"Never let me go" Kazuo Ishiguro

What is disturbing about this novel is not so much the chilling possibility of something like cloning and the use of clones for the harvesting of body parts actually occurring at some time in the future (which it might), but rather the way in which both the clones and their creators simply accept it as the way things must be. Here there is no Ewan McGreggor- led rebellion to bring down the citadel of the elite and liberate their slaves. What we have instead is unquestioning acquiescence: human beings who know full well that they are human in every sense, but who nevertheless accept their fate, and their "creators" who also know it but who refuse to face the truth, as the presence and role of these clones have become so central to the way things are. So many people are reaping the rewards of the donation programme, so much time and money has been invested in it, that no one, whatever their misgivings, is going to start rocking the boat now, are they? The scenario is poignantly reminiscent of the colonial economies that were sustained by the slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Africa, among the other resources that it supplied, was a harvest of human flesh, ripe for the picking. Virtually no one challenged this assumption, whether because they had no interest in doing so, or because they did not dare to, or because they were powerless to. Virtually no one publicly defended the human dignity of the slaves. On the contrary, the scientific establishment of the late 19th century actually seemed to make it possible for the white greed-driven elites to argue that these human beings were not human beings after all. They were little more than semi-evolved primates, at best arrested mid-way between ape and man. They were "reified", turned into merchandise. Ironically they were deprived of their humanity to bring relief to the troubled conscience of those who, supposedly, had advanced beyond them in the journey towards fully-fledged humanity. The parallels with Ishiguro's novel are unmistakeable.

So this novel raises some very fundamental questions. How do we define human dignity? What is the defence, in the current ideological climate of the western world, against something like the slave trade happening again, or against something like the world of Ishiguro's novel ever coming true (once again) in our world?