This final chapter engages with the difficulty of thinking about imaginative mechanisms as ‘I’-saving in the wake of the Holocaust, arguably the century’s most devasting act of mass murder. It offers a close reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and locates its conflicted defence of the imagination within the complex legacy of Theresienstadt: a Nazi concentration camp where inmates were encouraged to participate in cultural activities and carry on their pre-war professions in the hope that their example might trick the outside world into thinking that Europe’s Jews were not in danger. The chapter not only argues for Ishiguro’s indebtedness to two major accounts of that infamous site: H. G. Adler’s historical study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community and W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz. It also contends that Never Let Me Go registers, with arresting power, how knowledge of the combination of suffering, deception, and creativity that took place inside Theresienstadt’s walls has challenged ideas about the value of art and the ethics of attempting to console or distract persecuted populations

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a biodystopia in which clones are raised to supply organs for donation to strangers, takes the form of a poignant bildungsroman. The novel is representative of recent fiction that uses the conceit of cloning to challenge readers to think about what makes us human. In the manner of canonical realist fiction, Ishiguro’s story provokes ethical reflection and deep emotion in its readers, a stark contrast with the more than 150 science fiction films featuring clones, which typically exploit clones as a source of horror, violent action, or laughter. If, as we saw in Chapters 6 through 8, the imaginative world building of science fiction can inform public policy through its challenging thought experiments, realist genres invite sympathetic identification and attention to the moral complexities of policy decisions. Never Let Me Go helps one understand the influences that shape organ transplant policies, which can ask a patient to choose between the time one has to live and the life one wants to live in time.

In Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the narrator, Etsuko, looks out at the view of the surrounding countryside from her English garden and comments ‘I always think it’s so truly like England out here’. The phrase ‘truly like’ emphasizes a central topic in Ishiguro’s work: the question of England, or of what it is ‘truly like’ that is evoked especially in The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, and The Buried Giant. Such novels underscore the idea that human communities are permanent only in their heterogeneity and instability, in their fragile and conflicted status, and in the varied and ever-changing terms in which they talk to themselves about themselves. Ishiguro’s novels repeatedly return to and continually reinvent forms of Englishness because they recognize that England is an invention, a phantasm that can therefore only be ‘truly like’ itself, not itself. His narratives are not only about the exilic, ungrounded condition of the immigrant or of the cultural stranger within a society, but also (and therefore) about the ersatz, ungrounded condition of us all.

The longing for love and the possibility of its loss are consistent concerns in Ishiguro’s production. Through references to ancient and modern conceptualizations, the chapter addresses the varieties of love that dominate Ishiguro’s works. It moves from the guilt-ridden love of a mother for her suicided daughter in A Pale View of Hills, through Stevens’s barely acknowledged love for Miss Kenton in Remains of the Day, to the unresolved tension between the devotion to our nearest and dearest and the pursuit of a higher ideal in The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans. After minor excursions into songwriting and short stories, the chapter focuses on the most recent three novels, considering the deceptive possibility of romantic love’s redemptive power in Never Let Me Go, the long-standing but apparently doomed conjugal love of Axl and Beatrice in The Buried Giant, and Klara’s touching devotion to the sick Josie in Klara and the Sun.