I was a tremendous fan of Remains of the Day when the movie came out (1993). This led me to the book a couple years after. In both incarnations, Remains sticks with me as a shattering indictment of the concept of employment. As far as I’m concerned, “setting the table for Lord Darlington’s peace summits” should join English-language idiom alongside, “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”.
Remains of the Day details an assiduous care taken in professional work, interlocked with a single-minded short-sightedness in same. We've got a man here shouldering his way through a lifetime’s toil - not out of enslavement, but because he takes true pride in the toil - and in that long self-abnegation, the only transcendent result is that he’s fulfilled somebody else’s doomed, useless agenda. (To be employed, after all, means exactly that you’re being used.) Mr. Stevens throws his life away rather than throw his all into Miss Kenton as he was damned well meant to.
In any event, I was pretty taken by the restrained passion quilted into Remains of the Day. So a couple years later I picked up Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. This signaled some rare praise from me, reading Ishiguro again, ‘cause I am generally too worried about all the things I haven’t read to go back to any well twice. If I’ve read something by somebody, “I have that base covered”, I tend to figure. But I'd heard that Ishiguro’s other work was much weirder than RotD. And this was May 1998, so I was drinking a good bit, and shacking myself away in a very lonely downtown-San-Francisco SRO. The rootless, never-going-anywhere nightmare logic of The Unconsoled suited me too well.
In it, a musician shows up in a town which is never too well-described… for a performance which is never too well-explained... and a series of nested digressions keeps unfolding - all of them pretty ambiguous in their import too - through all of which, we’re not sure why the musician is being hustled into fulfilling pointless requirements set by his hosts, nor where any of this headache is heading. Like in a dream, none of it is ever questioned. There's an assuredness that - though nothing makes sense, everything obviously makes sense.
Also like a dream, I remember nothing specific about the book all this time later, except that it helped make me feel very bad, and very anxious, in a moment of life when I was super well-disposed to feeling bad and anxious. Does that sound like a recommendation? No? Well it is one, and Unconsoled is a worthy literary grandchild to Kafka.
Never Let Me Go
The two books I’d read by Ishiguro were such a contrast in style and level of literalism that hell, if I'm reading something by every Nobel Prize winner, it seemed like a compelling chance to go get a third data point from him.
Never Let Me Go falls somewhere smack in the middle of that concrete/fantasy spectrum. I walked into this book with no knowledge of the story, and only gradually felt out the fact that we were in a very fictional, rather dreamy environment. We’re hearing that there are people known as Carers, of whom the speaker, Kathy, is one. Not unlike Ottoman Janissaries, Kathy was raised under segregated life-training, thrown in with a school’s worth of other orphan children: a place called Halisham. An adult now, she's living what seems to be a relatively free and normal English life, and we're given a gradually-managed trickle of details about this strange upbringing. (But is it so strange in boarding-school England? I couldn't always tell.)
It turns out (spoiler) the children of Halisham, who will eventually be Carers and ultimately Donors, are genetic clones cultivated for organ donation. Ishiguro lets us know this in such slow, piecemeal development that there is hardly a time when this comes across as shocking. Our focus is entirely on what relations were like among the kids, within the social world they created for themselves while growing up.
Take an example. Kathy's frenemy Ruth boasts to her peers about receiving a pocketbook from the teacher - Kathy learns it was not from the teacher, lets Ruth know she knows (this is all so trivial...). Well, Kathy makes a point of stepping around this embarrassing intel in front of the other kids - helping conceal Ruth's lie - to prove to Ruth that she is worthy of friendship. Neither Kathy nor Ruth exchanges a word explicitly about any of this. Which is - I mean, all of it is so small, it doesn't even count as worth describing in a book. But here's the thing: for kids radically isolated in an orphanage / academy / internment camp, minutiae like these are the only raw materials for building a private culture. The reason this book is brilliant is that we see the workings of brains building that culture, and building sense-of-place, from incredibly scant materials.
(Hierarchy and clique in absence of normal social class - or any other basis of difference.)
Ishiguro’s strength is in constructing an imaginary environment - not directly by explaining it to us, but by using unspoken assumptions, and implicit familiarity with human mental life. From these wisps he gathers together a sense of place that we grow into understanding as sensible and normal, while it is absolutely neither. So he is able to get in a critique of our routine mental lives as humans... and a critique of how we construct "normal"... without having to say a word about any of it directly. That is brilliant.
Never Let Me Go
The two books I’d read by Ishiguro were such a contrast in style and level of literalism that hell, if I'm reading something by every Nobel Prize winner, it seemed like a compelling chance to go get a third data point from him.
Never Let Me Go falls somewhere smack in the middle of that concrete/fantasy spectrum. I walked into this book with no knowledge of the story, and only gradually felt out the fact that we were in a very fictional, rather dreamy environment. We’re hearing that there are people known as Carers, of whom the speaker, Kathy, is one. Not unlike Ottoman Janissaries, Kathy was raised under segregated life-training, thrown in with a school’s worth of other orphan children: a place called Halisham. An adult now, she's living what seems to be a relatively free and normal English life, and we're given a gradually-managed trickle of details about this strange upbringing. (But is it so strange in boarding-school England? I couldn't always tell.)
It turns out (spoiler) the children of Halisham, who will eventually be Carers and ultimately Donors, are genetic clones cultivated for organ donation. Ishiguro lets us know this in such slow, piecemeal development that there is hardly a time when this comes across as shocking. Our focus is entirely on what relations were like among the kids, within the social world they created for themselves while growing up.
Take an example. Kathy's frenemy Ruth boasts to her peers about receiving a pocketbook from the teacher - Kathy learns it was not from the teacher, lets Ruth know she knows (this is all so trivial...). Well, Kathy makes a point of stepping around this embarrassing intel in front of the other kids - helping conceal Ruth's lie - to prove to Ruth that she is worthy of friendship. Neither Kathy nor Ruth exchanges a word explicitly about any of this. Which is - I mean, all of it is so small, it doesn't even count as worth describing in a book. But here's the thing: for kids radically isolated in an orphanage / academy / internment camp, minutiae like these are the only raw materials for building a private culture. The reason this book is brilliant is that we see the workings of brains building that culture, and building sense-of-place, from incredibly scant materials.
(Hierarchy and clique in absence of normal social class - or any other basis of difference.)
Ishiguro’s strength is in constructing an imaginary environment - not directly by explaining it to us, but by using unspoken assumptions, and implicit familiarity with human mental life. From these wisps he gathers together a sense of place that we grow into understanding as sensible and normal, while it is absolutely neither. So he is able to get in a critique of our routine mental lives as humans... and a critique of how we construct "normal"... without having to say a word about any of it directly. That is brilliant.
(4/15/2020)
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