The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber & Faber, £20)
The literary novel isn’t dead—it’s just been turned into a zombie. You can find these zombie novels in the few remaining bookshops, wandering around and muttering in blog-style realist prose. We hear scattered phrases—something about how our narrator wanted the green socks but they are not washed so they must have the blue socks instead—but we hear no more, we have run away screaming. Virginia Woolf tried to dispatch the evangelical realists 100 years ago but they have regrouped. This time they tell us that fantasy is roughly akin to lying, and instead we must all concern ourselves with “reality”—apparently comprised of socks, metropolitan bohemia and relationship dilemmas.
But do not fear. Someone has dared to write an idiosyncratic novel that is also blissfully fantastical. Furthermore he is a novelist of unparalleled distinction: Kazuo Ishiguro.
Ishiguro has always maintained a complex relationship to reality, by which I mean the reality of which realist novelists are so confident. In The Remains of the Day (1989), he portrayed a butler transfixed by social conventions who refuses to acknowledge the Nazi affiliations of his former employer. In The Unconsoled (1995), Ishiguro exiles his narrator, Ryder, to an unspecified European city—more psychic hinterland than topographical realm—where characters vanish abruptly and every dream-like sequence is unfathomable. Though the novel has been described as “surreal” and “absurdist,” it can also be read as a portrait of the unstoppable weirdness of life, and the way people do disappear, mid-conversation, and are taken away from us by death—and how, in the end, we must all disappear ourselves. Similarly, Ishiguro’s previous novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), is set in a parallel version of Britain in which cloned schoolchildren are harvested for their organs. It is often discussed in terms of the “probability” of its science-fiction motif. Yet there is nothing sci-fi about the idea of children being coaxed through their school years, encouraged to develop their talents and raise their expectations, when in the end they must succumb to mortality. If you discuss futility, or transience, as sci-fi propositions, then your readers can consider them without being demoralised entirely. But mortality is still real, alas, even if we approach it by way of fantasy.
Ishiguro’s new novel, The Buried Giant, might seem like a departure from his previous work. It is set in a mythical version of early Britain and its characters—Arthur, Merlin, the dragon, the giant—are legendary archetypes. Yet it is centrally concerned, once again, with the ineluctable strangeness of mortality, and the illusions we adopt in order not to become desperate or insane. The central characters, Axl and Beatrice, are an elderly couple, first seen on a bleak hillside after the departure of the Romans: “You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland… Icy fogs hung over rivers and marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land.”
Their home is a shelter dug deep into the cold ground called a “warren.” It is as if Ishiguro is mischievously urging us to forge an abrupt analogy with The Hobbit. This fairytale land is under a spell. No one can remember anything. The past is “rarely discussed” and has somehow “faded into a mist as dense as that which hung over the marshes.” The villagers fear demons and ogres; there are figures stalking the plains, speaking in gnomic riddles. Axl feels a “familiar nagging sense that something was not right.” He cannot distinguish between what he has experienced and what he has dreamed; he is plagued by unanswered questions. “Had they always lived like this, just the two of them, at the periphery of the community? Or had things once been quite different? Earlier, outside, some fragments of a remembrance had come back to him: a small moment when he was walking down the long central corridor of his warren, his arm around one of his own children… Perhaps these were just an elderly fool’s imaginings.”
One morning a “strange woman” arrives, with “hair down her back and a cloak of black rags.” Though the rest of the villagers are too afraid to approach her, Beatrice offers her food, and in return this sage-witch tells Beatrice that her long-lost son “awaits her in his village.” Afflicted by forgetfulness, Axl and Beatrice have not thought of their son for years; it was as if a veil had “fallen over his memory.” With the lifting of this veil, their tranquility is shattered, and they can no longer stay at home. They embark on a quest—“with walking sticks and bundles on their backs”—in search of their son.
In his previous works, Ishiguro adapted the detective mystery trail (in The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans) and the myth of the modernist flâneur (in The Unconsoled). In The Buried Giant he cites and embellishes the heroic quest. This is what the US scholar Joseph Campbell called the “monomyth”—a metaphor for the journey of each individual, from the moment when we must leave the confines of our community, our family and embark on the ritual trials of adulthood. It appears in the ancient Egyptian funerary text the Amduat—where the soul of the dead must travel through the swamps and deserts of the afterlife. It recurs in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Inanna in the Underworld, the Odyssey, the trials of Hercules, Theseus, Buddha, Jesus in the wilderness and the quests of the Grail Knights. It is invoked, with irony, in 20th-century modernist novels—James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Saul Bellow’s Herzog.
The heroic quest has traditionally failed to contend with the trials of domestic continuity—how you might wake up with the same person beside you, year after year, and how they might be your companion or a hydra-headed monster you must defeat in order to survive. (Or both in one morning.) Ishiguro’s ingenious idea is to convert the solitary questing hero into an elderly married couple. As they struggle across the misty plains, Axl and Beatrice encounter warriors, knights, magical women, abandoned children and, eventually, a dragon called Querig, who turns out to be responsible for the mist and the spell of forgetting. They also encounter each other, naturally—they quarrel, become reconciled, fall in and out of love.
Almost everyone is on a quest. Sir Gawain even makes an appearance—formerly a knight of King Arthur, now past his prime, his armour is “frayed and rusted,” his face “kindly and creased; above it, several long strands of snowy hair fluttered from an otherwise bald head.” There is Wistan, a young warrior, who must slay the dragon and disperse the mist, and Edwin, his mascot-companion. Gawain tumbles into reveries, spoken at times to his horse, and there are eerie interludes, in which the parameters between life and death are elided. Apart from Wistan and Edwin, most of the central characters are old and weary. An ogre lies paralysed in a ditch. Even the dragon is fairly knackered.
If you remember almost nothing, how can you know yourself, or those you love? At one point, Beatrice cries out to Axl: “Don’t forget me... don’t leave me here. Don’t forget me.” They struggle to interpret the hallucinatory landscape through which they pass; they forget the names of commonplace objects. (In the Amduat one of the central challenges of the quest is to know and speak the names of things.) Yet they cannot berate each other for past failings because they cannot remember anything clearly enough to form definitive opinions. Their grail quest, therefore, is ambivalent; they do not entirely desire what they seek. The presence of the dragon’s forgetfulness-inducing mist may be a boon, Axl realises, as he entreats Beatrice: “Should Querig really die and the mist begin to clear. Should memories return, and among them of times I disappointed you... Promise, princess, you’ll not forget what you feel… for me at this moment.” As the spell recedes, Beatrice is tormented by images of dead children, and Axl begins to experience disturbing flashbacks to his dubious past. With knowledge comes pain, and the final revelation is brutal and intensely sad.
Ishiguro understands that the truths of human existence do not lie in facts and protocols, but in the febrile alterity of consciousness, the journey of a single life. If you (hypothetically) enter the mind of another individual, then almost anything can occur, and though it may seem preposterous to you or me, it will be real to the experiencing self. Fixed notions of reality are thereby meaningless. By setting his novel in an identifiably unreal place, Ishiguro frees himself from any obligation to be “convincing”; that is, to conform to the edicts of contemporary realism. In the age-old manner of the heroic quest, Ishiguro’s knights, dragons, witches and coiling mists become aspects of the human psyche—inner demons, that we must overcome. He turns again and again to the dilemmas of transience—how to endure the knowledge that everything must end, how to live within the finite moment.
The quest has always operated at this level, as psychodrama and rite of passage; the battles with successive foes are, equally, struggles with the self. This is why the story may always be reprised. “The latest incarnation of Oedipus,” wrote Joseph Campbell, is “on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.” Ishiguro has taken a significant risk, and I can imagine a less established author being dissuaded from such an endeavour. The style is elegant, sparse, non-archaic and, as with Ishiguro’s other works, it accumulates as you progress, until you are mesmerised by the agony of his characters. It is a bold, sorrowful, brilliant and unyielding book. The journey might be imaginary, yet it is existentially real, and that is its great beauty and strength.
The literary novel isn’t dead—it’s just been turned into a zombie. You can find these zombie novels in the few remaining bookshops, wandering around and muttering in blog-style realist prose. We hear scattered phrases—something about how our narrator wanted the green socks but they are not washed so they must have the blue socks instead—but we hear no more, we have run away screaming. Virginia Woolf tried to dispatch the evangelical realists 100 years ago but they have regrouped. This time they tell us that fantasy is roughly akin to lying, and instead we must all concern ourselves with “reality”—apparently comprised of socks, metropolitan bohemia and relationship dilemmas.
But do not fear. Someone has dared to write an idiosyncratic novel that is also blissfully fantastical. Furthermore he is a novelist of unparalleled distinction: Kazuo Ishiguro.
Ishiguro has always maintained a complex relationship to reality, by which I mean the reality of which realist novelists are so confident. In The Remains of the Day (1989), he portrayed a butler transfixed by social conventions who refuses to acknowledge the Nazi affiliations of his former employer. In The Unconsoled (1995), Ishiguro exiles his narrator, Ryder, to an unspecified European city—more psychic hinterland than topographical realm—where characters vanish abruptly and every dream-like sequence is unfathomable. Though the novel has been described as “surreal” and “absurdist,” it can also be read as a portrait of the unstoppable weirdness of life, and the way people do disappear, mid-conversation, and are taken away from us by death—and how, in the end, we must all disappear ourselves. Similarly, Ishiguro’s previous novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), is set in a parallel version of Britain in which cloned schoolchildren are harvested for their organs. It is often discussed in terms of the “probability” of its science-fiction motif. Yet there is nothing sci-fi about the idea of children being coaxed through their school years, encouraged to develop their talents and raise their expectations, when in the end they must succumb to mortality. If you discuss futility, or transience, as sci-fi propositions, then your readers can consider them without being demoralised entirely. But mortality is still real, alas, even if we approach it by way of fantasy.
Ishiguro’s new novel, The Buried Giant, might seem like a departure from his previous work. It is set in a mythical version of early Britain and its characters—Arthur, Merlin, the dragon, the giant—are legendary archetypes. Yet it is centrally concerned, once again, with the ineluctable strangeness of mortality, and the illusions we adopt in order not to become desperate or insane. The central characters, Axl and Beatrice, are an elderly couple, first seen on a bleak hillside after the departure of the Romans: “You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland… Icy fogs hung over rivers and marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land.”
Their home is a shelter dug deep into the cold ground called a “warren.” It is as if Ishiguro is mischievously urging us to forge an abrupt analogy with The Hobbit. This fairytale land is under a spell. No one can remember anything. The past is “rarely discussed” and has somehow “faded into a mist as dense as that which hung over the marshes.” The villagers fear demons and ogres; there are figures stalking the plains, speaking in gnomic riddles. Axl feels a “familiar nagging sense that something was not right.” He cannot distinguish between what he has experienced and what he has dreamed; he is plagued by unanswered questions. “Had they always lived like this, just the two of them, at the periphery of the community? Or had things once been quite different? Earlier, outside, some fragments of a remembrance had come back to him: a small moment when he was walking down the long central corridor of his warren, his arm around one of his own children… Perhaps these were just an elderly fool’s imaginings.”
One morning a “strange woman” arrives, with “hair down her back and a cloak of black rags.” Though the rest of the villagers are too afraid to approach her, Beatrice offers her food, and in return this sage-witch tells Beatrice that her long-lost son “awaits her in his village.” Afflicted by forgetfulness, Axl and Beatrice have not thought of their son for years; it was as if a veil had “fallen over his memory.” With the lifting of this veil, their tranquility is shattered, and they can no longer stay at home. They embark on a quest—“with walking sticks and bundles on their backs”—in search of their son.
In his previous works, Ishiguro adapted the detective mystery trail (in The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans) and the myth of the modernist flâneur (in The Unconsoled). In The Buried Giant he cites and embellishes the heroic quest. This is what the US scholar Joseph Campbell called the “monomyth”—a metaphor for the journey of each individual, from the moment when we must leave the confines of our community, our family and embark on the ritual trials of adulthood. It appears in the ancient Egyptian funerary text the Amduat—where the soul of the dead must travel through the swamps and deserts of the afterlife. It recurs in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the story of Inanna in the Underworld, the Odyssey, the trials of Hercules, Theseus, Buddha, Jesus in the wilderness and the quests of the Grail Knights. It is invoked, with irony, in 20th-century modernist novels—James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, Saul Bellow’s Herzog.
The heroic quest has traditionally failed to contend with the trials of domestic continuity—how you might wake up with the same person beside you, year after year, and how they might be your companion or a hydra-headed monster you must defeat in order to survive. (Or both in one morning.) Ishiguro’s ingenious idea is to convert the solitary questing hero into an elderly married couple. As they struggle across the misty plains, Axl and Beatrice encounter warriors, knights, magical women, abandoned children and, eventually, a dragon called Querig, who turns out to be responsible for the mist and the spell of forgetting. They also encounter each other, naturally—they quarrel, become reconciled, fall in and out of love.
Almost everyone is on a quest. Sir Gawain even makes an appearance—formerly a knight of King Arthur, now past his prime, his armour is “frayed and rusted,” his face “kindly and creased; above it, several long strands of snowy hair fluttered from an otherwise bald head.” There is Wistan, a young warrior, who must slay the dragon and disperse the mist, and Edwin, his mascot-companion. Gawain tumbles into reveries, spoken at times to his horse, and there are eerie interludes, in which the parameters between life and death are elided. Apart from Wistan and Edwin, most of the central characters are old and weary. An ogre lies paralysed in a ditch. Even the dragon is fairly knackered.
If you remember almost nothing, how can you know yourself, or those you love? At one point, Beatrice cries out to Axl: “Don’t forget me... don’t leave me here. Don’t forget me.” They struggle to interpret the hallucinatory landscape through which they pass; they forget the names of commonplace objects. (In the Amduat one of the central challenges of the quest is to know and speak the names of things.) Yet they cannot berate each other for past failings because they cannot remember anything clearly enough to form definitive opinions. Their grail quest, therefore, is ambivalent; they do not entirely desire what they seek. The presence of the dragon’s forgetfulness-inducing mist may be a boon, Axl realises, as he entreats Beatrice: “Should Querig really die and the mist begin to clear. Should memories return, and among them of times I disappointed you... Promise, princess, you’ll not forget what you feel… for me at this moment.” As the spell recedes, Beatrice is tormented by images of dead children, and Axl begins to experience disturbing flashbacks to his dubious past. With knowledge comes pain, and the final revelation is brutal and intensely sad.
Ishiguro understands that the truths of human existence do not lie in facts and protocols, but in the febrile alterity of consciousness, the journey of a single life. If you (hypothetically) enter the mind of another individual, then almost anything can occur, and though it may seem preposterous to you or me, it will be real to the experiencing self. Fixed notions of reality are thereby meaningless. By setting his novel in an identifiably unreal place, Ishiguro frees himself from any obligation to be “convincing”; that is, to conform to the edicts of contemporary realism. In the age-old manner of the heroic quest, Ishiguro’s knights, dragons, witches and coiling mists become aspects of the human psyche—inner demons, that we must overcome. He turns again and again to the dilemmas of transience—how to endure the knowledge that everything must end, how to live within the finite moment.
The quest has always operated at this level, as psychodrama and rite of passage; the battles with successive foes are, equally, struggles with the self. This is why the story may always be reprised. “The latest incarnation of Oedipus,” wrote Joseph Campbell, is “on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.” Ishiguro has taken a significant risk, and I can imagine a less established author being dissuaded from such an endeavour. The style is elegant, sparse, non-archaic and, as with Ishiguro’s other works, it accumulates as you progress, until you are mesmerised by the agony of his characters. It is a bold, sorrowful, brilliant and unyielding book. The journey might be imaginary, yet it is existentially real, and that is its great beauty and strength.
