The Long Lost Caterpillar

How do you know. How can you possibly know how life works or where it will take you or how you can try and beat it, overcome it’s wrath. It is only after events occur when we wish we took another path, we wish we acted differently, chose a different answer, had more fun, were more serious, noticed the subtle things, told someone the truth, took advantage of an opportunity. Before and even during it is impossible to know if that direction will serve you best. And this is a one way street…turning back and doing something differently is never on the cards. It’s like we each have our own huge tree. Rife with intersections, interwoven branches, parting at every step of the way - taking you higher and higher to the beautiful view at the top or curving around and leading you down to fall off your feet. And the whole time we are growing through our tree we can only ever see directly in front of us, never knowing where it will lead us but simply taking the best options we think we can. The forest  of trees that make up human beings are constantly being linked and helping or hindering one another. This is what gives us the strength to grow. Or the ability to fail. How we react with each other, care for one another, treat our fellow beings, our relationships. Do we give it all and trust someone who could shoot you to the top or leave you out with the litter. Or do we live half a life slowly but surely, playing it safe, knowing we’ll probably get there eventually. Yet one day it is all snatched away and we will be chopped down from the truck. No warning, no ability to prepare or properly say goodbye. Leaving others with remnants of your connections in the branches, weighing them down not willing to let it go, never able to fully say goodbye. The inevitability taunts us, instills fear within our souls, cripples us. Yet still no answers are provided and we carry on blindly - an impenetrable shield placed over our eyes - hoping, willing, yearning that this is the right path for us and we are doing the best we can. 

Never Let Me Go makes you want to have sex, take drugs, run a marathon, dance - anything to convince yourself that you’re more alive, more determined, more conscious, more dangerous than any of these characters.

This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn’t about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It’s about why we don’t explode, why we don’t just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.