'That's where you'll find we all come from.' 'Look down the toilet,' declares Tommy after this last episode. Such diversions seem to have no direct bearing on the plot but their accumulated effect is so invigorating that it hardly matters if these are meticulously calculated master strokes or, just occasionally, actual slips of the pen.Ī brief flutter of interest is created by a chance encounter with a woman from whom Kathy's friend Ruth might possibly have been cloned, but their origins are of only passing interest to them. In this novel, he frequently builds up the tension with appetite-whetting references to offstage noises, unexplained things on people's sleeves or - as in his first novel, A Pale View of Hills - caught around people's feet. Perhaps he is also genuinely interested in double-glazing? If this is so, does it make his naively innocent pose somewhat artificial? It is also tempting to ask if Ishiguro's use of red herrings is a form of genius or evidence of a wandering mind.

Ishiguro undoubtedly has an artist's double vision. The relish with which such matters are described is central to Ishiguro's art, but their incorporation into the text is done with such enigmatic grace and lightness of touch, such naturalness, that the reader may be forgiven for sometimes wondering if they are reflections of the author's own character and taste. One little girl even has a gorgeous, luscious pencil case with a furry pom-pom attached to its zip. Here there is a sports pavilion and a playing field, and the students do ordinary things like playing rounders. Ostensibly - but this is surely just another massive Ishiguro tease - Never Let Me Go is about a group of genetically-engineered or test-tube children living in a comfortable country house called Hailsham. Innumerable sleights of hand, sly flash-forwards, almost psychotic bits of underwriting and a multitude of red herrings combine to make the reader ache with curiosity about what happened earlier and what happens next. In this, his sixth and strangest novel, his narrative brilliance depends, as always, on over-simplicity, a highly provocative idiom which embraces both the prosaic and the prissy.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a master storyteller, in a class of his own making.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro