Kazuo Ishiguro: 'Never Let Me Go' Quiz

Answer: Hailsham

Recalled through the narrator Kathy H's eyes, Hailsham is described in idyllic terms as an oasis of culture and respect for the children who attend school there. Only gradually, almost imperceptibly, do we realise the strangeness of this school where students have no family but each other, and where words used casually such as 'guardian', 'donation' and 'completion' have a macabre reality lying behind them.

Charterhouse, Alleyn's and Dulwich are real English schools - so Hailsham was the only fictional answer possible.

Answer: They are human clones

Ishiguro paints a portrait, through narrator Kathy H's eyes, of students who are alike to other children in almost every respect - teasing each other, making and losing friendships, sometimes happy and sometimes sad. It's well into the novel before we clearly understand that all these children were cloned in a laboratory, and although they're too young to understand the picture perfectly they do know they've each been modelled on another human being.

Answer: Their organs will be harvested for transplant patients

By the period in which the novel's 'present' is set - the late 1990s - it seems this human organ donor programme has been running for around 50 years. Each cloned young person will donate organs to 'normal' human beings on up to four separate occasions until they 'complete' (die). If the operation is carried out poorly, some may die after only their first or second donation.

A recurring fear many of them have is that, at the point of death, they'll still be semi-conscious as their body is being plundered for the remaining organs.

As they grow to understand their inescapable role, the young people face it with a combination of pride and acceptance, mingled with fear, pain and depression.

Answer: The art shows influential people that the students have a soul

The students at Hailsham are almost obsessively encouraged to produce paintings, poetry, sculpture and other art forms - the best of which are taken away by the silent figure of Madame. The young people endlessly speculate why she does this. Towards the end of the novel we learn that Madame and her lover, the head guardian Miss Emily, used the art in exhibitions staged to persuade powerful figures that these cloned children had souls and imagination, and should be treated as humanely as possible. Successful in this endeavour for a while, eventually the political tide turns against this 'liberalism', and the most humane schools for cloned children - including Hailsham - are closed down and demolished.

In the post-Hailsham era, it appears future organ-donor clones will be treated more harshly and clinically, because those who plunder their organs cannot allow themselves to think of the young people as human.

Answer: Miss Lucy

Ishiguro's subtle writing portrays cleverly how the students are 'told but not told' about their function in life and its painful and final outcome. One of the students' guardians at Hailsham, Miss Lucy, attempts to strip away the idealised half-truths the children are being told, and to tell them the grim reality about their future - that they will never be movie stars or work in a supermarket or an office, as some of them childishly fantasise about. The well-meaning Miss Emily and Madame remove Miss Lucy because they know the students can only face their unavoidable future if its reality isn't too starkly revealed to them.

(Little) Miss Muffet is a character from a nursery rhyme, Miss Bellum is the Mayor of Townsville's assistant in 'The Powerpuff Girls' cartoon series, and Miss Teri is ... well ... a Mystery!

Answer: Carer

After leaving school at 16, and a transition period of a year or two, each young person trains to be a carer - providing counselling and support to the organ donors after their operations, each of whom will die after several 'donations'. Each carer, in turn, will themselves become a donor in due course. Kathy H has been a carer for more than eleven years, an unusually long time - but that is now due to end in a few months, and she too will become a donor - with her own 'completion' to follow within a few short years.

Answer: Having a baby

As a young girl, Kathy H often played the song 'Never Let Me Go' while dancing round with a cushion pressed to her chest. She imagined the lyrics were about a woman who'd been told she couldn't have children but who - to her joy - had miraculously had a baby.

She is dancing while holding on to the baby tightly, fearing it might disappear. Ironically, since all the cloned students are sterile, none of them will ever have children, and sex becomes an emotionally meaningless function which the young people engage in fairly promiscuously.

Answer: Norfolk

After leaving Hailsham at 16, Kathy H, Tommy and Ruth go on a day trip to Norfolk, a county that Hailsham students had grown up believing that if you lost something or threw it away it would end up there eventually. Ruth wants to go because she's been told that a woman in an office there looks like her, and she's curious to see if she could be the human she was modelled on. In the seaside town of Cromer, Tommy and Kathy H wander off and stumble across a copy of the 'Never Let Me Go' tape that she had lost years before, in a second hand shop. It poignantly echoes their childhood fantasy that everything lost ends up in Norfolk.

Of the answer options given, only Norfolk is on the east coast of England.

Answer: Completion

Terms like 'guardians', 'donation' and 'completion' are used throughout the novel to soften the reality that all of these artificially cloned children have been produced and raised solely to provide essential organs for human transplant patients once they reach early adulthood. Resigned to this role, and even proud of it, the students nonetheless have a largely unspoken fear of the 'completion' which several organ donation operations inevitably brings.

A popular rumour among them believes that if two students can persuade their guardians that they truly love each other then they can win a temporary postponement of their donations and so live longer.

However Kathy H and Tommy, who become lovers after Ruth's death, discover there is no truth to the rumour - and no escape from their predestined role.

Answer: Carey Mulligan

Carey Mulligan began her acting career alongside Keira Knightley in the 2005 film version of 'Pride & Prejudice', and Knightley co-stars in 'Never Let Me Go' as Kathy H's best but selfish friend, Ruth. At Hailsham school, Ruth took Tommy as her boyfriend simply to avoid being alone - even though she knew there was the basis of love between Kathy H and Tommy. Only many years later, shortly before her death, does Ruth set out to redeem her friendship by allowing Kathy H to acknowledge her love for Tommy.

This allows them to have a brief love affair before Tommy's death after his fourth 'donation'.