Ishiguro novel explores theme of memory

Kazuo Ishiguro looks at my plate with dismay. "You're making quite a mess of it, aren't you?" We're having afternoon-tea at Cafe Richoux in central London.

Somehow I have managed to scatter scone crumbs on to Ishiguro's side of the table. With mock irritation, he studies my plate and has another go at instruction. "First spread the cream down, and then place the preserves on top like so," he says. "Just think of it like putting blood on fresh snow."

It's hard to tell whether this display of fastidiousness is a performance; a strategy for our interview — the first of dozens he will give about his new novel, Never Let Me Go.

If that is the case, it would be hard to blame him. Ishiguro turned 50 in November and most of his adult life has been spent writing five novels then talking about them publicly. From A Pale View of Hills to Booker winner The Remains of the Day, about a repressed butler, Ishiguro has taken the "reliably unreliable" narrator to its artistic zenith, and stood at the summit. But although his mastery brought him the Booker and Whitbread prizes, among others, Ishiguro admits there is a danger to being too good at this delicate art.

"There's a certain way of telling a story," he says. His eyes are kind but his tone is clipped. "There is a certain texture in your scenes that you become addicted to: the texture of memory. I have to become careful that I don't continue to use the same devices as I did in the past."

Never Let Me Go is his most radical stylistic departure to date. Set in England in the late 1990s, the novel is essentially a love story dressed in the garb of alternative history. But, whereas Philip Roth's novel, The Plot Against America, used a slight alteration in American political history as its foundation, Never Let Me Go turns to science: it imagines a world in which genetic engineering — not nuclear technology — turned out to be the defining development of World War II.

Never Let Me Go is free of gadgetry and technology. The story exists in a parallel world whose contours we must infer. Ishiguro, dressed smartly in black sweater and crisp trousers, bristles when the word "sci-fi" crops up. "When I am writing fiction I don't think in terms of genre at all. I write a completely different way. It starts with ideas."

Although Never Let Me Go takes Ishiguro beyond his normal bounds, it circles the same thematic territory of memory. As the book unfolds, Ishiguro's protagonist, Kathy H, looks back on her childhood growing up in a rural English boarding school called Halisham. Instead of hearing about students who have become famous politicians or society mavens, though, Kathy's pantheon of alumni involves "carers" and "donors".

It takes a while to work out just what this means, but one thing is clear: at the age of 31, Kathy does not have much time left to live, and telling her story is a way to make sense of all the miniature crises and spectacles of her pre-shortened life.

"I guess it was a useful kind of metaphor for how we all live," Ishiguro says. "I just concertina-ed the time span through this device. These people basically face the same questions we all face."

The gap between "donors" and "carers" and the relative immaturity of their day-to-day concerns gives Never Let Me Go an eerie poignancy. Ishiguro's adolescent cast are hormone-crazy, hell-bent on being cool, but know as little of the world outside the school as we readers do. Only Kathy, her friend Tommy and Tommy's girlfriend Ruth have the intellectual curiosity to figure out what fate has in store.

"What really matters if you know that this is going to happen to you?" Ishiguro says of the death that awaits them. "What are the things you hold on to, what are the things you want to set right? What do you regret? What are the consolations? And what is all the education and culture for if you are going to check out?"

The novel's title comes from a jazz standard by Jay Livingston that recurs throughout the book, as Kathy recalls her friendship and love for Tommy.

Initially, Ishiguro began writing a novel set in 1950s America about lounge singers trying to make a go at Broadway. "The book would both be about that world and resemble its songs," Ishiguro says, "but then a friend came over for dinner and he asked me what I was writing. And I didn't want to tell him what I was writing, because I don't like to do that. So I told him one of my other projects, just in two sentences: I said, 'Maybe I'll write this book about cloning'."

A year later, Ishiguro had given up on his original Never Let Me Go and was polishing up the book he's talking about today.

The fact that Ishiguro has talked about it makes it seem unlikely he will go back to his songwriting book. In a way, he's already lived it: lyrics were his first literary effort. When pressed for a description of his student days, wooing girls with guitar ballads, he steers the conversation back to writing. "You write about the things you've experienced. I basically did that with songwriting."

Many critics attempted to read Nagasaki-born Ishiguro's early work as veiled autobiography, and he concedes there was some truth in this view, but also a downside. "People kept asking me if I was trying to be a bridge between east and west. It was a real burden, and I also felt like a complete charlatan."

Ever since The Remains of the Day was made into a movie, he has been increasingly involved in films. In 2003, his screenplay The Saddest Music in the World was filmed with Isabella Rossellini. This year The White Countess, starring Ralph Fiennes and Vanessa Redgrave, is being released and more screenplays are in the pipeline.

* John Freeman is a writer in New York. Never Let Me Go will be published on April 4, $35.