Charles Finch

If I have a favorite living writer, it's probably Philip Roth; but Kazuo Ishiguro, most famous for writing The Remains of the Day and then having the good fortune to see Anthony Hopkins star in a movie adaptation of it, runs Roth a close second. For Christmas I gave a friend my favorite of Ishiguro's novels, Never Let Me Go, and when she was too slow to start it I stole it back for another read.

Prose is perhaps the only form of art that cannot accommodate surrealism; but Ishiguro manages something close to surrealism by writing in the form of a scrupulous realist, in the mold of Henry James. The Remains of the Day is to me one of the genuinely misunderstood books of our age. It has generally been interpreted - and Merchant and Ivory probably bear the responsibility for this - as an elegy for Victorian England, or at least a book about English stoicism. I'm not sure that it's not in fact something like the reverse; remember that the chief aristocrat in the novel is a fascist, even a Nazi-sympathizer, and that the butler, Stevens, is emotionally hollow to the point of total blankness. It reminds me of people who quote the speech Polonius gives to Laertes in Hamlet ("And these few precepts...to thine own self be true," etc) which when one reads it in full seems less like an inspiring bestowal of wisdom than a stale precursor of the Successories poster.

I won't spoil the plot of Never Let Me Go, which relies on the slow pace of its revelations for so much of its tension, but I will say that I think it's Ishiguro's best novel, better even than The Unconsoled, and that it's subject is much wider than it initially appears: What begins as a mixture of science fiction and Tom Brown's Schooldays becomes, in the end, a fable about how difficult it is for all of us to be what we are; human.