Let it go….with one big spoiler

Never Let Me Go

It’s rare for a film to impress me more than a book did. Or to be so perfect at painting the picture. Impress is the wrong word, scare the shit out of me is more accurate. I remember waiting to watch Never Let Me Go not having a clue what it was about, perhaps some loved up couple who went through a heartache phase or a love triangle as the poster suggested and then BOOM, hello humans, die die pointless death! Never before has a film made my insides contract to the single hard ball of fear. Fear, that was it, fear at what I was hearing:

‘None of you will go to America. None of you will work in supermarkets. None of you will do anything except live the life that has already been set out for you. You will become adults, but only briefly. Before you are old, before you are even middle-aged, you will start to donate your vital organs. That’s what you were created to do. And sometime around your third or fourth donation, your short life will be complete.’ (spoken by the admirable Sally Hawkins who I saw live in Constellations)

Kazuo Ishiguro writes the way your thoughts run, the language is unpretentious, clear, transparent. No need to re-read paragraphs or pages, it flows through you without knocking off anything inside your tightly packed inner labyrinths. It touches and moves on. The voices of his characters are familiar and seem to be so close, as if they were sitting right next to you on a sofa in a dimly lit room telling you the story which happened, it did and there is simply no need to fight it. I wish I read the book first; I took great pleasure in sounding out each word, weighing and keeping it, and then letting it go. Each death is pointless.