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"I've lost some energy on the pure intellectual front, I think," he says during a phone interview from London.

His new novel, "Never Let Me Go," certainly had the potential to stimulate a wide-ranging discourse. As the novel opens, the narrator, identified only as Kathy H., is looking back on her life as a "carer." Readers only later find that she cares for clones who are raised to be organ donors, and that Kathy is a clone herself.

Instead of the ethics of science, however, Ishiguro casts his attention inward.

"This book in many ways is quite a simple book, I feel," says Ishiguro, the author of the Booker Prize-winning "The Remains of the Day." "It's not full of very complicated ideas. And the sadness I try to convey at the end is the sadness of things in general, the fact that our time on earth is limited and time passes, relationships end, because of that fact."

So why, then, is a reader in many ways uplifted by what the author admits could be mordant?

First, Ishiguro's precision and mastery of the English language are breathtaking. The author of "The Remains of the Day" and "When We Were Orphans" is arguably in a league with such consummate literary masters as John Updike and A.S. Byatt.

Most of all, the hopefulness a reader feels is a reflection of Ishiguro's intentions. In past books, Ishiguro says he created characters who were formed from weaknesses or impulses -- notably Stevens, the butler from "The Remains of the Day" who was "an exaggerated version of a lot of people's fear of emotions."

"My writing almost served as a warning to myself not to become complacent," he says.

Kathy H., Tommy and, to a certain extent, Ruth, the children who grow up facing a lifespan of 30 years in "Never Let Me Go," were spun from a different source.

"I did actually set myself the task of portraying the more positive aspects of people," Ishiguro says, "because I couldn't convey the sense of sadness of their lives passing and the shortness of life -- which is really what this book is about, I guess -- if there wasn't anything to celebrate about the actual people and the relationships themselves. Although they make a lot of mistakes and get things wrong, I did want to portray the characters in the book in a positive way. I wanted to celebrate the decency of people, and I did try to portray love."

Ishiguro's style, however elegant, is achieved by utilizing a precise, almost spare, approach. If he were an artist, he'd specialize in sketches -- albeit intricate, detailed sketches. The characters in "Never Let Me Go" are rendered with a minimum of descriptive details, the author allowing readers to create their own images.

Ishiguro thinks finely detailed passages and descriptions are no longer necessary because of mass media, unlike Victorian times, when books were filled with descriptions of "whether people's noses protruded or whether their forehead was a certain kind of forehead.

"Particularly these days, readers have all these stock images in their head," he says. "It's only important for me that the reader gets a sense of Kathy in terms of what I've put in the book. If one person wants to think she's got blonde hair and another wants to think she's got dark hair, it really doesn't matter to me. The important things about Kathy are in the book.

"But in general, I've always assumed that pictures come alive in readers' imaginations more if you don't provide too many details, if you don't dictate too much."

Ishiguro's reticence to color his work with definitive descriptions extends to setting and time in "Never Let Me Go." The locale could be anywhere in England, and while it initially seems Ishiguro is writing about the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there's just enough doubt cast that one can plausibly make a case for the book being set 100, even 200 years in the future.

Time and place, he insists, are not critically important.

"That's always been a kind of strain in my writing in the past," he says. "I set it down in some special historical context, like Japan after the war ('An Artist of the Floating World'), and people tend to read it as a portrait of Japan after the war. But there's part of me saying 'no, no, no; ignore all that.' OK, it's set there, but what I want to ask you is do these things apply to us as we live now, will they apply to us in 50 years' time, are there things that are universal and eternal?

"In this book it comes close to fable, I guess. This dystopian kind of world is for me, primarily, a metaphor that is very simple and universal. Which is the fact that we all have limited lifespans, and by creating this situation where the lifespan is concertino-ed down to about 30 years, it seemed to me as a way of looking with a fresh perspective at a lot of questions we all ask: What do you do during your time here? What are the important things? And, indeed, do we sometimes just mistime things? Do we only realize too late about the things that are important?"

Capsule review

Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" is, superficially, a novel cast in the guise of science fiction. A group of children at an elite school are being raised for a special purpose. Only gradually does Ishiguro reveal that the children are clones and being raised as organ donors.

And gradually, another theme emerges: Life is brief, and the compressed lifespans of Ishiguro's characters all too well mimic ours.

Masterfully told, "Never Let Me Go" is one of the year's most compelling and unforgettable novels.

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