One of the things that has always interested the British-Japanese writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, who has won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, is how “we live in small worlds and big worlds at the same time and we can’t forget one or the other.”
In his interview to the Swedish Academy after the announcement, Ishiguro said: “...we have a personal arena in which we have to try to find fulfilment and love. But that inevitably intersects with a larger world, where politics, or even dystopian universes, can prevail.”
This is the running thread through his books, even though he has dabbled in varying genres, and particularly true of his 1989 classic, The Remains of the Day, which got the Booker and was later made into a memorable film. In it, we follow Stevens, an ageing butler — that quintessential Wodehousian and British character — as he embarks on a motoring trip through the west of England, that will also become a journey into his past. We watch as his small world and the big world collide, throwing life in disarray.
In a limbo?
The year is 1956, post-war Britain. After spending three decades at Darlington Hall, Stevens has a new master, Mr. Farraday, an American, who offers his Ford to the butler for the expedition. While on the road trip he will also look up Miss Kenton to find out if she would want to return to Darlington Hall. As Stevens looks back at his life, questions arise. Has he wasted too much time on his career putting his personal life in a limbo? Has he overlooked excesses by his old master, a Nazi sympathiser, just because he was playing his professional role to the limit? Can he make up for the loss? Is there a way to love and fulfilment?
There are no easy answers, and memory distanced from reality can play tricks, but don’t get taken in by the calm with which Stevens confronts these questions — “What is the point of worrying too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one man’s life took?”
Hidden emotion
Nothing is as it seems in an Ishiguro novel, which hides more than it reveals. The only emotion Stevens and his dignified self will allow is this: “Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.” This, when Miss Kenton lays bare the real reason for her mystifying “unhappiness.” The unravelling of Stevens’ life happens in the backdrop of the surreal landscape of the British countryside.
As Stevens takes in a “marvellous view over miles...,” he explains: “We call this land of ours Great Britain... And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’?... I would say it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.”
While announcing his name for the Nobel, the Swedish Academy placed Ishiguro in an illustrious literary firmament, with Austen, Kafka and Proust. It could have added one more name, that of Bob Dylan, for Ishiguro was drawn to the 2016 Literature Nobel laureate’s “stream-of-consciousness or surreal lyrics” since he was 13.
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.