What lies within

Kazuo Ishiguro, alongside Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, is part of a celebrated cohort of English male novelists that represents the zenith of a bygone age (though they are all still healthy and at their desks). We will not see their like again. The economics of publishing has been too radically transformed by the internet, by Amazon, and self-publishing, and the literary novel no longer occupies so central a place in contemporary culture as to excite either tabloid prurience or broadsheet chin-stroking.

In keeping with the milieu, if not the subject, of The Buried Giant , Ishiguro’s new novel, his first in 10 years, it is as if Ishiguro, Rushdie et al were the knights of some literary roundtable jousting for literary prizes, bestsellers, eye-watering advances, and column inches. Every so often, their chainmail still burnished, mounted on their high horses, these authors continue to command our attention and admiration. But the fanfare for their books gets a little less loud each time, and the notices get a little more bold, a little more disrespectful.

The Buried Giant has so far received mixed reviews and Ishiguro has been embroiled in a spurious controversy over some mild comments made in an interview about how his readers might react to a novel filled with ogres, pixies and dragons. The writer Ursula Le Guin took exception to his supposed diss of the ‘fantasy’ genre, exception which she later acknowledged as hasty and clumsy, though she did not take it back. “I found reading the book painful,” she had written.

What Ishiguro described as the ‘surface elements’ of the novel — the circa sixth century post-Arthurian setting, the aforementioned ogres — has exercised most reviewers, with many agreeing with Le Guin that Ishiguro’s treatment of his setting is rudimentary, not fully imagined. Ishiguro’s concern though, in each of his seven novels, is not with the details of mise en scene or even of language, but with his abstract themes, the abiding questions which catalyse his writing.

This is not to say his choice of setting is arbitrary, that The Remains of the Day , for instance, could just as easily have been set in Los Angeles in the 1990s instead of a great English country house in the years before World War II, or that he does not labour to create a prose specific to each novel. Only that these disparate settings and styles — the writer Neil Gaiman in his lukewarm review of The Buried Giant praised Ishiguro for not writing “the same novel, or even the same type of novel, twice” — are not the point. For if, as Gaiman would have it, Ishiguro ranges widely in his choice of genre and setting, country house novel, say, or detective novel, or science-fiction novel, he is preoccupied by a much narrower range of themes. Overlapping ideas are examined and re-examined in his novels, a theme turned over for a new angle, a new facet.

Memory is chief among Ishiguro’s concerns. And what is left unsaid or is unsayable. Can we confront the collapse of our hopes, our ideals? Can we confront our failures? Or must we turn to silence as both balm and penance?

In The Buried Giant , we are introduced to an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, Britons living out their old age in a dark, dank, barely hospitable ‘village’, a warren carved into a hillside. Their memories cloudy, not as you might surmise from old age, but from a more general malaise that affects the whole village and others further afield. They decide to travel to their son’s village, though they are not quite sure where this village is or if he will be there to greet them. They are convinced though of the desirability of a reunion. Along the way, they pass a Saxon village roiled and made fearful by ogres who have killed men and kidnapped a boy. These Saxon villagers are also suffering from what Beatrice calls “the mist”, the strange forgetfulness that leaves people not entirely sure of their histories, of what they might have said or done, and subsequently who they are beyond the immediate present.

Axl and Beatrice then set off for a monastery in the mountains where she hopes to find answers to her questions about both the mist and a slight but nagging pain in her side. The Saxon warrior is on a quest to slay the she-dragon Querig, a quest which brings him into conflict with Sir Gawain, a nephew of King Arthur and one of the finest knights of the legendary round table. Arthur is long dead, though his legacy is evident in Saxons and Britons living together in peace, and Gawain has aged, his armour rusting and his warhorse equally old and tetchy. He is literally a Quixotic figure, a relic of a chivalric age who has become parody and farce. It is the dragon whose breath is the cause of the mist and so the quest to slay her, which involves the novel’s protagonists and small cast of characters is a quest to retrieve not just individual memories but a collective memory.

What lies does a society tell itself, the novel asks. What does a society choose to forget? Are there some things it is necessary for a society to forget in order to keep the peace? Can peace only result from a monumental act of violence deliberately repressed? And how, despite the damage we do to each other as a couple, do we continue to love?

The Buried Giant has its longueurs. (Which novel doesn’t?) And even if it offers ambiguities and elusive allegory and metaphor in place of answers, it would be a poor reader who could not see the present-day implications of its questions about violence, memory, and revenge, and our individual capacity for love.

(Shougat Dasgupta is a Delhi-based freelance writer)

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