Friday, October 6, 2017

Kazuo Ishiguro / Nobel prize winner and a novelist for all times

Kazuo Ishiguro
Poster by T.A.

Kazuo Ishiguro: Nobel prize winner and a novelist for all times

by John Mullan

The Swedish Academy has got it right this year: the British author is audacious, controlled and utterly original

Thursday 5 October 2017 17.09 BST
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few years ago in a panel discussion at a literary festival I was asked to name a recent British novel that readers and critics would still be talking about in a hundred years’ time. On the spur of the difficult moment I plumped for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Only as I tried to explain my choice did I realise why I had given this answer. It was not just a novel I enjoyed and admired, it was also a novel that enacted something elementary and elemental: a human’s need to imagine his or her origins.

The Swedish Academy has made some dubious – and last yearattention-seeking – decisions in recent years, but this year its 18 voters have got it right. While the choice has come as a surprise to some – Ishiguro at 62 is relatively youthful; he was not on the list of bookies’ favourites being touted in the press – in literary fact it is not. The Nobel prize for literature, according to the official wording, is for “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Translated from the original Swedish, it is an awkward phrase, but does suggest something important: that the prize should reward universality rather than topicality, literature about the way we always live, not just the way we live now. Ishiguro’s novels step aside from contemporary mores and pressing social issues. Audaciously, sometimes bewilderingly, they abstract us from our times.

How brilliant it is that Never Let Me Go opens with a page that says only “England, late 1990s”. Narrated by a young woman who is a clone, created, like her fellow clones, to provide organs for those requiring transplant surgery, it takes place in a version of Britain both cosily provincial and utterly strange. The countryside, the liberal boarding school, the English seaside town have never made for such a disturbing backdrop. Similarly, the novel that made him famous, The Remains of the Day, took a character familiar from a hundred English books and films – the butler in a country house – and gave him a narrative of painstaking evasiveness. For all the teasing period detail, it was a novel about human self-denial and self-deception at any time and in any place.

Both these novels have first-person narrators whose powers of expression are limited. Kathy H, the narrator of Never Let Me Go, cannot escape the cliches and idiomatic redundancies (“What I am saying is …”, “I know for a fact …”) of spoken English. The limits of her language are the limits of her understanding. She does not have the words to rebel against her cruel destiny. Stevens in The Remains of the Day is wedded to self-important circumlocution and stiff double negatives. Inadvertently he draws attention to his own deceptions and failures of memory: “as I recall” is one of his favourite, self-condemning idioms.

Here, as ever, Ishiguro lets us hear the ways in which ordinary language deceives those who use it. He goes against the grain of every lesson in how to “write well”.

In retrospect, it is clear that in his earliest novels he was already testing the ways in which narration might say less than it means. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills, a tale of Japanese émigrés in England, looked as though it was rooted in the experiences of his own family. Born in Nagasaki, Ishiguro came to England and to London suburbia when he was five. But in fact the experiences of transplantation are used for an exploration of estrangement that the reader is asked to share and that has little to do with any particular time or place.

While stylistically austere or self-limiting, Ishiguro’s fiction revels in literary allusion and generic playfulness. Often he takes a well-known fictional subgenre and transforms it. With Never Let Me Go it is dystopian science fiction. In When We Were Orphans he expected his readers to recognise the conventions of the detective story. In The Unconsoled he rewrote the Kafkaesque fable. Sometimes, because he is distorting the rules of a fictional genre, his works at first provoke some resentment. The Unconsoled, a wonderfully unsettling and melancholy narrative, exasperated some critics, but now has begun to win them over.

His most recent work, The Buried Giant, perplexed many with its rewriting of the rules of fantasy fiction. It follows some of the regulations of the strange genre (it even has a dragon) in order to explore the powers of human forgetfulness. Imagining Britain in the dark ages, among Roman ruins and recent memories of King Arthur, it creates characters who have lost track of history and cannot even remember the important events of their own lives. It is a fable for all times. It is because he writes for all times, using such carefully controlled means, rigorous yet utterly original, that Ishiguro is such a worthy winner.

THE GUARDIAN