The Rest Is Science - Introducing: The Book Club - Never Let Me Go

Episode Date: March 14, 2026

What inspired Kazuo Ishiguro’s timeless story about mortality, growing up, and the human condition? How are its characters so relatable, and yet entirely unique? And, why does the dark secret at its heart challenge scientific innovation?  Dominic Sanbrook joins Hannah and Michael to discuss all this and Dominic's new show, The Book Club, available now.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, it's Hannah here. And Michael. And welcome to the Restis Science. And today we're doing something a little bit different because we are here with Dominic Sanbrook of Restis history fame, Dominic. Welcome to our side of the fence. Thank you very much. It's lovely to be on a properly professional podcast for once,

one which the presenters actually know what they're talking about. This is an absolute first for me, so it's very exciting. Dominic, I love bringing literature into the lab. Would you consider this podcast a lab, Hannah? Sure, it's a lab of the mind. It's an ideal lab, at least. But Dominic, you've got a new show out that's called The Book Club. And so I wanted to hear about it and I wanted to talk to you because I love books as well.

Oh, amazing. We all love books. We can have a lovely relationship. So, yes, I do a podcast called The Rest is History normally and a long-serving producer on the Rest is History, Tabitha. And I would often talk about books when we're on tour and when we're. preparing the shows and stuff. And we did a mini-series for our Restis History club members, our subscribers, all about books. So we'd looked at The Hobbit and we looked at Dracula and some kind of great classics.

Anyway, those went down quite well. So we decided to launch it as a stand-alone show. And actually, our second episode is a book partly about science. So it's a book called Never Let Me Go by Casio Ishiguro. So it's a book in which it turns out, this is a massive spoiler, by the way, so your listeners should prepare themselves. So the narrator is one of a group of children who have effectively been created as clones to be organ donors.

And so the book is asking deep questions about what it is to be human and what it is to be a clone and all of this kind of thing. Do they know that they've been created for that purpose? When it starts, it looks like Kazua Ishiguro has written a kind of classic British boarding school story. And quite early on, so it's not a colossal spoiler. there is a moment when they're talking about what they're going to do when they grow up and some of the kids are saying they want to go to Hollywood.

You know, some of the boys, they want to become actors. And their teacher, who is not a clone, kind of loses patience with them and says, this is not right that you're having this conversation. It's not right that you haven't been told. Or she says this line, which I think is so true because it's how we learn about our own mortality, for example. She says to the kids, it's not right because you've been told. told and not told. It's been allowed to kind of seep in, but no one has really sat you down

and had this blunt conversation with you, that you will never go to Hollywood. You will never have a job. You will never have a normal life. You have been bred for a purpose of giving your organs to other, to human beings. And you are not effectively, you are not fully human. And of course, the funny thing is, it's kind of a shock for these kids, but at the same time, they react as 13-year-olds always do when a teacher sits them down and wants to give them a lecture about their health or sex education or their own mortality. They're a bit embarrassed and a bit bored of the conversation. And so it's really, really brilliantly handled.

And the rest of the book is about how these characters cope with the reality of the fact that they are clones and that other people don't regard them as human and that their lives are going to be shortened, that they're going to have to give up their organs for don't and then they'll be dead. So there are clones of the people who will need these organs in the future. That way it's a perfect match. We never really know how they have been created, but they come to believe some of them themselves

that they've been made from, as it were, the losers of society. So there's a bit where they're having an argument, and one of them says to the others, you know what we are, we're trash. That's the quote from the book. We are winos. we are prostitutes, we are criminals, we are all of these kinds of things. And that's, those were our models and that's what we've been created from. And we are basically,

we're just organ donors. That's all we are. And it's a really troubling idea. But how did you pick this book? It is an incredibly haunting, troubling book about nostalgia, about melancholy. There's lots of themes. It's not just the science element. There's lots of these kinds of themes to it. but actually like a lot of Ishiguro's books, and like a lot of science fiction books actually going back to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's book, which is another book that we're doing on the show. It's a book that asks, what is it, what does it mean to be human

and to kind of confront your own mortality? Like what do you do with the time that is given to you? So one of the questions we talk about in the show is, it's one of the things that critics actually leveled at the book. They said, why don't they run away? Why don't they go mad, knowing that this is their reality? And Tabith, my co-presenter and I were having this conversation, I said, yeah, but you and I are going to die.

And, you know, that moment is faster, is approaching more quickly than we would like. And yet, we haven't run away. We haven't gone mad. We're actually doing this podcast. That's what we're choosing to do with the limited time that we've been given. And that's the question that ultimately we all have to face, isn't it? When we contemplate our own very short time on this planet, that that's what do we do with the time that's given to us?

I'm so intrigued by something that you said there that these people aren't considered as fully human or they don't see themselves as fully human. Why is that? I mean, presumably they are a full human form. Of course. Yeah. So, and as we discover, they believe that they have emotions just as valuable as any humans. And they believe that they have souls. It's really important to them that they have souls. And there's a group of people who are trying to prove that the clones have souls. They get them to do artworks and they collect their art. And they want to basically say, you know, they are able to express themselves artistically, and that's one of the attributes of being human. Why wouldn't people think of them as human? Well, you guys are the science

experts, do you not think that if we were to clone human beings as organ donors, one of the ways that we would cope with it and the moral implications is we would tell ourselves they're not really human beings like us? I mean, this is what people always say, this is the theme of Blade Runner, Oriente Frankenstein, or all these kinds of things. I mean, I think if you take that logic and start applying it more loosely, then you would say that only one twin, only one of two identical twins gets to be considered the human. Twins are clones of each other.

So which one got the soul and which one didn't? Surely the first one out. The first one out always wins. Yeah. Psychologically and historically, it's been very common to say, you know what, these people were exploiting? They're not really fully people. so it's not that bad.

And then when the Pope says, actually you can save their souls, they go, oh, crud. Okay, they've got a soul. What do we do about this? So is that why they're clones then? The hope would be that they could be exploited for their organs without guilt?

Yes. Because why wouldn't you just breed a bunch of humans? After all, if I wanted organs, I would want them to come from the cream of the crop of society, not the trash. So you're asking the difficult questions that really, I mean, just to be clear, I'm not Kazuu Ishiguro, and I therefore cannot. And I think he would say his book is a metaphor rather than a serious investigation of what

a future with cloning would look like. I mean, sure. I still want Michael Phelps's lungs, you know? Yeah, okay, fair enough. Fair enough. I think you're being very hard on these kids' lungs. I don't think they're good lungs. You know what? I would like Albert Einstein's spleen. Which is. It would be a funny story to tell people. I'd be like, oh, yeah, I got an organ from Albert Einstein. They're like, that's why you're so smart.

And I'm like, no, I got his spleen. What would you take, Hannah, if you could have the organ of anybody from history? The organ of anyone from history? Oh, I don't know. The, like, the courage of Joan of Arc, there you go. The courage, that's not an organ. Yeah, that's not an organ. You put me on the spot.

My biology is weak. I've exposed myself. I'd have Nelson's liver. That's what I'd do. Fair. I'm sure he could take it. You know what you could do, Hannah, is you could ask for the good. guts of Joan of Arc.

Nice. There you go. See? You know, the thing is also, Dominic, that a lot of this is actually possible. You know this. Like, you could probably do this with humans. People thought you couldn't clone any primates in particular for a really long time.

And then some people managed to clone some macaques and it's all gone. So the only reason why this, it's not a scientific reason that has stopping this from happening. It's much more of an ethical one. It's just ethical. because Ishiguro got the inspiration for his book from Dolly, the sheep that was cloned in the 1990s. And I've often wondered why, if you can clone a sheep, you can't clone a human being.

But then, of course, that causes, you know, if they cloned another Hannah Frye, which one is the real one? Would you be happy to die knowing that Hannah Frye, the other one lived on? I mean, obviously not, surely. I'd consider her my nemesis and do everything I could to take her down. Of course you would.

You'd do everything to undermine that person, wouldn't you? I want to say it really depends. on how the cloning happens. Like, to clone her today, we would wind up with a newborn Hannah-Fry twin. Because twins, which naturally happen all the time, are clones. They have the exact same DNA as each other.

If we wanted to make an adult Hannah-Fry clone that's the same age as the one we're talking to right now, we don't know how to do that. We'd have to make a baby. We'd say it has the same DNA. It's going to have completely different life experiences. It's going to grow up with different technology. even if we had her parents raise it,

her parents are different now than they were than she was a child. So it would wind up quite different. This is what confused me as a kid when Dolly was cloned. The little magazine we all had to read in school about it had a picture of two adult sheep that looked the same, but they were clearly just this one image mirrored. And we were like, no, no, no, this is exactly the same image just mirrored.

And the teacher didn't understand that they'd actually created a baby of Dolly. Yeah, well, this raises the question, doesn't it? that what are you? What makes you you? Is it your DNA and all that stuff? Or is it some of your memories and your life experiences? And I think most of us instinctively would say it's the latter that a Hannah Frye with different memories is not the real Hannah Frye. Well, so if Hannah had a head injury and suffered from amnesia, is she now a different person? That's a major problem for people who are amnesiac. They wake up. They're told, here's your wife, here's your job, and they're like, oh, I don't get to choose?

Like, wait, but who am I? There's also some ideas about the memory. When you do clone something, that there's some lingering memory that gets transported. I mean, we were talking about bamboo the other day on our show. And bamboo, as you clone it, it sort of retains this kind of internal genetic clock. So bamboo, it's very dramatic, right?

It sort of flowers and then dies. It takes about 100 years or so for it to happen. And there was one particular, very beautiful, fountain-spray bamboo that some Russian explorer found in the mountains of China took it back to St Petersburg. It got cloned and cloned and cloned and cloned and cloned until it was all over Europe. But it retained this memory, the clock of when it was going to flower and die.

And so there was basically an apocalypse, bamboo apocalypse across all of Northern Europe simultaneously a few years ago, where just everything was like, well, and done. So I like the idea that maybe in this book, all of the kids, you know, die at the same age as the elders that they've copied. But they don't know, you see, this is the thing, because there's this terrible heartbreaking sequence at the end of the book

when some of the characters that we've come to really know and love when they start to have to give up their organs for donation. And you can normally do, I think, three or four donations, and then you're dead. And they just passively, the thing that a lot of readers find fascinating but also quite troubling about it is that they don't rebel. they just passively go along with it. And I mean, that's effectively what we all do with their own mortality, isn't it?

Unless we freeze ourselves, which you will know much more about than me, but I think it's probably bonkers. It's probably bonkers. The freezing isn't bonkers. It's the unfreezing that we haven't figured out yet. But the hope is that if we freeze you in 500 years, we'll be able to figure it out. Now, whether we'll honor the contract and say, yep, let's bring them back is another question. Because we could find ourselves with, you know, hundreds of thousands of frozen people. Right.

And we figure out how to bring them back. And we all go, yeah, but where are they going to live? Like we basically would have this migrant crisis. Right. Exactly. People are so grumpy about immigrants now. Imagine if people start saying, oh, these people who are coming out from 500 years ago, taking all our jobs and like, that's insane.

That would never happen. Coming here in their frozen carriers. Yeah. It won't be a bunch of migrants who were thought. and we'll take jobs. Because at the moment, all these frozen people, there's like hundreds of them, they're super old because you cannot freeze someone unless they're dead.

Yes, that would make sense. Right. If you were to freeze me, you would be murdering me according to the law. Yeah. And so people who sign up to these services, they usually stay in like a hospice or a nursing home near a freezing facility.

And at the moment that they're pronounced dead, the companies can come in, they flush out the blood, replace it with an anti-freeze solution. They got to cool the brain really fast. And they just, they cover you with liquid nitrogen and they pump your heart with this machine to get to suck in the antifreeze and out the blood. And then they put you in a big doer of liquid nitrogen. And that's where you stay in a big warehouse. But they hang you upside down like a bat.

Did you know this? I didn't know that. They're freezing you at a point when you wouldn't want to be frozen. So you would want to be frozen, surely, at your peak. Exactly. In your physical prime, wouldn't you? I mean, if I was going to be frozen, I wouldn't want to be frozen now. I'd want to be frozen when I was 25.

Ooh. I wouldn't mind being frozen now, but I'm excited for what's coming next in my life. I think the problem is everyone who's being frozen right now is being frozen at literally the worst part, their death. Like when they come back, they're going to be like, oh, but I'm still dying. Like, I'm still, I'm still 107 years old. Exactly. So, of course, the real hope is that we'll be able to copy their brains and

give them computer bodies and robot bodies and reproduce their consciousness digitally. But then that gets you back to that question, Michael, doesn't it? If you could upload your brain into the cloud and then download it again into another vehicle, would you still be you? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Whoever woke up would definitely think they were me because they would have the continuous life story that I've already built for them.

Yeah. But yeah, it's weird to think when I close my eyes and die and then I'm rethought, am I going to be like, oh. Exactly. It's the thing about Hannah. Is that the real Hannah Fry? Or is this now yet another imposter? Profound questions. Profound questions.

That's what I expect on the rest of science. You don't get these questions on my shows. Anyway, here is a clip from our episode of the book club that we did about Never Let Me Go. And I hope that your listeners enjoy it. So tell us a bit about the book itself. So Never Let Me Go. He's written The Remains of the Day. The Remains of the Day is a great hit.

It's a, it wins like surprises. It becomes a film with Anthony Hopkins, Nema Thompson. Great film. And then he starts work on this book. And he sort of struggles at first, doesn't he? He doesn't really know where it's going to go. He said he had this kind of binder on his shelf that just kind of haunted him. And it was called the student novel.

So basically he'd made two previous attempts back in the early 1990s to write this novel, the novel that became Never Let Me Go. And as I said, it was called the student's novel. And then he said, both times I felt there was a key piece missing to the jigsaw, a piece whose shape and colour I couldn't determine and I'd moved on to work on a different book. The story alluding me I knew would feature students who lived in wrecked farmhouses in the rainy English countryside. There'd be a segregated group whose lives had become strangely shortened. And he just couldn't get past that idea.

He couldn't work out why they were doomed. And he kind of played around with the idea of viruses or nuclear contamination, but none of it seemed to work. And then one day he was listening to the radio and he heard about all these advances. I mean, obviously, you and I obviously know exactly what we're talking about. Yeah. It's very scientific. But he said he had all these advances in biotechnology. And he'd always been interested in the idea of how new technologies could create a kind of two-tiered society, which is a very dystopian concept.

H.G. Wells, it's kind of the Morlocks and the Eloy from the time machine. Exactly that. And at the same time, there was massive publicity around things. this sheep called Dolly. Okay. Big clue there. Born in 1996 and announced to the media in early 1997. And this was the spur for his book.

It allows him to turn his student's novel into something a bit like science fiction. And simultaneously in that way, he was inspired by writers like David Mitchell, Alex Garland. And he said that the amazing thing about this breakthrough, the dystopian element of the book, which is still a secret. Yeah, we won't give it away. We won't give it away. But stay with us. and we might at the end, though, was that it allows him to kind of wrestle with these very, very

mature, big themes, the big questions that haunt people about like human nature, love, all of this kind of thing. The kind of stuff that in Dostoevsky, you know, you get 20 pages of people gnaering about, you know, existential crises and God and whatever it is. But these days, authors can't really get away with that. And so this was like his way in. It was like his cipher to deal with those big questions. So the title, the title comes from a song, doesn't it? They'll never let me go. It's basically the idea of clinging together and not being parted. And that sort of, well, we can come back to the song because I know you've got lots of stuff to say about it. So let's get into the book.

So obviously there's different elements to it. The school story, the coming of age story, the mystery story. We're learning information the whole time. When we kick off, it's England late 1990s. That's what we're told. But it feels kind of, to me, quite timeless, doesn't it? They're still in a world of cassettes rather than CDs. There's, you know, they're not in a world of computers and smartphones and things like that.

There's a sort of dreamlike side to it. We have this narrator Kathy. You read it at the beginning. Beautifully. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say something nice, but actually you beat me to it, which is you obviously anticipated. You anticipated that I wouldn't say something nice, so that's disappointing.

Carrie Mulligan, a heart out. Yeah. So Kathy is talking to us. She's been a carer. She thinks clearly that we are just like her and that we will understand all the terms she's using, as we'll find out, we may not be like her at all. Yeah.

So she is haunted throughout, isn't she, by memories of this school. And that's what we get right into. Her memories of her time with these two friends, Ruth and Tommy. So tell us a bit about them, Debbie. So Hailsham is obviously this very idealised place. and it's kind of, Ishgoe plays with light a lot and it's the only sunny part of the book. And so that's how we meet, as you say, Ruth and Tommy. And their relationship, their love triangle is kind of the emotional heart of the book, I think.

It's the emotional core. And so there's Tommy who's kind of very sweet, naive, he's very lovable. But he has these massive inexplicable tantrums. And he's one of the only students in the novel, as we'll call them, to show this massive, degree of emotion. And in the movie, he is played by Andrew Garfield. Very well, actually, I think. Yeah, he's very good Andrew Gaffir. Now, do you want a fascinating fact? So do you know who, do you know who Kazio Isiguro? I'll give you one guess. It's somebody from the early 2000s when he's writing the book, who he thinks Tommy should have been played by. Johnny Depp.

It's a good guess, but it's not right. It's somebody very different. It's, um, I can see, You are so smug. You're sitting on a, yeah, on a volcano of information. Okay, I'm just going to put you out of your misery. It's Wayne Rooney. Stop. He thought, yeah. No.

Yeah, it's Wayne Rooney. That's sportive for you, hasn't it? In one blow, you've totally destroyed, never let me go for me. What? Yeah, it's Wayne Rooney. How does that work? Andrew Garfield. So in the book, Tommy is one of his defining things is he's very good of football.

So actually, Wayne Rooney could have played him, I think, magnificently. But Wayne Rooney looks like an orc. I imagine Tommy looking like kind of quite in his feet. Do you? You basically imagine him as Andrew Garfield. I do, yeah. I mean, I know we have to move on, but I'm totally staggered by that reveal. So you've got Tommy, Wayne Rooney.

Then you've got Ruth, who is in a relationship for most of the book with Wayne Rooney. And she's Kiranightly. She's played by Karen Knightley. That Queen Arnie relationship. Yeah, yeah, that's the meat cute we've all been waiting for. Yeah. Yeah, if Kira's listening, take our advice. Anyway, Ruth is probably the least attractive

for the characters in the novel. She's quite mean. She's very manipulative. She's kind of like the school popular girl. And she has this very disquieting thing called the secret guard that she sets up. And it's where she kind of promotes or assembles a group of her and other girls who creates this idea that one of their favorite guardians,

Ms. Geraldine, is going to be kidnapped. And it's their job to protect her. her. And for instance, at one point, Kathy, who is technically Ruth's best friend, exposes the fact that Ruth can't play chess, high stakes at Hilsham. And she kicks her out of the group. You know, it's classic kind of bitchy, you know, childhood children, female politics. Well, I was going to ask you about this, Tabby. So, I mean, you said earlier on that you were at boarding school yourself, so you know this better than anybody. Clearly. How convincingly do you think does Ishiguro capture that world of kind of, you know, pre-pubescent or teenage girls? Yeah, it's very, very, very powerfully done. And but then there is one thing about, and also I read this asker with Margaret Atwood, who often writes about that dynamic.

And she said for her that was kind of the most potent part of the book in many ways. Oh, really? Of this book? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Interestingly. And the very cruel and manipulative thing that she does above all else is.

that she keeps, she sees and understands, possibly even before they do, that Tommy and Kathy are in love. And she keeps them apart and she drives herself between them. But there is one sympathetic feature about Ruth, and that's the fact that you get the sense. And more so later on, that she's kind of craving a mother figure. And that might explain some of her odd, you know, her odd behaviour with Miss Geraldine. Yeah. So I think one of the lovely things about this book, actually, is there there is this sort of science fiction or existential mystery about what does it mean that they're donors and carers and, you know, clearly there is something weird going on at this school. And yet that is coupled with a portrait.

It's so interesting that Ishii Giro didn't himself go to one of these schools. You know, he went to Woking Grammar School because I think it's as good a portrait of what it is the sort of day-to-day relationships of people at boarding schools as any book I've ever read. I mean, you were a boarding school too and evidently embroiled in, um, catty female politics. I hope this isn't too affecting for you, Don Mick. Yeah, it's bringing back all kinds of terrible memories about arguments about pencil cases or whatever it is. Yeah, marching around, pining after Wayne Rooney, pretending you knew how to say chess. What? Come on.

You've got mad now, I'm telling you. I have. It's the Wayne Rooney thing. It's totally blown me off course. So, okay, so just before we come to the break, let's talk. I mean, there are some very strange elements of life in this boarding school section. They give us a clue that this is not a normal. school. So a classic example of this is they have to do every now and again these things

called the exchanges where basically they don't have any money. Their currency is the kind of artwork and crafts that they've created. Yeah, creativity is the big thing. And they're obsessed with art. They're told to put a lot of emphasis into their art. They have an idea themselves that there is a, there's a, they have this sort of place called the gallery and somebody is going to come who they call Madame, who is not like one of their teachers, but kind of a, you know, somehow associated with the school, and Madame is going to come and take away their artworks, and they'll be exhibited, and that this is somehow incredibly important and life-changing, and to get into the gallery, you know, means everything.

And there's a brilliant bit when Ishigar is talking you through this, where he says, it's clear now to me, this is Kathy talking, she says, it's clear now that we did know things about ourselves, we kind of suspected them, and we'd kind of been prepared for the truth about ourselves, but it had never really hit home. And she says one of the first moments when it hit home is when they walk past this woman, Madame, who's come to pick up their art in the corridor, and she kind of shrinks from them. Yeah.

It's a really chilling moment. It's like she's frightened of them and horrified by them. She actually says she was afraid of us in the way someone might be afraid of spiders. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a really kind of unsettling moment. Spine crawling. And Kathy says, the first time you'd look at. limps yourself through the eyes of a person like that.

Quote, it's a cold moment. It's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life. And suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange. It's like for the first time, something about herself has dawned on her through this moment where she's brushed past this woman who's horrified by her. And I think when rereading it for the second time, I thought, okay, that's the moment. It's a bit like when you're a child and you realize your own mortality,

that the life, the world doesn't revolve around you and one moment you'll die or whatever it might be. That sort of sense of something dawning on you that changes everything and you can never unthink it again. I think it's really, really brilliantly done. Well, I hope you all enjoyed that clip from our episode about Kazu Ishaegura's Never Let Me Go. And if you want to hear more, please search for the book club wherever you get your podcasts.