Lost corners and flat, bare fields

Dystopia. We might picture towering glistening skyscrapers, horrifying technological and scientific advances, or the overbearing propaganda of authoritarian governments.We might think of Aldous Huxley’s frightening baby Conditioning Centres, the conveyor belts of near-identical human embryos or the electromagnetic golf courses in Brave New World (1932). Or we may picture the giant face of Big Brother, the futuristic Telescreens and clocks that strike 13 in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Not so in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Though melancholy and often curiously unpeopled, the England of this novel is a deliberately recognisable England of the late twentieth century. Although Never Let Me Go is often identified as a dystopian novel (the BBC, for example, included it in Radio 4’s 2016 Dangerous Visions season of dystopian storytelling), Ishiguro said, in an interview on BookBrowse.com, that creating and exploring a dystopian society was not his primary purpose. He doesn’t ‘have the energy to think about what cars or shops or cup-holders would look like in a future civilisation’. So, if creating and describing such a society is not a core concern, how should we read the settings in Never Let Me Go?