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Summary
Summary
From the author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day
The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But, at least, the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son they have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards--some strange and otherworldly--but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they foresee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight--each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, but drawn inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life's memories.
Sometimes savage, sometimes mysterious, always intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade tells a luminous story about the act of forgetting and the power of memory, a resonant tale of love, vengeance, and war.
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan on November 8, 1954. In 1960, his family moved to England. He received a bachelor's degree in English and philosophy from the University of Kent in 1978 and a master's degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.
His first novel, A Pale View of Hills, received the Winifred Holtby Award from the Royal Society of Literature. His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1986. His third novel, The Remains of the Day, received the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. His other works include The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, and The Buried Giant. He was awarded the OBE in 1995 for services to literature and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1998. He received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. He has also written several songs for jazz singer Stacey Kent and screenplays for both film and television.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
New York Review of Books Review
FANTASY IS A TOOL of the storyteller. It is a way of talking about things that are not, and cannot be, literally true. It is a way of making our metaphors concrete, and it shades into myth in one direction, allegory in another. Once, many years ago, a French translator decided that my novel "Stardust" was an allegory, based on and around John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" (it wasn't), and somewhat loosely translated the book with footnotes to that effect. This has left me a little shy of talking about allegory, and very shy of ever mentioning "The Pilgrim's Progress." Kazuo Ishiguro is a remarkable novelist, both for the quality of his work - because his novels share a careful, precise approach to language and to character - and because he does not ever write the same novel, or even the same type of novel, twice. In "The Buried Giant," his seventh and latest, he begins with clear, unhurried, unfussy language to describe the England of some 1,500 years ago, in a novel as well crafted as it is odd. Some of the oddness comes from the medieval terrain: This is a novel about an elderly couple going from one village to the next, set in a semi-historical England of the sixth or perhaps seventh century, in which the Britons and the Saxons have been at bloody war. The Britons have been driven west and the Saxons control the east of England, but Saxons and Britons live side by side in a post-Arthurian twilight, in a mythical time of ogres, sprites and dragons - most of all the dragon Querig, who dominates the second half of the book, in which one character needs to kill her as badly as another needs to keep her alive. Other oddities come from the characters, many of whom navigate their way through the story as if asleep and uncertain whether they will like what they find if they wake up. The elderly couple are Axl and Beatrice - "Perhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them" - who start out living in a hill-warren village, ill treated by their fellow Britons. Axl and Beatrice love each other deeply and care for each other as best they can. Beatrice has a malady, a pain in her side she insists is nothing serious, for which she seeks a cure. They have reached the age when their memories have become unreliable, when names, faces and even events slip away. But the problems with memory and event are not just theirs; all the people in their community, and even those in neighboring villages, Briton and Saxon, appear to be having the same difficulties. There is a mist that takes memories: good memories and bad, lost children, old rancors and wounds. And memories are valuable. They make us who we are. As Beatrice says: "If that's how you've remembered it, Axl, let it be the way it was. With this mist upon us, any memory's a precious thing and we'd best hold tight to it." Out of the fog of memory, Beatrice recollects that they have a grown son they've been neglecting in a nearby village, and that they need to see him. The couple set off on their journey, and soon encounter Wistan (a Saxon warrior whose first appearance immediately puts us in mind of Beowulf), who has rescued a boy stolen by ogres. Seeing Wistan, Axl begins to remember his own past, as someone who was, perhaps, also, in his day, a soldier of some kind. The rescued boy, Edwin, bitten by a monster, is in danger in his Saxon settlement, and the boy and the warrior join the elderly couple on their journey to the son's village. The four travelers meet Sir Gawain, the dead King Arthur's nephew, now an ancient knight in rusted mail armor. He has a mission, a past and secrets, just as Wistan has a mission, a past and secrets, and the two men may find themselves at odds. The travelers visit a monastery with its own secrets and dangers, they survive its perils, and discover at last the source of the mist of forgetfulness that covers the land. "The Buried Giant" is a melancholy book, and the mist that breathes through it is a melancholic mist. The narrative tone is dreamlike and measured. There are adventures, sword fights, betrayals, armies, cunning stratagems and monsters killed, but these things are told distantly, without the book's pulse ever beating faster. They are described unflinchingly, precisely, sometimes poetically. Enemies are slain, but the deaths are never triumphant. A culmination of a planned trap for a troop of soldiers, worthy of a whodunit, is described in retrospect, once we already know what must have happened. Stories drift toward us in the narrative like figures in the mist, and then are gone. The excitements that the book would deliver were this a more formulaic or crowd-pleasing novel are, here, when they appear, not exciting, perhaps because they would be young people's adventures, and this is, at its heart, a book about two people who are now past all adventure. Axl and Beatrice, gentle and caring and kind, wish only to survive, to reach their son, to be together. They need to remember their past, but they are afraid of what those memories might bring them. At the heart of the novel is a philosophical conundrum, expressed first by an old woman whose husband has gone on before her, crossing the bar, as it were, to a mystical island to which she has not been allowed. (Were this an overt allegory like, say, "The Pilgrim's Progress," the river might be identified as the River of Death.) Only those couples who can prove to the boatman that their love is perfect and true, without bitterness or jealousy or shame, can cross the water together, in the same boat, to the island. "She went on speaking, about how this land had become cursed with a mist of forgetfulness," Beatrice tells us of this woman. "And then she asked me: 'How will you and your husband prove your love for each other when you can't remember the past you've shared?' And I've been thinking about it ever since. Sometimes I think of it and it makes me so afraid." Not until the final chapter does Ishiguro unravel the mysteries and resolve the riddles: Who, really, are Axl and Beatrice? What has happened to their son? Where are they going? And, if they truly remember who they are, will they still be able to love each other in the same way? Fantasy and historical fiction and myth here run together with the Matter of Britain, in a novel that's easy to admire, to respect and to enjoy, but difficult to love. Still, "The Buried Giant" does what important books do : It remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to turn it over and over. On a second reading, and on a third, its characters and events and motives are easier to understand, but even so, it guards its secrets and its world close. Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle huge, personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic as the tools to do it. "The Buried Giant" is an exceptional novel, and I suspect my inability to fall in love with it, much as I wanted to, came from my conviction that there was an allegory waiting like an ogre in the mist, telling us that no matter how well we love, no matter how deeply, we will always be fallible and human, and that for every couple who are aging together, one or the other of them - of us - will always have to cross the water, and go on to the island ahead and alone. 'The Buried Giant' is an adventure novel about two people past all adventure. NEIL GAIMAN'S new book is the story collection "Trigger Warning."
Guardian Review
In 1953, JRR Tolkien wrote an essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late medieval poem that features the eponymous nephew of King Arthur undertaking a mysterious quest. He praised it for the deep roots it had in the past - a quality he saw it as sharing with both Beowulf and King Lear: "It is made of tales often told before and elsewhere, and of elements that derive from remote times, beyond the vision or awareness of the poet." The ultimate origins of the poem, as of the entire corpus of Arthurian myth, lay back in the murkiest depths of the dark ages; a time when native Britons and invading Saxons had been fighting over the abandoned Roman province of Britannia. Arthur, the probably fictional war leader who was supposed to have stemmed the Saxon advance, could be located in the period, and enshrined as a great king, precisely because almost nothing was known about it. Only odd fragments of poetry had survived to hint at how natives and immigrants in post-Roman Britain might actually have made sense of the world. It was from these same fragments that Tolkien, committed to restoring to his country the legends he felt had been lost as a result of the Norman conquest, had fashioned The Lord of the Rings The genre of fantasy he thereby founded has been one that novelists of the kind who win the Booker prize tend not to touch with a barge-pole. Literary fiction and dragons rarely go together. This, though, has evidently not deterred Kazuo Ishiguro. For all the constancy of his obsession with themes of memory and loss, he has always delighted in taking his fans by surprise. In When We Were Orphans, he made play with the detective novel; in Never Let Me Go, with science fiction. Now, in The Buried Giant, his first novel for 10 years, he has performed his most startling and audacious adaptation of genre yet. "Icy fogs hung over rivers and marshes," Ishiguro writes in the opening paragraph, "serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land." A dragon is not merely present in the novel, but lies at the very heart of its plot. Nevertheless, the palpable debt Ishiguro owes to the literary tradition established by The Lord of the Rings only makes his adaptation of it stranger and more hallucinatory. The role of Tolkien in The Buried Giant is akin to that of Wodehouse in The Remains of the Day: less a model than a fixed point to be destabilised. Although the first characters we meet live underground, connected "one to another by underground passages and covered corridors", the village is no Hobbiton. Rather than transmute dark-ages Britain into Middle-earth, Ishiguro gives us what is ostensibly a historical novel - and yet the narrator's show of objectivity, garnished as it is with seemingly authoritative allusions to the iron age and Roman roads, is itself a deception. At times, it will speak as though from the present day; at other times, as though from an age in which its audience might well have grown up in roundhouses. Geography and details of history are similarly scrambled - and literary influences too. Sir Gawain appears, roaming through a landscape familiar from the medieval poem about the Green Knight; but in Ishiguro's novel, he has become an old man, Don Quixote-like in battered armour. A warrior who wrestles with ogres and stalks a dragon is recognisably drawn from Beowulf. Echoes of "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" repeatedly sound. "Do these trees ail, even as they shelter us?" In itself, this promiscuous mixing of influences and periods within a fantasy novel is hardly original to Ishiguro. George RR Martin, for instance, has always performed it with particular aplomb, fusing plot lines drawn from the wars of the roses with locations that plainly draw on Hadrian's Wall or the steppes of Genghis Khan. The Buried Giant, though, unlike A Song of Ice and Fire, makes play with the gaps and the seams. They are designed to show. The shimmering of literary influences within Ishiguro's prose is like that of memories within a fading mind: fragments shored against ruin. Yet always, haunting the novel, lurks the possibility that the memories themselves may be false. The Buried Giant cannot help but exist in the shadow of the near-total oblivion that has claimed the period Ishiguro is writing about. One character worries that God himself may be afflicted by amnesia - "and if a thing is not in God's mind, then what chance of it remaining in those of mortal men?" Ishiguro is less certain than Tolkien that what has been forgotten can be redeemed. Nor does he entirely regret this. In The Buried Giant, tendrils of mist curl around villages in which Britons and Saxons live at peace, forgetful of the terrible acts of slaughter that had enabled Arthur to establish his realm, and keep the invaders at bay. What, though, if it should prove possible to exhume buried memories? "How," demands a Saxon indignant over the slaughter of his people at the hands of Arthur's knights, "can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly?" We know, of course, what is destined to happen: that the Saxons will indeed recover the memory of the wrongs done to them, and that the Britons will be swept amid carnage and fire from the future England. A grievance forgotten, Ishiguro implies, is an atrocity forestalled. That the relevance of this is not confined to dark-ages Britain hardly needs to be pointed out, of course. Nevertheless, Ishiguro is too subtle and complex a novelist to rest content with such a message. The memory loss that may serve a troubled people as a blessing cannot help but threaten the individual with the dissolution of his or her self. At the heart of The Buried Giant, luminous amid all the dragons and warring knights, is a deeply affecting portrait of marital love, and of how even the most precious memories can end up vulnerable. Axl and Beatrice are an aged couple who, in the grip of the mysterious amnesia that has afflicted the whole of Britain, abruptly decide to visit a son that they had forgotten so much as existed. In the course of their journey, they meet a boatman in the ruins of a Roman villa, whose duty it is to ferry people to an island of the dead. Only if a couple can convince him of their devotion will he allow them to travel together. From that moment on, Axl and Beatrice are haunted by a dread that they would fail such a test, and be separated for ever. "Axl and I wish to have again the happy moments we shared together. To be robbed of them is as if a thief came in the night and took what's most precious from us." If there are rare moments in The Buried Giant when the plot does teeter into pastiche, and the swords and sorcery can seem a tad silly, then these are more than compensated for by a power and a strangeness that are, in the Shakespearean sense of the word, weird. "There's a journey we must go on, and no more delay . . ." It is surely no coincidence that these words of Beatrice to her husband, displayed prominently on the book's jacket, should echo the haunting final lines of Kent in King Lear: "I have a journey, sir, shortly to go. / My master calls me; I must not say no." Old age and memory loss, suffering, love and war: what Shakespeare explored in the eerie setting of pre-Roman Britain, Ishiguro explores in the context of a period of history barely less mysterious. For all the deconstruction The Buried Giant performs on its manifold sources and inspirations, the ultimate measure of Ishiguro's achievement is that his novel is more than worthy to take its place alongside them. The quest undertaken by Axl and Beatrice is not merely a search for their son, but one that follows in the footsteps of Sir Gawain, and Tennyson's King Arthur, and Frodo. The novel's parting assurance is affecting precisely because it is so hard-won: "But God will know the slow tread of an old couple's love for each other, and understand how bleak shadows make part of its whole." Tom Holland's In the Shadow of the Sword is published by Abacus. 352pp, Faber, pounds 20 To order The Buried Giant for pounds 15 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. - Tom Holland Caption: Captions: Remains of a dark-age settlement at Tintagel, Cornwall If there are rare moments in The Buried Giant when the plot does teeter into pastiche, and the swords and sorcery can seem a tad silly, then these are more than compensated for by a power and a strangeness that are, in the Shakespearean sense of the word, weird. "There's a journey we must go on, and no more delay . . ." It is surely no coincidence that these words of Beatrice to her husband, displayed prominently on the book's jacket, should echo the haunting final lines of Kent in King Lear: "I have a journey, sir, shortly to go. / My master calls me; I must not say no." Old age and memory loss, suffering, love and war: what Shakespeare explored in the eerie setting of pre-Roman Britain, [Kazuo Ishiguro] explores in the context of a period of history barely less mysterious. For all the deconstruction The Buried Giant performs on its manifold sources and inspirations, the ultimate measure of Ishiguro's achievement is that his novel is more than worthy to take its place alongside them. The quest undertaken by [Axl] and Beatrice is not merely a search for their son, but one that follows in the footsteps of Sir Gawain, and Tennyson's King [Arthur], and Frodo. The novel's parting assurance is affecting precisely because it is so hard-won: "But God will know the slow tread of an old couple's love for each other, and understand how bleak shadows make part of its whole." - Tom Holland.
Library Journal Review
Though filled with all the trappings of fantasy, this exquisite tale of barely remembered legends, past wrongs, and relentless change is a multifaceted narrative offering layer after layer of story, metaphor, and reality. The wars between Romans and Britons have come and gone. Despite a perplexing forgetfulness that has fallen upon the land, Axl and Beatrice, an aging Briton couple, are determined to see their son. A Saxon warrior and an orphaned boy join them on their journey. As the group move forward, face new obstacles, and learn more of their history, the pall of forgetfulness is ever so slowly lifted. Ishiguro's (The Remains of the Day) tale is of a quest for understanding, of love and vengeance, of forgiveness and fear, and of truth and the mercy of forgetting. Reader David Horovitch weaves an account so rich and fluid that listeners will be delighted to be drawn into this world. Horovitch is a master of subtle voice variations that differentiate characters while still allowing listeners to draw their own conclusions about motivations. VERDICT An essential purchase for most libraries. Suggest this audiobook not only for lovers of Tolkien but also for sophisticated listeners of any genre. ["This quasi-fantasy falls short as the medium to deliver the author's lofty message," differs the LJ 2/1/15 review of the Knopf hc.]-Lisa Youngblood, Harker Heights P.L., TX © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One 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. Most of the roads left by the Romans would by then have become broken or overgrown, often fading into wilderness. Icy fogs hung over rivers and marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land. The people who lived nearby--one wonders what desperation led them to settle in such gloomy spots--might well have feared these creatures, whose panting breaths could be heard long before their deformed figures emerged from the mist. But such monsters were not cause for astonishment. People then would have regarded them as everyday hazards, and in those days there was so much else to worry about. How to get food out of the hard ground; how not to run out of firewood; how to stop the sickness that could kill a dozen pigs in a single day and produce green rashes on the cheeks of children. In any case, ogres were not so bad provided one did not provoke them. One had to accept that every so often, perhaps following some obscure dispute in their ranks, a creature would come blundering into a village in a terrible rage, and despite shouts and brandishings of weapons, rampage about injuring anyone slow to move out of its path. Or that every so often, an ogre might carry off a child into the mist. The people of the day had to be philosophical about such outrages. In one such area on the edge of a vast bog, in the shadow of some jagged hills, lived an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice. Perhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them. I would say this couple lived an isolated life, but in those days few were "isolated" in any sense we would understand. For warmth and protection, the villagers lived in shelters, many of them dug deep into the hillside, connecting one to the other by underground passages and covered corridors. Our elderly couple lived within one such sprawling warren--"building" would be too grand a word--with roughly sixty other villagers. If you came out of their warren and walked for twenty minutes around the hill, you would have reached the next settlement, and to your eyes, this one would have seemed identical to the first. But to the inhabitants themselves, there would have been many distinguishing details of which they would have been proud or ashamed. I have no wish to give the impression that this was all there was to the Britain of those days; that at a time when magnificent civilisations flourished elsewhere in the world, we were here not much beyond the Iron Age. Had you been able to roam the countryside at will, you might well have discovered castles containing music, fine food, athletic excellence; or monasteries with inhabitants steeped in learning. But there is no getting around it. Even on a strong horse, in good weather, you could have ridden for days without spotting any castle or monastery looming out of the greenery. Mostly you would have found communities like the one I have just described, and unless you had with you gifts of food or clothing, or were ferociously armed, you would not have been sure of a welcome. I am sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time, but there you are. To return to Axl and Beatrice. As I said, this elderly couple lived on the outer fringes of the warren, where their shelter was less protected from the elements and hardly benefited from the fire in the Great Chamber where everyone congregated at night. Perhaps there had been a time when they had lived closer to the fire; a time when they had lived with their children. In fact, it was just such an idea that would drift into Axl's mind as he lay in his bed during the empty hours before dawn, his wife soundly asleep beside him, and then a sense of some unnamed loss would gnaw at his heart, preventing him from returning to sleep. Perhaps that was why, on this particular morning, Axl had abandoned his bed altogether and slipped quietly outside to sit on the old warped bench beside the entrance to the warren in wait for the first signs of daylight. It was spring, but the air still felt bitter, even with Beatrice's cloak, which he had taken on his way out and wrapped around himself. Yet he had become so absorbed in his thoughts that by the time he realised how cold he was, the stars had all but gone, a glow was spreading on the horizon, and the first notes of birdsong were emerging from the dimness. He rose slowly to his feet, regretting having stayed out so long. He was in good health, but it had taken a while to shake off his last fever and he did not wish it to return. Now he could feel the damp in his legs, but as he turned to go back inside, he was well satisfied: for he had this morning succeeded in remembering a number of things that had eluded him for some time. Moreover, he now sensed he was about to come to some momentous decision--one that had been put off far too long--and felt an excitement within him which he was eager to share with his wife. Inside, the passageways of the warren were still in complete darkness, and he was obliged to feel his way the short distance back to the door of his chamber. Many of the "doorways" within the warren were simple archways to mark the threshold to a chamber. The open nature of this arrangement would not have struck the villagers as compromising their privacy, but allowed rooms to benefit from any warmth coming down the corridors from the great fire or the smaller fires permitted within the warren. Axl and Beatrice's room, however, being too far from any fire had something we might recognise as an actual door; a large wooden frame criss-crossed with small branches, vines and thistles which someone going in and out would each time have to lift to one side, but which shut out the chilly draughts. Axl would happily have done without this door, but it had over time become an object of considerable pride to Beatrice. He had often returned to find his wife pulling off withered pieces from the construct and replacing them with fresh cuttings she had gathered during the day. This morning, Axl moved the barrier just enough to let himself in, taking care to make as little noise as possible. Here, the early dawn light was leaking into the room through the small chinks of their outer wall. He could see his hand dimly before him, and on the turf bed, Beatrice's form still sound asleep under the thick blankets. He was tempted to wake his wife. For a part of him felt sure that if, at this moment, she were awake and talking to him, whatever last barriers remained between him and his decision would finally crumble. But it was some time yet until the community roused itself and the day's work began, so he settled himself on the low stool in the corner of the chamber, his wife's cloak still tight around him. He wondered how thick the mist would be that morning, and if, as the dark faded, he would see it had seeped through the cracks right into their chamber. But then his thoughts drifted away from such matters, back to what had been preoccupying him. 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 the warren, his arm around one of his own children, his gait a little crouched not on account of age as it might be now, but simply because he wished to avoid hitting his head on the beams in the murky light. Possibly the child had just been speaking to him, saying something amusing, and they were both of them laughing. But now, as earlier outside, nothing would quite settle in his mind, and the more he concentrated, the fainter the fragments seemed to grow. Perhaps these were just an elderly fool's imaginings. Perhaps it was that God had never given them children. You may wonder why Axl did not turn to his fellow villagers for assistance in recalling the past, but this was not as easy as you might suppose. For in this community the past was rarely discussed. I do not mean that it was taboo. I mean that it had somehow faded into a mist as dense as that which hung over the marshes. It simply did not occur to these villagers to think about the past--even the recent one. To take an instance, one that had bothered Axl for some time: He was sure that not so long ago, there had been in their midst a woman with long red hair--a woman regarded as crucial to their village. Whenever anyone injured themselves or fell sick, it had been this red-haired woman, so skilled at healing, who was immediately sent for. Yet now this same woman was no longer to be found anywhere, and no one seemed to wonder what had occurred, or even to express regret at her absence. When one morning Axl had mentioned the matter to three neighbours while working with them to break up the frosted field, their response told him that they genuinely had no idea what he was talking about. One of them had even paused in his work in an effort to remember, but had ended by shaking his head. "Must have been a long time ago," he had said. Excerpted from THE BURIED GIANT by Kazuo Ishiguro. Copyright © 2015 by Kazuo Ishiguro. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted from The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.