From Ishiguro, a cautionary tale that doesn't quite add up

Never Let Me Go
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Knopf, 288 pp., $24

At first encounter, Kathy H., the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's chilly, enigmatic novel, seems ordinary enough. She's a 31-year-old English woman, driving around the countryside in her job as some kind of caretaker, thinking back with bittersweet regard to her hallowed youth at a place called Hailsham. Coming of age in that ''privileged estate," Kathy had teachers she favored and arts projects and a couple of close friends named Ruth and Tommy -- memories grown fonder in retrospect. But if there's one thing we should know by now from an Ishiguro novel, it's that the person holding the reins of the narrative is rarely to be trusted. The world tilts; history either cannibalizes or reinvents itself; the butler (''The Remains of the Day") or the mourning mother (''A Pale View of Hills") is left to pick up the pieces and translate, willy-nilly, for the rest of us. And fail they must, at least partway, that burden of accounting being humanity's curse. Ishiguro's narrators are sympathetic revisionists -- not so much perpetrators of deceit as they are victims of their own patched-together hopes.

Part sci-fi novel and part elegiac what-if, ''Never Let Me Go" takes place in a universe parallel to England in the 1990s, and it will give away little to the reader to divulge that Ishiguro has given us a moody horror story about institutionalized cloning. Kathy's euphemistic description of her job as ''carer," in the opening pages of the novel, is our first clue: We know that she tends to ''donors" in recovery centers; that ''completing" is the term they use to describe dying, which generally happens after her patients have finished with their third or fourth organ donation. The tension that surrounds this spooky story lies within the reader's unfolding realization of just what the characters understand, or choose to comprehend -- how fully Kathy and her fellow students have come to accept their fate. This growing recognition, theirs as well as ours, constitutes the center of the novel, its labyrinthine path lighted only by insight and an attendant resignation. If Kathy and her Hailsham classmates might pretend to lose themselves in the simple dress rehearsals that youth presents, they all possess an amorphous consciousness about where they came from and, far more imponderable, where they are headed.

So: Goodbye, Dolly, in other words, though the frustrating mystery of ''Never Let Me Go" is how the modern world managed to get from helpless sheep to hapless humans. Instead Ishiguro has chosen to construct the intricate and poignantly realized smaller realm of Hailsham and its tributaries, where the commonplace pursuits of children are truncated or rendered impotent by the shadow of what awaits them. Kathy's muted narration describes a run-of-the-mill boarding-school atmosphere, complete with schoolyard cruelties among boys and treasure-trading among girls, until the hint is dropped about just how precious those worthless treasures are. Students make art out of old bottle caps or soda cans, then barter over such possessions to have something, anything, to call their own. This hoarding, a widespread trait among institutionalized children, is the most gripping signifier of the paucity of life at Hailsham, hinting at the profound ambivalence, even fear, with which the residents are treated. But it is not so much the present state of affairs at Hailsham that presents a problem. The future is what's missing from their lives, beyond the preordained or prescribed outcome that gave them life in the first place.

This inevitability, actively loathed or silently endured, will color all their experiences -- sex, romance, music, the absurdly optimistic dream one girl covets of working in an office one day. ''If you're going to have decent lives," the humane Miss Lucy, guardian at Hailsham, tells them, ''then you've got to know and know properly. None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day."

The comforts here are small and therefore all the more piercing. Ruth befriends Kathy, then proves her affection by taking her to the stable and letting her ride Bramble -- one of several invisible horses that Ruth owns, this one tame enough for her to share with her new friend. Kathy's friendship with Tommy, an innocent boy who personifies the sorrow of the novel, will try to blossom into something more, but that, too, is an idea based on the hope of tomorrow, and the love is mixed with shame and futility. Most of the things that matter to the residents of Hailsham belong to provinces of the imagination, whether their predetermined fates or the jobs and marriages they will never have. Kathy, in particular, clings to an inner picture of the coastal town of Norfolk. A guardian at the school, lecturing on geography, once casually described Norfolk as ''something of a lost corner," and that description took -- it must be where the missing possessions go, all things beautiful that disappear, and so exists in the students' minds as a kind of Xanadu of possibility. Lingering in her recovery center years later, Ruth remembers what the idea of Norfolk gave to them: ''When we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken."

And yet oddly, unfortunately, ''Never Let Me Go" is more heartbreaking than it is affecting. The heartbreak is that of a child's, piercing and transient, but the overriding premise to this novel undermines its sentimental tugs and renders it an exercise in Gothic gloom. The problem is partly one of architecture: When you imagine a world of such dire conscriptions, the details have to line up -- the circumstances surrounding Kathy's and Tommy's plights, whether emotional or strategic, need to be as thorough as they are meticulous. How can you have clones wandering about the English countryside, let loose with ''Daniel Deronda" or ''The Odyssey" (Kathy) and pocket change (Tommy), and yet choosing to stay put? No one ever bolts in ''Never Let Me Go," or even considers it, and this compliance is never fully explained, beyond the implied atmospheric tension of hopeless certainty. Worse, though, is the slapdash anti-cloning idea that the novel can't help insinuating. Stated or not, a bête noire lies at the heart of any dystopian novel: One assumes in, say, ''A Brave New World" that technology and fascism have colluded to rob the soul of humanity; similarly, ''The Handmaid's Tale" proceeds along the futuristic lines of a world that disdains, then enslaves women. A bad guy must exist, in other words, for the dystopian novel to have an absent moral center for which to yearn. Here, the only possible explanation for how terrible things have become is mentioned sketchily near the end of the novel, depicting a world where the locomotive of scientific progress, drunk on its own fumes, simply derailed at high speed.

Most novels of foreboding have a fortune cookie of packaged wisdom buried somewhere in their brooding dispatches; in Ishiguro's cautionary tales, it arrives as the societal dilemma over whether clones have souls. That sounds like theology grilling biology, but it's an idea as tried and true as Dr. Frankenstein and his lumbering creation. The humanity of Ishiguro's characters may be precisely what undermines his premise: It goes without saying that a girl reading George Eliot and slow dancing alone to a torch song isn't exactly kidney-crop material. As much as I cared for Kathy's gang and the more heartsore details of ''Never Let Me Go," the wider world that invented, then imprisoned these test-tube heroes never quite came to life. Then you wind up with polemic instead of fiction, and all the sorrowful lost objects in the world won't remedy that.