The question that underlies the premise and the action of this book has always seemed to me a stupid and irrelevant one: If we were to clone human beings, would the clones have souls? My thinking isn't ecclesiastical, but Ishiguro bases his story on the assumption that most people's thinking is, and thus that if there were cloned human beings, that would be a matter of debate. Because the backbone of the story is made out of jelly, at least for me, it made reading this book much less enjoyable than I'd hoped.

The narrative style is simple and casual. The first-person narrator's entire education has been an artistic one with a heavy emphasis on "being creative," but she seems to have no pretenses of a literary "style," which I find interesting, and though not entirely unwelcome, at times the struggle of the author, his desire not to be weighty in his style, is perceptible and becomes wearying. (I found the narrator a bit too much like Offred of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale at first, too.)

The naïveté of the characters is at times painful; having grown up outside of society, they earnestly pursue something that the reader, more sophisticated and jaded, perceives as obviously untrue. Throughout the book, under the curiosity and hopes, there is a kind of resignation that I found off-putting. I suppose I have a brash, American point of view, wanting people to struggle harder against what others have deemed their destinies. I'm ashamed of that because it means that I prefer the treatment of this premise in Michael Bay's film "The Island" (though not the execution of that premise) to Kazuo Ishiguro's, but, there, I've said it. I find it interesting that in "The Island," which is set in the U.S., getting organs from a clone is a matter of privilege, while in Never Let Me Go it seems to be part of their national health care program. This difference in the way I think as an American and the very British treatment of the subject matter was apparent to me throughout.

That said, as a contemplative rather than active work, this book is mildly enjoyable.