Carer?

Donors?

Kathy H.'s low-key, almost affectless narration eddies around the meaning of those words for many pages. As we become fully aware of their chilling significance, we enter a world where the monstrous is accepted as routine. That this world seems to be mostly indistinguishable from our own — the setting is announced as "England, late 1990s" — adds another shock to the novel: the shock of recognition.

"Never Let Me Go" is hard to describe without tipping off its secrets.

It's not a plot-driven novel but a novel of discovery, of hints and disclosures, the subtle unfolding of a reality that the narrator takes for granted and therefore feels no pressure to make explicit for us. Remember the first time you read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"? It has some of that malice-in-the-mundane quality. But in scope and significance, it's akin to such dystopian classics as Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale."

As the novel opens, Kathy H. has reached a crucial point in her life, and she reflects on her past, starting with her school days at Hailsham, an idyllic place secluded from the outside world. The staff, known as "guardians," fostered in the students a sense that they were special. And indeed they are, but in ways that they never fully grasped. In the world of "Never Let Me

Go," a biotech breakthrough has brought about miraculous cures for a variety of diseases, but only through some necessary sacrifices from the likes of Kathy H. and her friends, who have no family but one another.

The Hailsham scenes are poignantly filled with the universal adolescent sense of apartness, combined with an equally adolescent facility for denial. Even when, as Kathy tells us, one of the guardians rebelled against the school's sunny complacency and insisted on talking bluntly about what the future had in store for them, she was met with a puzzled incomprehension. "Some students thought she'd lost her marbles," Kathy recalls.

Yet even after they've left Hailsham and entered upon a pale semblance of young adult lives, including flirtations and love affairs but also the losses contingent on the role they have to play in the world, Kathy and the others stoically accept their fate. Though the reader may squirm in discomfort, impatience, outrage at their fatal passivity, Ishiguro makes their acceptance credible. And soon we begin to recognize our kinship with them: We all accommodate to schools and jobs and families, and to the other political, commercial and cultural institutions that blunt our rebellious edges and keep us in line with what the larger society demands of us.

With a marvelous lack of sentimentality, Ishiguro also explores the mystery of "otherness" — something that a writer who was born in Japan and moved to England at the age of 6 must have experienced on some level.

Kathy recalls that the students at Hailsham had so little contact with the outside world that they were startled when the few visitors to their school seemed to be frightened or repelled by them.

"The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment," she reflects. "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."

Some readers will take Ishiguro's novel as a parable about such biomedical controversies as the ethics of stem cell research, but I don't think he's aiming for anything so mechanically allegorical. The layers of significance in this novel are manifold and intricate. As in his best-known novel, "The Remains of the Day," the psychological tension accrues from the characters' denial of emotion and avoidance of harsh realities. A life of routine becomes preferable to a life of uncertainty.

Though Ishiguro draws the reader into his novel by dangling a series of puzzles to solve — the search for the reality behind what Kathy H. tells us so obliquely — those narrative enigmas are only superficial.

Once you've solved the puzzle of what's happening, you return to the novel for the far more rewarding task of figuring out why.