In his latest book, Kazuo Ishiguro uses many of the same literary devices that were so impressive in his Booker Prize-winning novel, "The Remains of the Day."

		'Never Let Me Go' By Kazuo Ishiguro Knopf $24

There, he used the nuances of British class as a means of understating how the desire for order can become manipulated for ulterior political ends, letting his narrator, a butler named Stevens, use passivity as a screen for fascistic ideology.

Ishigaro again returns to an exemplar of that society -- boarding school -- to uncover a paranoid conspiracy lurking just beneath the surface of propriety.

Kathy H., the novel's narrator, is a 31-year old "carer" who attended Halisham, a British public school. Like many narrators -- come to think of it, like all narrators -- Kathy believes that the past can explain her present problems, with her love life, or her job or her astounding lack of real insight.

Kathy aims for emotional honesty, but she so rarely analyzes her situation that rather than being candid, we are subject to a kind of world view that is ultimately limited and seemingly calculated for effect.

Ishiguro's style is also painfully foreboding, and the accumulated anticipation becomes frustrating quickly and ultimately wearying.

Each scene is less dramatic or significant than its predecessor, and it's not clear why the past so fascinates the narrator or why it should concern us.

The key to the puzzle may be provided by Miss Lucy, a guardian at Halisham. (Oddly, there are no teachers at this school, nor, for that matter, are there any parents, siblings, field trips or bucolic trysts with the local villagers.) In a fit of righteous anger, Miss Lucy comes out with it, almost:

"If no one else will talk to you, then I will. The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I'm not. If you're going to have decent lives, then you've got to know and know properly. None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets."

Cut to the chase. Kathy and her classmates are clones, created to donate their organs to "real" humans. Unfortunately, the reader puts the clues together fairly quickly and waits for more. And waits. And herein lies the plot-point problem: As Miss Lucy says, we're both told and not told, and that's the play of the novel.

Unfortunately, the narrator and her friends, who seem to be normal in most respects, have lost any capability for empathy, insight or curiosity, even about their own futures. Oddly, they seem unaware of libraries, radios or any other source of information that might clue them in to their situation, even though the novel is set in contemporary England. They rarely talk even among themselves.

A good novel should allow us entry into worlds we cannot explore ourselves. Ishiguro has created a rich premise without delivering; if he cared to, he probably has the talent to reawaken Frankenstein's monster.

But Ishiguro backs away from any insight into Kathy's emotional state. While she certainly knows what she is and what she's doing, her eventual epiphany is not a surprise as much as a confirmation of what she's always known.

Emotional simplicity, rather than being a biological or environmental consequence of cloning, simply feels like stupidity. Literature has only recently begun confronting the ethical issues emerging from the widespread application of biotechnologies beyond the cellular level. Whether these problems will actually become conundrums remains to be seen.

After all, the birth of Louise Brown a quarter of a century ago as the result of an in-vitro fertilization, the widespread use of steroids by athletes and the harvesting of organs for transplant have, in fits and starts, become an accepted part of biomedical discourse without too much extended debate.

Cloning, as we all know, has occurred, and we may not be too far away from the kind of scenario that Ishiguro has imagined. If we are willing to infer reason and consciousness to a piece of mutton, however, we might also accurately assume that Dolly the sheep probably thought of herself as a regular ewe. She enjoyed her pasturage as much as anyone else and faced the same moral and ethical dilemmas that confronted the rest of the flock.

Ishiguro's novel, rather than fulfilling the narrative promise of the best suspense or science fiction, has provided us instead with a dull-normal pastiche of "Blade Runner" meets "Goodbye, Mr. Chips."