Taking off Into the Realm of Metaphor: Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the quarter century since he published his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), Kazuo Ishiguro has been engaged in an increasingly conflicted relationship with his audience. Unlike many other writers who distrust and avoid interviews, Ishiguro has been willing to submit to a surprisingly large number for a writer whose literary output has been restricted to six novels. Such willingness to discuss his novels may suggest that he himself senses the need to confront (mis)readings of his work, especially after the appearance of The Remains of the Day (1989), which propelled him onto the literary scene. (1) Remains earned him the coveted Booker Prize, (2) along with accolades from the committee's chair, David Lodge, who spoke of it as a "cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance" (Wroe). The novel has achieved further power as a cultural icon with the popular and critical success of the film adaptation by the renowned team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, whose casting of Anthony Hopkins as the butler Stevens and Emma Thompson as the housekeeper Miss Keaton was no small factor in the film's success. The filming of the novel, however, as yet another costume drama in the Merchant/Ivory repertoire, convinced Ishiguro all the more that his novel was being misread as the celebration of an England he thought he was satirizing, an England that never existed, or existed only as a figment of the literary imagination and the tourist board's marketing programs to advance a Thatcherite "heritage industry." (3) It is in the interviews regarding The Remains of the Day that we begin to see the surfacing of Ishiguro's growing awareness of a disconnect between the novel he thought he had written and the novel his audience was (mis)reading. In one interview, for example, he comments,