I don’t mean to be flippant; it’s clear that Ishiguro does find some beauty, some genuine beauty, in the England he depicts, especially in the fictional Hailsham academy. And yet even this Arcadia is corrupted by the revelation that it, too, came with expectations. At the end of the novel, the former carers of Hailsham turn on Kathy and her friends, berating them for expecting more than a beautiful, fake childhood. They tell her that there is no way to make the world better, that every pleasure they have experienced to this point is expected to be paid back in full. Not only must Kathy and her friends endure a subhuman existence, they also need to be grateful for this existence: anything else would be a betrayal of the privileged class which deigned to bring them these pleasures. Grin and bear it, they say in so many words. We could have given you nothing!

I find this novel prescient because it was produced in a time where there was still hope about where the world was going, a possibility that the generation that Kathy and her friends are a part of might make a world for themselves. They have the heart to do so; they are just structurally presented, as we have been, from making their own world. Instead we are, as Kathy is, doomed to give ourselves to the old world, piece by piece, until we are gone and only theirs remain.