Kathy describes herself as a “carer for donors”. She tells us about her life, the boarding school she grew up in, the people she crossed paths with, and how she became a “carer”.

Never Let Me Go’s protagonist Kathy is one of the most boring narrators to ever grace the page. Ishiguro’s choice of narrator combined with the mundane story he’s telling, despite serving a greater thematic purpose, was torturous to read through.

But if you break through Never Let Me Go’s thick shell of boredom, you’ll see that it’s an ambiguous novel, worth thinking about critically. But, I found myself lacking the energy to do so because of Ishiguro’s disinterest in telling a story that’s entertaining when taken at face value.

Unlike something like The Wizard Knight (Gene Wolfe) which is a blast to read straight and tremendously fun to dig into.

It’s hard to say whether Ishiguro repeatedly building to climaxes that never come to pass is evidence of bad writing or something else. Either way, I found it hard to enjoy.

Much of what I was initially curious about in the premise of Never Let Me Go was left unexplored or completely forgotten by the end of the novel.

For example, reading the first chapter I assumed that Never Let Me Go was a frame narrative because it’s framed that way. I love frame narratives, so you can imagine my disappointment when this gets completely forgotten about.

Also, I was curious to see Ishiguro dig deeper into this weird world he sets up in the first few chapters. It’s being gestured at constantly but never really appears on the page other than brief moments of Kathy reckoning with the world around her.

Essentially, I would have appreciated Never Let Me Go more if it were more of a science fiction novel, focused on exploring a world unlike our own and what it means for us and ours, and less of a literary fiction novel, focused on exploring the profoundly boring and paper thin inner life of one character.

Never Let Me Go’s world seems internally consistent even though at first glance it might not appear to be because of how limited and skewed Kathy’s perspective is.

It all makes sense to me.

But, it wasn’t much fun to read about Kathy losing a cassette tape, or her frenemy Ruth losing a pencil case, or her friend Tommie having a temper tantrum when Ishiguro could have been telling us about these same moments through the eyes of a less criminally boring narrator.

I’m pretty confident Ishiguro is conveying something to the reader about the world and Kathy’s part in it with all this mundanity, but I just don’t care for the way this meaning is delivered.

All that said, I wish I liked Never Let Me Go more than I do.