Some books knock your socks off...

Others don't. Unfortunately, Never Let Me Go was one of the latter.

Don't get me wrong, Part 1 had me gripped; on tenterhooks to discover how the students have come to be at Hailsham, a boarding school in the English countryside with its eerie, Bronte-esque, uncanny Romantic quality.

Ishiguro deftly uses a faux naif narrator, Kathy, whose sheltered life prohibits the reader from ever entering fully into the world of the text. Through other characters we receive morsels of information: this is a world where everything is the same except that cloning humans to harvest organs is morally acceptable, Hailsham, we learn, is not the only 'school' for rearing clones, but it is the most humane.

Part 1, at Hailsham, is the most effective part of the novel. Ishiguro captures the concerns and aching sincerity of youth at the same time as instilling the disturbing sense that there is something different about these students. Everyone is watching or being watched; there are whisperings in dark corners; a mysterious and austere visitor shudders when crossing paths with the students.

But then, sometime after the students leave Hailsham, the narrative becomes insipid, the prose repetitive, the author's hooks innocuous, and I couldn't wait for the torture of this book to be over. I persisted owing to this project but the tedium didn't let up. I started to see there was nothing conceptually interesting or original about the world of the novel. Ishiguro's imagination is not capacious enough for the subject matter, and, although he creates some tender images which linger in the reader's mind, I see NLMG as a wasted opportunity for profound insight into the human condition. I read somewhere Ishiguro's genius lies in his restraint. His genius in my opinion lies in being able to manipulate writing techniques (i.e. faux naif narrator) to disguise how limited his thinking is.