A heavy mist has descended over sixth-century Britain, a bleak country inhabited by mutually antagonistic Saxons and Britons. The Romans left long before; during the intervening centuries even their famous roads “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.”
As early as this opening paragraph Kazuo Ishiguro appears to be imposing a firm structure on the narrative, which appears to be intended to take the form of a fairy tale – "ogres" providing the clue.
Daily life is an ordeal endured in communal shelters, and monsters are “regarded as everyday hazards”. Ishiguro’s initial use of a first-person narrator seems both promising and helpful, in keeping with the convention.
An elderly Christian couple, Axl and Beatrice, are introduced. But then again, for fear one might draw any certainty from this information, the narrator concedes: “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.”
This voice, possibly that of a boatman who reappears at the close, attempts to set the scene: “at a time when magnificent civilisations flourished elsewhere in the world, we were here [in Britain] not much beyond the Iron Age.”
Ishiguro quickly dispenses with this avuncular “I’, reverting for most of the novel to a detached third-person voice. But not until Axl’s dilemma is made clear: he can’t remember anything. No one can. Memory has been lost. The central theme of the novel is that of a crisis; the despair of having forgotten one’s past and the terror that could be caused by retrieving it.
Beatrice longs to visit her son, but she doesn’t know why she feels he is in a distant village or where it is. How could she? She can’t remember anything. Yet she is strong and determined, even in pain. Axl, watching her sleep, comes to a decision: it is time they undertake a journey. It will be dangerous, as they are old, so weakened that they are no longer trusted with having a candle, for fear it cause a fire.
Stilted when striving
Beatrice is already making plans. Axl goes looking for her. He happens on “five women – not in their first youth, but still of child-bearing age”, and they direct him to her. He thanks them, adding, “I’ll go and see what my wife is up to.” It is jarringly modern usage for a novel in which the dialogue is formal, often stilted in striving for an archaic quality.
It is a picaresque. The couple, once on the move, remain moving, however slowly. They take a wounded boy and meet up with a warrior. There is a great deal of talking, much of it between the couple, tediously reassuring and delivered like lines in a play.
Beatrice is very insecure. For all her courage she cannot help clinging to Axl, leaving the reader suspecting that there has been an infidelity in the past. She may not be able to recall it, but the old wife can sense it. As for Axl, he is as interesting to those he meets along the way as he is to Beatrice.
The Buried Giant is an extremely literary novel, full of allusions, like a modified Brothers Grimm meets Kafka with a nod to Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Yet there is also Dante, not only because of Beatrice's name but also because of her role as a guide of sorts. And there's her fear, which counters her courage. There is a hint of Orpheus's plight. Yet Ishiguro never fully pursues any of the allusive thematic veins he opens. It is as if he barely touches the source material before moving on.
The arrival of Sir Gawain suggests that The Buried Giant might become a parody of romance literature. This Sir Gawain is elderly, and he hovers, at times offstage but never far away. He is a Don Quixote figure. Whereas previously he had been on a knightly quest, now he has a purpose that proves surprisingly easy to guess. His two reveries merely highlight the narrative's theatrical tone.
The all-encompassing mist is blamed for the communal loss of memory, and the fog is caused by Querig, a she-dragon. Querig’s threat “comes less from her own actions than from the fact of her continuing presence”, explains Ivor, whose few utterances are important.
The novel is mildly funny. En route to the son they can’t remember they undertake a detour (instigated by Beatrice) to consult a monk with healing powers. Only he is ill. They finally visit him at his bedside; he has appalling injuries, having been attacked by birds. The monastery sequence is chaotic and not only sustains the ambivalence that runs through the narrative but also consolidates the menace of human betrayal. The ogres prove ineffectual; the she-dragon is not thriving either.
If Ishiguro has intended The Buried Giant as a fantasy novel he should have worked a bit harder; the genre merits more respect. There is a sequence in which the couple, having escaped from one danger, attempt to borrow a boat. Instead they are offered two baskets in which to travel down the river. Beatrice insists that the crafts be latched together. Enter the screaming pixies. It is hysterical: the pixies swarm like locusts over the floating baskets and then are gone.
For a slow-moving, deliberate novel, it is quickly read and fails to achieve the profundity of its message, which seems to be that memory is vital to humanity. Yet it does fuel hatreds and, with them, instigates war.
The Buried Giant lacks the punch of Jim Crace's equally historically unspecific Harvest (2013). Here the rank mist is causing the forgetfulness, which in turn sustains the uneasy peace. At intervals throughout the narrative it appears that a fully Arthurian theme will emerge, and the potential is there, particularly as Axl can't remember his past. Late in the novel Axl snaps at Gawain, "Make your meaning clearer, Sir Knight."
The same could be said to Ishiguro. At possibly the most dramatic moment in a novel of squib-like climaxes, two men about to engage in mortal combat converse as if they are swapping telephone numbers.
Mood master
Ishiguro enjoys ambiguity and uses it well. He is a stylist, calm and unhurried, a master of mood. Yet he usually has something to say; he first emerged as a writer of beautiful works such as his debut,
A Pale View of Hills
(1982) and
An Artist of the Floating World
(1986).
The Remains of the Day
, which won the 1989 Booker prize, is one of Britain’s finest postwar novels.
The Unconsoled
(1995) is a Rubik’s cube, the genius of which is more apparent on a second reading. With
Never Let Me Go
(2005) Ishiguro wrote a prophetic narrative about human cloning. Only the lackluster
When We Were Orphans
(2000) has disappointed.
The Buried Giant is an apt title. Too much of the narrative is interred beneath a tentative layer of literary allusion. The first-person voice, the witness, is a boatman. The final image brings to mind the solitude of the Anglo-Saxon lament Wulf and Eadwacer, which is considered a riddle. So is this cautionary, half-hearted novel that is not quite a fairy tale, not quite a fantasy. Instead it dangles unconvincingly somewhere between the two.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
