The Buried Giant

Kazou Ishiguro

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, April 25th 2015

Kazuo Ishiguro has always felt free to borrow from whatever genre he thinks most fitting for the ideas he wishes to explore and his latest novel, The Buried Giant, combines history, fantasy and myth into an extended allegory that defies easy categorisation; an interesting experiment, albeit one that didn’t quite work for me.

The story is set in a crumbling, post-Arthurian England in which creatures such as ogres, pixies are giants are regarded in the same light as the other hardships of daily life and where Britons and Saxons live side-by side, all animosities lost in a mist of forgetfulness that erases the memory of all but the present moment.

At the heart of the novel are an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, whose journey to visit their son in a nearby village is interrupted by a series of encounters that take them far from their original path and test the very foundations of their relationship. These begin when the travellers shelter from a storm in the company of an elderly widow and a boatman whom she accuses of deliberately separating her from her husband. According to widow, he promised to carry both of them across a lake to a beautiful island just off the shore, only to take her husband and leave her stranded and alone on the mainland. The boatman explains that only in very rare cases can he take couples together, and that they must first demonstrate the strength of their love for each other.

This greatly troubles Beatrice, who fears that because she and Axl cannot recall any of their most precious moments of marriage, they would fail such a test. So she is delighted to learn that it is the breath of the she-dragon Quereg that is robbing the land of memory, for on their travels the couple have been joined not one but two knights on a quest to slay this monster; the elderly Sir Gawain whose decades-long search represents his final duty to the late King, and the Saxon warrior, Wistan, who has been charged by his own Lord with the same mission. But it becomes increasingly apparent that the two act with quite different motivations and towards distinct ends. Meanwhile Beatrice’s hope becomes tinged with fear that the secrets revealed by the lifting of the mist will condemn them in the Boatman’s eyes.

As Margaret Atwood has pointed out, none of Ishiguro’s novels are about what they pretend to be about, and although the arc of Axl and Beatrice’s story is obvious from the beginning, there are a number of other philosophical interpretations that can be layered over it, including the way societies attempt to rewrite history in order to omit ugly or shameful details, ethical questions about ends-means justification (is it is better to do the right thing for the wrong reasons or the wrong thing for the right ones), and whether a relationship built on forgetting is more or less genuine than one built on forgiveness.

As interesting as these questions are, I was unable to engage with these broader themes it is a novel that has divided critics; Ishiguro has voiced his concerns that readers will be prejudiced against its surface elements rather than understand what he is trying to do (a remark that earned a scathing response from Ursula Le Guin), but for me the stumbling block was not the story’s excursions into fantasy but my inability to get past the constant foreshadowing with which it is suffused. Ultimately The Buried Giant left me feeling as shrouded in grayness as the characters themselves.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/experiment-doesnt-quite-work