I get skeptical when a book is described as “deceptively simple,” because that sounds like a pretty good excuse for not delivering on the complexity of the premise. Kazuo Ishiguro’s <em>Never Let Me Go certainly delivers the simple, but it’s the deceptive part that remains an open question. Yet another in the seemingly endless line of older narrators looking back, Kathy’s narration is straightforward and childlike, and her story is plainly told. There is your simple. It’s what's left off the page- those issues dealing with the fact that Kathy is a clone whose sole purpose is to donate her organs when the time comes before “completing”- that determines how deceptive the novel is or how simple it remains. What works about the simplicity of Kathy’s narration is its creepiness- her tone has an otherworldly naivete that conveys a fundamental decency, but also an ignorance about her plight that generates so much of the story’s pathos. Ishiguro is not interested in laying out explicit arguments about the immorality of harvesting organs. He is all show, no tell, and he allows the reader to fill in the blanks with his own internal debate about the ethical issues the story raises. The simple narration is a tool to illustrate the exploitation of the innocent, to show how clones become means and not ends. I may be putting too much faith in Ishiguro, but maybe I'm just reciprocating his faith in the reader. Never Let Me Go will not light up the sky with rhetorical pyrotechnics, but it may deliver more with humble sparklers.