The Buried Giant, My Favorite Ishiguro

a resurrected review

I have no recollection, at all, of writing this piece, though I wrote it less than five years ago. Nor do I remember how it came to be, which I have pieced together from old emails - I was encouraged to write for the NYT Magazine’s “Letters of Note” feature, I pitched this, they complained that there was no news hook, I was urged to submit it to the LA Review of Books, they (quite rudely) told me it was too short, and I gave up. Into the maw of my Dropbox it went, along with hundreds of other pieces I wrote and never published. Then people were talking about hoping it might become a book club selection, something fired in my brain, and I looked, and there it was. And I thought, such a shame it never saw the light of day. So here it is.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize announcement comes at something of a peculiar time. Ishiguro’s reputation has long since been secured, and few would see his selection as some sort of a shock. He would certainly appear on many lists of the best contemporary novelists, and his books The Remains of the Day and Never Let You Go enjoy the kind of career tentpole reputations on which such awards are made. Yet his last book, The Buried Giant, does not enjoy anything like the reputation of those books, and in an odd way its recent muted release and limited fanfare colors the Nobel announcement.

It's hard to imagine a new novel by an author as celebrated as Ishiguro slipping through the cracks, but that’s precisely what happened with the 2015 publication of The Buried Giant. The book, a story set in Britain’s distant past, was released to little fanfare, with reviewers mostly calling it a noble failure, if not out-and-out bad. It won no major awards and appeared on few year-end best lists. A couple years later, it stands little remembered and less loved. Halfway through reading it, I understood the reaction, convinced the novel was a mess.

By the time I was finished, I was certain it was a masterpiece.

Though it ostensibly belongs to the fantasy genre, and is the story of an epic journey, The Buried Giant shares little of the tenor of similar books. There's nothing of the jauntiness or carefree wandering that's typical of those. The book takes place in a fog, both literal and metaphorical – a fog of memory, one which robs the characters of their past but protects them from the consequences of history… for a time.

The two main characters, the elderly Axl and Beatrice, look for a son they can't remember in a country they barely recall. Finding themselves gripped by a longing for someone they loved without really knowing why, they set out from home, two old lovers wandering a dangerous world together in pursuit of their own memories. Their Britain is an uneasy place, where the Britons and Saxons have reached uneasy piece after years of bloodshed. Along the way, they meet one of Arthur's knights, ancient and rusty, and a younger warrior who offers them friendship and whose existence, in the long run, means death. The book is about histories, both intimate and grand, and its message is disquieting and true, its central concern a brutal genocide that has been rendered to us antiseptic and unremarkable by centuries of history. And so, Ishiguro suggests, will holocausts of more recent vintage, thanks to the inevitable anesthesia of the passage of time.

It’s perhaps useful to contrast The Buried Giant with Ishiguro’s previous book, 2011’s Never Let You Go. That book received the kind of plaudits and awards that its successor never has, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It remains a fan favorite. In large measure, Never Let You Go was beloved because it was written to be loved. At 288 pages, it was tight and focused where The Buried Giant is sprawling and meandering at 358. Its themes are direct and uncomplicated where The Buried Giant’s are diffuse and unsettled. Never Let Me Go’s plot maps easily onto predigested contemporary political issues, a surefire way to make readers (and critics) feel clever and sophisticated; The Buried Giant is after far less obvious game. Never Let You Go was adapted into a movie starring some of the most telegenic young actors you can imagine. The protagonists of the Buried Giant look, talk, and act like grandparents.

Never Let You Go, in other words, is a book that put out its lips to be kissed, and was celebrated by critics who always celebrate such work. The Buried Giant most certainly is not, and so wasn’t.

That is not intended as a shot at the earlier novel, which I love myself. But it demonstrates the kind of risks that an established author like Ishiguro takes when he endeavors to produce a novel that is stingy with its pleasures, which in The Buried Giant are abundant but subtle, often deliberately withheld, and excavated only with effort. The book asks its readers, like its protagonists, to go on a journey of unclear destination and with no promise of happiness at its end. For long portions of the book, many of its elements seemed to be coming to nothing, and for a while on my first reading I was afraid that I had invested myself in a jumbled mess. But Ishiguro is spinning a very long thread, and those who have the patience to follow it to its ends will be rewarded.

The story Ishiguro tells isn't some intricate thriller with an elaborate twist; the plot isn't a complex setup designed to arrive at some surprising conclusion with well-machined precision. And yet I can't remember the last time the work a book did early on paid off more effectively. There is no twist, only the tragic logic of revenge, which is excavated throughout the text like a patient in therapy slowly discovering what she has long suppressed. As in the best of these things, by the time you come to the finish, it seems as inevitable as death. Everything within the book is earned, and the central relationship, and its impenetrable sadness, are worth earning.

It’s that relationship between Axl and Beatrice, a loving and impossibly sad portrayal of aging and loss, that ties it all together. The book follows them in their improbable adventures, as they make their way through a world with nothing but each other for support, a journey that must end in the way all journeys will eventually end for everyone. As much as the flow of history and the weight of the past, that is Ishiguro’s interest, the final separation that awaits all of us. He explores it with uncanny grace. The Buried Giant is a masterpiece, Ishiguro’s best.