The setting is Britain around 450AD, long after the Romans have departed. The Buried Giant is, quite weirdly, a late, great addition to Arthurian literature. Throughout his career, Ishiguro has taken familiar genres, such as the butler comedy or the detective story, and turned them to his own ends. The result is a book that is perfection in its own terms.
Ishiguro admitted that he had in effect written the same novel three times, getting closer and closer to what he wanted to say. It won the Booker prize and was turned into a successful film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, winning eight Oscar nominations. The Remains of the Day is wonderfully funny and sad at the same time, “both beautiful and cruel”, as Salman Rushdie said.
Stevens’s misplaced dedication has cost him his own chance of love and fulfilment, a realisation he comes to all too late. Set this time wholly in Britain in the 1950s, Stevens the butler, a believer in the elusive concept of “dignity”, recalls his life of service to a man who was, we come to realize, a Nazi sympathizer. Both novels had developed his vision of people looking back on their lives in puzzlement and regret, leaving much to the reader to interpret.īoth are fine books, the second improving on the first, but it is his third take on much the same theme that remains the definitive entry point to his work: The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro’s first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, had both directly addressed his lost Japanese background – he came to Britain with his family when he was five and did not visit Japan again for nearly 30 years, by which time he was a celebrated author.
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