The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’ve had The Buried Giant on my to-read list for a long time, since a volunteer and avid reader at the public library where I worked when it came out recommended it. Longtime bookconscious readers know I’ve read other novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, and loved them. The Buried Giant was also on the list of Tookie’s recommended books at the end of The Sentence and was available relatively quickly from the library’s eBook app. Yes, this is the same person writing who, pre-COVID, moaned a fair bit about how far superior paper books are. I still prefer them, but have come to appreciate library eBooks during the pandemic.

Anyway, I’m glad I finally got around to reading The Buried Giant. Unlike Ishiguro’s other dystopian books, this one is set far in the past in England, after King Arthur has died and there is a fragile peace between Saxons and Britons. Right from the start of the book, when we meet the elderly protagonists Axl and Beatrice, it’s clear that this peace is not all that peaceful. While there may not be open war, there is suspicion even within individual settlements. Axl and Beatrice live in a “warren” of a village — shelters carved into the earth — and are forbidden a candle because someone has managed to convince the leaders that they might accidentally start a fire. So even neighbors suspect each other. And there is at least an uneasiness about strangers, and in some cases, open hostility towards them.

This makes the old couple’s decision to travel several days’ walk away to visit their son seem quite strange. Although Beatrice has experience with part of the journey because she’s been to a Saxon village with other women to trade, neither of them really knows the way. They, like everyone else, seem to have difficulty remembering the events of their earlier lives. Axl and Beatrice suspect this is because of a mysterious mist that impairs them. Still, they gain permission to travel and set off.

It’s a strange journey right from the start. Early on they come across a boatman who ferries people to an island where every inhabitant thinks they are entirely alone unless a married couple can convince the boatman under separate questioning that their “bond of love” is particularly strong and has been so for their lifetimes, in which case they may be granted an exception (it’s all hearsay) and live on the island together. There’s no mention of younger folks or parents and children or friends or any other kind of love. The boatman Axl and Beatrice meet is being harrassed by an old woman who feels she was deceived and misjudged in this process, whose husband is on the mystery island while she remains on the mainland.

Then they come to the Saxon village Beatrice knows, and learn these folks have been having problems with some kind of super ogres, called fiends. Because he comes home with a nasty bite, they turn on a child who was carried away and later rescued by a warrior, a Saxon trained by Britons. Axl and Beatrice end up continuing their journey with these two strangers, the boy and the warrior. The four agree to travel together at least as far as a monastery in the mountains where Beatrice hopes to get the advice of a monk known as a skillful healer, and the boy is to go on with them to their son’s village.

Let’s just say the trip gets even crazier once they are a party of four. They come across the last of Arthur’s knights, Gawain, now elderly himself, and still on his last quest, to slay a dragon. He becomes entangled in their stories, and at this point none of the other characters are quite what they seemed. Even Axl is not the simple laborer he seemed to be when the book opened. They visit the monastery, which may actually be an old fort, ad find the healer, who is even more wounded himself.

As if all of that isn’t strange enough, as each character’s memories slip in and out and pieces come together, we learn that the mist was something Arthur thought would hold the peace together. The idea was that if people could not remember atrocities, they wouldn’t seek revenge. This was necessary because Arthur’s noble rules of engagement, which required his knights to engage only with other knights and not allow anyone else to be harmed, had not held together. I won’t spoil for you the source of the mist or whether or not it remains. But its hold seems to lessen as they travel, just as when we’re out of our usual element, we may think of things we haven’t in some time. And that reveals enough to help us get to know the characters a little more.

We also learn a little more about Axl and Beatrice and their son, although not enough to really understand entirely where he is, how he came to live there, what their reception will be if they find him, and whether the boy will be welcome wherever he is. The island (or an island — we learn there may be many of them) comes back into play as a possible destination. We revisit the question of whether Axl and Beatrice could meet the boatman’s test. They reassure each other many times on the journey that their love is strong and others observe their “unusual devotion to each other” but we also get hints of past disagreements, even possibly betrayals. Ishiguro keeps us guessing about what their memories might reveal if the mist is lifted and how that might impact their journey.

Is this a fable about collective memory, war, tribalism, xenophobia, and the danger of relying on charismatic leaders? Perhaps. Is it a story about the realities of a long marriage, the way bonds may be tempered rather than broken by challenges? Or is it about about forces — cultural, political, or even simply human nature — that cannot be overcome as we try to direct the paths we’re on? Is it about surviving those forces? It may be any of these. Or it may just be a good story, a little bit unsettling but lovely and mysterious and someone even reassuring?

A good read might keep you wondering what it was about long after you get to the final page, and this is one of those reads. It would be interesting for a book group to wrestle with the many questions that arise.

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Klara and the Sun by by Kazuo Ishiguro

I loved Never Let Me Go when I read it, so when I saw that Kazuo Ishiguro had a new book out, Klara and the Sun, I got on the hold list for the library eBook. Although I also loved The Remains of the Day, I was excited to see Ishiguro return to a dystopian story. A beautiful and disturbing one.

The title character is an AF — artificial friend — and when the novel opens, Klara and her fellow AF Rosa are taking their turn in the window of the store where they hope children will choose them. The Manager trains and prepares the AFs, but it becomes clear that Klara learns a great deal simply by observing, and she picks up on subtle things Rosa can’t or won’t try to make sense of, like two taxi driver fighting. The AFs receive their “nourishment” from the Sun (capitalized, like God) and one day Klara observes a homeless man and his dog, who appeared to be gravely ill, returned to health in the sunlight.

Josie, a young teen, visits Klara in the window, and promises to come back; Klara senses that her mother isn’t necessarily on board. Eventually, Josie does get her way and Klara goes to live with them, out of the city. And through Klara’s eyes we learn that privileged children are “lifted” through some kind of procedure that can sometimes make them weaken or die, but if successful, gives them a boost that will ensure their entry into elite colleges and, it’s implied, successful futures.The lifted kids seem to need to be re-introduced to social life; Josie gets all of her schooling remotely, and specially arranged social sessions are meant to prepare them for “society.” Josie is also one of the people weakened by the lifting.

Klara’s observations are finely tuned but she only knows what she observes, and so our view of this world is limited to her vision of it and her conversations with others. We meet Josie’s childhood friend and neighbor Rick, whose aging actress mother chose the unconventional path of not “lifting” him. He is brilliant, but probably won’t go to college because of her choice. And we meet the strange Henry Capaldi, a man in the city who is making a “portrait” of Josie — one which causes a great deal of tension between her mother and father, particularly when Klara is drawn into the Mother’s plan.

On a visit to the city so Josie can sit for Capaldi, Klara persuades the Father to help her on a mission to do something special for the Sun, so that he might provide “special nourishment” for Josie as Klara observed the Sun do for the homeless man. As they drive, the Father tells her “I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he might be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better. That’s how Capaldi sees it, and there’s a part of me that fears he’s right. “I won’t give away any more of the story, but I will say that this question of what it is to be human and live a good life suffuses the story with a kind of low grade tension.

Klara never stops having faith in the Sun, and to think well of just about everyone she meets. She is a unique narrator that I felt enormous empathy for; Ishiguro left me feeling more for the robot than the humans in this novel. It’s not a long book, but he captures so much. Klara has more simple faith and hope and gentleness than the parents maneuvering to get their kid a place in the world that will set them up for the future combined. But she is herself already old fashioned — a new generation of AFs will make her kind obsolete even as they cause people to be afraid that robots are becoming too smart and taking over too many things.

Ishiguro even makes her aging — her “slow fade” as the Mother calls it, poignant. Klara notes, “Over the last few days, some of my memories have started to overlap in curious ways.” That seems reasonably similar to what humans experience, but again, Klara observes it with an innocence that I found touching.

I loved Klara and the Sun and I think book clubs will find much to discuss. A really lovely and profound read.

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The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’ve only read one other book by Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, but ever since reading that a couple of years ago, I’ve kept my eyes out for his other books. I bought The Remains of the Day at a used bookstore. I’ve never seen the film, nor had I read the book before. It’s pouring buckets today so I thought it might be a good day to read a book set in the English countryside.

The Remains of the Day is about a quintessential English butler, Stevens, who prides himself on having learned from his father before him how to embody the dignity derived from “a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits.” When the book opens, Stevens remains at Darlington Hall in the early 1950s, although this great house has been sold to an American who has cut back on the staff and does not live there full time. Stevens is concerned with some recent errors he himself has made while working under these conditions and is considering how best to appeal for more staff when a letter arrives from Darlington Hall’s former housekeeper, Mrs. Benn, formerly Miss Kenton.

When his American boss suggests he take a break and even offers his car, Stevens sees an opportunity to visit Mrs. Benn and see whether he can persuade her to come back to Darlington Hall. The novel is taken up with Stevens’ reminiscing, as he travels, about their work together in the house’s heyday. As he muses, Stevens posits that to be a great butler, as he strove to be, meant “to serve the great gentlemen of our times in whose hands civilization had been entrusted.”

And he recalls the way his former employer’s reputation suffered because he truly believed that the Germans suffered after the treaty of Versailles and that the honorable way to treat a former enemy was not to saddle that enemy with reparations, but to leave the past in the past and “offer generosity and friendship to a defeated foe” as Lord Darlington’s godson Mr. Cardinal puts it. As Stevens recalls the events of the 1930’s and the men who came to consult with Lord Darlington and each other before WWII, it’s clear he is ruminating on Mr. Cardinal’s belief that, “Today’s world is too foul a place for fine and noble instincts.”

Ishiguro’s beautiful and subtle writing never spells out the final position Stevens takes on whether Lord Darlington was wise or foolish, although he seems to trust that his former boss was sincere. That’s one of the things I love about Ishiguro, is that he respects the reader’s ability to connect their own dots. Among which, in this book, is whether Stevens has any regrets and what his visit to Mrs. Benn revealed to each of them abut their choices in life. Would the world have turned out differently had Lord Darlington and men like him had not had so much influence? Would war have been averted if left to “the professionals” rather than gentlemen? Why did Mrs. Benn leave Darlington Hall? Did Stevens realize it at the time, or does he only come to see it during this visit? This would be a wonderful book club read.

A lovely read on a gloomy afternoon.

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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

When the Nobel prize in literature was announced this year I thought to myself, “there’s an author I always intended to read.” For no good reason, I started with Never Let Me Go rather than Ishiguro’s most recent novel. It’s a lovely book, full of the emotional force Ishiguro’s writing is known for, and like all really good fiction, it’s about being human. Which is ironic, since Never Let Me Go is about people who aren’t considered fully human.

The three main characters, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, grew up together at a boarding school in England called Hailsham. As the novel opens, Kathy, now an adult, is reminiscing about their childhood, the “guardians” who ran the school, and the experiences they had after leaving Hailsham to begin their adult lives. Kathy works as a carer, and ends up caring for both Ruth and Tommy. Slowly readers begin to understand who and what the three characters are, why there is no mention of their families, and what their purpose in life is.

I know I’m being vague but I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprising truth for you if you haven’t read it. Suffice to say that Ishiguro writes of a time and place that could be in the past or the present or the future, of people who live in England but could be living anywhere, with the same concerns and interests of people everywhere. This is not accidental, as he has stated, “I am a writer who wishes to write international novels. What is an ‘international’ novel? I believe it to be one, quite simply, that contains a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world.”

It’s this universality that I found most interesting as I read what could be considered a dystopian novel. There is nothing strange about this world Ishiguro creates — it is all too familiar. The emotions his characters feel are things we’ve felt too. And yet Never Let Me Go deals with a society that has decided collectively to use certain people for the benefit of others in a chilling and inhumane way.

Which makes it sound like horror or science fiction, which it isn’t. Just as it is unreal and yet ordinary and recognizable, it is scary without being creepy. Evocative, yes, maudlin, no. Hard to describe? Yes. A very good read, thoughtful and thought provoking. It made me want to discuss it with someone.

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