The Buried Giant

I have enjoyed Mr Ishiguro’s previous novels — Never Let Me Go broke my heart - and have appreciated his carefully crafted prose. I have also appreciated his attention to memory and its permutations. Both Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day are about how one reconstructs and reviews the events of one’s past, though the discussion of the art of memory is somehow above or behind the plot material. This novel brings the memory question to the forefront and makes it almost the entirety of the plot. In doing so, he does two things that make the book particularly subtle: he gives away almost nothing directly, making us earn the knowledge we gain about what has transpired; and he weaves the characters’ concerns about their memories with their concerns about what they might mean in terms of forgiveness. Is forgetting — actually not being able to recall what has gone before — necessary for peace and forgiveness, either at the personal or societal level? It is a challenging question, and Ishiguro addresses it carefully, albeit through the indirectness of a historical, almost mythic fiction. Which makes the book a slow, understated read, requiring patience and care. He doesn’t write lengthy books, but it should take a while to read them.