Never Let Me Go

I read Kazuo Ishiguro's haunting Never Let Me Go years ago. What stayed with me was the sombre mood, the feeling that the children had no control over their lives or futures. Their fates were so gradually revealed that they seemed irrevocable and somehow natural.
The movie recreated the darkness but interjected some themes that I don't recall from the book. At the end of the movie Kathy knows that she is on the road to "completion" and contrasts herself positively with others who do not know when they are going to die. She is one of the special children who have been farmed and brainwashed with stories and rumors to expect an early death - sorry, completion - and to expect it sooner than ordinary people, who because of them expect to live for a century or more.
I reread the end of the book when I got home yesterday and found it even bleaker than the end of the movie: in the book she mourned all whom she'd lost, the childhood she'd misunderstood and her purpose in a hopeless and altogether fatalistic way. She looked for no bright sides, no wisdom from knowledge of her fate, just accepted that that is the way of the world - and that is what I find so bleak about the book and the movie.
When I extend her fatalism to us all, our gullibility is revealed. We accept the stories we are told; we hand control of our lives and futures over to others, to society, with hardly a murmur; we fail to question or reflect on the discourses and trends of thinking and ideas that sweep us along on the tide of societal expectations. We are trapped by the time, place and society in which we are born.