Duplicating, with a chill

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NEVER LET ME GO

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Knopf, $24, 288 pages

While completing Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go," it was an eerie coincidence to learn in the news of the birth of quintuplets to a surrogate mother. The novel is built around a fictive world in which bioengineering -- cloning for organ donation to be precise -- is both the source of its mystery and its scaffolding. The real-life surrogate birth (facilitated by fertility drugs) only heightened the book's not-so-farfetched premise.

But to say that Mr. Ishiguro's book is just about cloning would be like saying that Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is about creating a monster. While science plays a prominent role in each, when compared to the human component of the stories, it seems little more than an inevitable, if not a necessary, evil.

How evil the science is, of course, depends on its application, and in Mr. Ishiguro's imaginary world, the science is pretty evil. Even so, there is more to this engaging, chilling story than meets the eye.

Mr. Ishiguro, author of "Remains of the Day" and "When We Were Orphans" is one of literature's most highly esteemed novelists. Like his earlier books, this one takes its time creating what seems to be an ordinary world linked to and bedeviled by a menacing, darker one. In the case of "Remains of the Day," it was the British aristocracy's flirtation with fascism that lurked in the background and leads the dutiful butler Stevens to his hollow fate. In "When We Were Orphans," the setting was a precarious and dangerous Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese War that turns an ordinary family of British expats upside down.

In "Never Let Me Go," readers meet 31-year-old Kathy who, on page one, describes herself as someone who's "been a carer now for over eleven years." One takes this occupation to be something akin to a nurse's aide, and Kathy, it seems, is very good at what she does: "My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as 'agitated,' even before the fourth donation."

Early on, it is not entirely clear who the donors are or what exactly they are donating, and certainly in the book's early pages there is no indication at all what the "fourth donation" connotes. But, as with all of Mr. Ishiguro's novels, small details are revealed slowly over time until his puzzle is complete.