Time machine.

[Tabitha]

Exactly that. And at the same time, there was massive publicity around this sheep called Dolly. Okay, big clue there. Born in 1996 and announced to the media in early 1997. And this was the spur for his book. It allows him to turn his student's novel into something a bit like science fiction. And, you know, simultaneously in that way, he was inspired by writers like David Mitchell, Alex Garland. And he said that the amazing thing about this breakthrough, the dystopian element of the book, which is still a secret,

[Dominic Sandbrook]

but yeah, we won't give it away.

[Tabitha]

We won't give it away, but stay with us. And we might at the end, though, was that it allows him to kind of wrestle with these very, very mature, big Themes, the big questions that haunt people about, like, human nature, love, all of this kind of thing, kind of stuff that in Dostoevsky, you know, you get 20 pages of people nattering about, you know, existential crises and God and whatever it is. But these days, authors can't really get away with that. And so this was like his way in. It was like his cipher to deal with those big questions.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So the title. The title comes from a song, doesn't it? Never Let Me Go. It's basically the idea of clinging together and not being parted and that sort of. Well, we can come back to the song because I know you've got lots of stuff to say about it. So let's get into the book. So obviously there's different elements to it. The school story, the coming of age story, the mystery story. We're learning information the whole time. When we kick off, It's England, late 1990s. That's what we're told. But it feels kind of, to me, quite timeless, doesn't it? They're still in a world of cassettes rather than cds. There's, you know, they're not in the world of computers and no smartphones and things like that. There's a sort of dreamlike side to it. We have this narrator, Kathy. You. You read it at the beginning, beautifully.

[Tabitha]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

I was gonna say something nice, but actually, you beat me to it, which is. You obviously anticipated. You anticipated that I wouldn't say something nice. So that's disappointing. Yeah. So Kathy is talking to us. She's been a carer. She thinks clearly that we are just like her and that we will understand all the terms she's using. As we'll. We'll find out, we may not be like her at all. So she is haunted throughout, isn't she, by memories of this school? And that's what we get right into her memories of her time with these two friends, Ruth and Tommy. So tell us a bit about them, Debbie.

[Tabitha]

So Hailsham is obviously this very idealized place, and it's kind of Ishkiro, plays with light a lot, and it's the only sunny part of the book. And so that's how we meet, as you say, Ruth and Tommy. And their relationship, their love triangle, is kind of the emotional heart of the book, I think it's the emotional core. And so there's Tommy, who's kind of very sweet, naive, he's very lovable, but he has these massive, inexplicable tantrums. And he's one of the only students in the Novel, as we'll call them, to show this massive degree of emotion. And in the movie he is played by Andrew Garfield. Very well, actually, I think.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, he's very good, Andrew Garfield. Now, do you want a fascinating fact? So do you know who. Do you know who? Kazuo Ishiguro. I'll give you one guess. It's somebody from the early 2000s when he's writing the book who he thinks Tommy should have been played by.

[Tabitha]

Johnny Depp.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

It's a good guess, but it's not right. It's somebody very different. It's.

[Tabitha]

I can see you are so smug. You're sitting on. You're sitting on a. Yeah, on a volcano of information.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Okay, I'm just going to put you out of your misery. It's Wayne Rooney.

[Tabitha]

He.

[Michael]

Stop.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

He thought. Yeah, no, yeah, it's Wayne Rooney. That's spoiled for you.

[Tabitha]

In one. In one blow, you've totally destroyed Never Let Me Go for me. What?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tabitha]

How does that work?

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Andrew Garfield? So in the book, Tommy's. One of his defining things is he's very good at football. So actually Wayne Rooney could have played him, I think magnificently.

[Tabitha]

But Wayne Rooney looks like an orc. I imagine Tommy looking like kind of quite an Ascete, sort of floppy eye.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Do you imagine as Andrew Garfield?

[Tabitha]

I do, yeah. I mean, I know we have to move on, but I'm totally staggered by that, by that reveal.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So you've got Tommy, Wayne Rooney. Then you've got.

[Tabitha]

Then you've got Ruth, who is. Who is in a relationship for most of the book with Wayne Rooney.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And she's Keira Knightley.

[Tabitha]

She's played by Keira Knightley.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

That Keightly Wayne Rooney relationship.

[Tabitha]

Yeah, that's the meet cute we've all been waiting for. Yeah, yeah. If Kira's listening, take our advice. Anyway, Ruth is probably the least attractive of the characters in the novel. She's quite mean, she's very manipulative. She's kind of like the school popular girl. And she has this very disquieting thing called the secret guard that she sets up. And it's where she kind of promotes or assembles a group of her and other girls who create this idea that one of their favorite guardians, Ms. Geraldine, is going to be kidnapped and it's their job to protect her. And for instance, at one point Kathy, who is, you know, technically Ruth's best friend, exposes the fact that Ruth can't play chess. High stakes at Hillshire, and she kicks her out of the group. You know, it's it's classic, kind of bitchy, you know, childhood children.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah.

[Tabitha]

Female politics.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Well, I was going to ask you about this Tabby. So I mean you said earlier on that you were at boarding school yourself, so you know this better than anybody. How convincingly do you think does Ishiguro capture that world of kind of, you know, pre pubescent or teenage girls?

[Tabitha]

Yeah, it's. It's very, very, very powerfully done. And but then there is one thing about. And also I read this article with Margaret Atwood who often writes about that dynamic and she said for her that was kind of the most potent part of the book in many ways.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh really? Of this book?

[Tabitha]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Interestingly. And the very cruel, manipulative thing that she does above all else is that she keeps, she sees and understands possibly even before they do, that Tommy and Cathy are in love and she keeps them apart and she drives herself between them. But there is one sympathetic feature about Ruth and that's the fact that you get the sense and more so later on that she's kind of craving a mother figure. And that might explain some of her odd, you know, her odd behavior with Ms. Geraldine.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah. So I think one of the lovely things about this book actually is that there is this sort of science fiction or existential mystery about what does it mean that they're donors and carers and you know, clearly there is something weird going on, something very weird and serious going on in the school. And yet that is coupled with a portrait. It's so interesting that Ishigo didn't himself go to one of these schools. He went to Woking Grammar School because I think it's as good a portrait of what it is, the sort of day to day relationships of people at boarding schools as any book I've ever read.

[Tabitha]

You were a boarding school too and evidently embroiled in Cassie Female politics.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Absolutely.

[Tabitha]

I hope this isn't too affecting for you, Dominic.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Yeah, it's bringing back all kinds of terrible memories about arguments about pencil cases or whatever it is.

[Tabitha]

Yeah. Marching around pining after Wayne Rooney but pretending, you know, you knew how to play chess.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

What? Come on, this has got you gone mad now?

[Tabitha]

I have the Wayne Rooney thing. It's totally blown me off course.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

So. Okay, so just before we come to the break, let's talk. I mean, there are some, some very strange elements of life in this boarding school section that give us a clue that this is not a normal school. So a classic example of this is they have to do every now and again These things called the exchanges, where basically they don't have any money. Their currency is the kind of artwork and crafts that they've created.

[Tabitha]

Creativity is the big thing.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And they're obsessed with art. They're told to put a lot of emphasis into their art. They have an idea themselves that there is a. There's a. They have this sort of place called the gallery. And somebody is going to come who they call Madame, who is not like one of their teachers, but kind of, you know, somehow associated with the school. And Madame is going to come and take away their artworks and they'll be exhibited. And that this is somehow incredibly important and life changing. And to get into the gallery, you know, means everything. And there's a brilliant bit when Ishigur is talking you through this where he says, it's clear now to me, this is Kathy talking. She says, it's clear now that we did know things about ourselves. We kind of suspected them and. And we'd kind of been prepared for the truth about ourselves, but it had never really hit home. And she says one of the first moments when it hit home is when they walk past this woman, Madame, who's come to pick up their art in the corridor. And she kind of shrinks from them, doesn't she? Yeah, it's a really chilling moment. It's like they. She's frightened of them and horrified by them.

[Tabitha]

She actually says she was afraid of us in the way someone might be afraid of spiders.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

Oh, yeah, there. That's a really kind of unsettling moment.

[Tabitha]

Spine crawling.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And Kathy says, the first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that quote, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange. It's like for the first time, something about herself has dawned on her through this. This moment where she's brushed past this woman who's horrified by her. And I think I. That when rereading it for the second time, I thought, okay, that's the moment. It's a bit like when you're a child.

[Tabitha]

Yeah.

[Dominic Sandbrook]

And you realize your own mortality. That the life world doesn't revolve around you in one. One moment you'll die or whatever it might be. That sort of sense of something dawning on you that really. That changes everything and you can never unthink it again. I think it's really, really brilliantly done. Well, I hope you all enjoyed that clip from our episode about Kazuo Ishigura's Never Let Me Go. And if you want to hear more, please search for the book club wherever you get your podcasts.