AN ACCIDENTAL GIANT OF FANTASY
Ishiguro unaware he was entering ‘new genre’
Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book The Buried Giant has been called his Lord of the Rings.
That’s understandable. After all, it has a dragon, pixies, ogres, great warriors, famous knights and a long journey involving companions.
But it’s not a fantasy at all, Ishiguro says.
The renowned author of books such as The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go would demur.
The Buried Giant is really a novel about remembering and forgetting — topics Ishiguro has looked at before. This time, he says, he wanted to explore collective memory loss in a couple, a community and a nation.
He says he wrestled with the question of where to set the book. The years since the end of the Cold War have seen wars that are based on national grievances, such as those that happened during the collapse of the former Yugoslavia or in Rwanda.
But setting the novel during those conflicts would have cluttered the book with current events, he thought.
“It wasn’t one of those books where I thought it would be great to set it in that kind of (mythical fantasy) world. I actually struggled for a long time trying to figure out what kind of world I wanted to set it in,” Ishiguro said in a phone interview.
“I actually had wanted to write a book about the way society struggles with its dark memories. How does a nation remember or forget?
“I had grown up in Britain when the Troubles were going on in Northern Ireland and sectarian hatreds were being maintained by both sides through the use of historical grievances and centuriesold battles.
“But I felt I could not set the book in a contemporary situation, because then it would have been about that place. As a novelist, I wanted to write something more universal. Readers could be invited to apply it to other situations.”
So he set his book in a time long ago. That setting has prompted a debate about fantasy writing.
In Prospect Magazine, writer Joanna Cavanagh says she thought social realist fiction needs an injection of fantasy. And U.S. fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin took aim at Ishiguro over his use of dragons in his book.
She has since retracted her criticism somewhat but, in the end, an interesting debate has been fuelled within the science fiction-fantasy community, Ishiguro says.
The result, he says, is that his book has seemed to restart a discussion about what is considered serious literary fiction. The barriers, he says, between popular fiction and serious fiction are breaking down.
The Buried Giant is the story of an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, who, like all the people living in their village, have forgotten their pasts. But every now and again, the cloud lifts and certain memories return, such as the fact that they have a son living in another village, whom they have not seen for years. And so they decide to set out to see him.
During their quest, they acquire companions. A warrior and a young boy who bears the scar of an ogre’s bite join them on their way.
“This is not a book of fantasy,” Ishiguro says. “I don’t know much about fantasy. But I needed to use these elements. It didn’t occur to me I was entering a new genre.
“I was coming to it from old samurai folk tales and I am a fan of Homer and fascinated by Gilgamesh and Beowulf and the old Norse sagas.
“In a way, without ever being a reader of well-known fantasy writers, part of me was always a fan. And I like the freedom to be able to use ogres and pixies for my own ends. Dragons too.”
Much has been made about the fact that this novel took 10 years to produce.
“Partly it took a long while to get it set properly,” he said. “I did make a start after Never Let Me Go, but then I showed my wife the first 60 pages and she told me to start again. She’s getting a little cross about me always telling this story, by the way.”
In the meantime, he wrote a collection of short stories. He also had some film work to worry about and he was writing song lyrics.
“Then I went back to it, had the setting in place, and took another run at it.”
The other aspect of memory he wanted to explore was the question of when is it better to leave things forgotten — in a marriage and in a country.
The story also revolves around an enforced peace in the mythical land that was won by a great atrocity, after which everyone was made to forget it so that peace could follow.
In a marriage, as time is running out, the question surfaces: “Are we going to keep these things hidden forever? Is our love based on something false?” Ishiguro says. He notes that when someone writes a family memoir, there is always a huge fight.
Ishiguro does not feel any pressure to produce a novel when he is between books.
“I’m kind of pleasantly surprised when people remember my work,” he says with typical humility. “I don’t live in a book world where publishers put pressure on for the next novel. That’s the nice thing about the book culture — people do have long memories. If I was a musician or a film director, 10 years without a new work would be damaging.”
Speaking of music, Ishiguro was a budding singer-songwriter in his early 20s. He says he was influenced by a lot of Canadians: Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Robbie Robertson and Neil Young.
These days he is into jazz. “I play jazz myself. And I have been writing jazz song lyrics for the American singer Stacey Kent since 2007. I write with her husband Jim Tomlinson, the saxophonist. She’s bigger in Europe than in North America, but she has had some Grammy nominated albums.”
Ishiguro says he always has ideas. “When I finish a novel, I usually have something to build upon from the novel just finished. I tend to start with ideas and themes.”
His take-away from The Buried Giant is to further explore the differences between remembering and forgetting in a nation and in a couple.
“How does the memory of a nation actually work? Who controls it? How might shared memory keep a family together or split it apart?
“It’s a lens through which I am looking at the world and at life. In the end, by looking at that, I am able to think about what the really important things are. The questions that really matter. For example, if a couple feels their love is really strong, are they right to think love could defeat death?”
This man obsessed by exploring the power of memory has a very good one himself.
“I remember a surprising amount about Japan,” says Ishiguro, who left that country at the age of five. “It is the Japan of my childhood. I had a lot of incentive to remember.
“It was an important place to me and a place I thought I was going to go back to, so it was important to remember.
“I thought a lot about Japan after I left. I can remember people at my old nursery school, toys I had, every room of the house I used to live in.
“What I remember about Japan may be inaccurate and is limited to the memories of a child. When I went back in 1989, all those years later, I could remember where the house used to be. Some of the neighbours were still there. I could remember the walk I took to kindergarten.”
But he says he couldn’t live again in Japan.
“I’ve become British, but I feel something special about Japan.”
The Britain of Ishiguro’s childhood was a very welcoming rural community in Surrey, between Guildford and Woking. In 1960, the neighbourhood children “played in fields and down country lanes and milk was delivered by horse and cart.”
He was the first Japanese head chorister in the local church. It was written up in the local newspaper.
He started to sense racism in Britain in the 1970s. Those were the years when immigration from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean became an issue.
“I was 15. I remember the climate changing. People had positions. That was when I was much warier. When I met someone, I had to fairly quickly establish whether they liked me or not.”
The U.S. producer Scott Rudin has picked up the rights to The Buried Giant. Rudin was involved in The Grand Budapest Hotel, among many other film projects.
One surprising thing about The Buried Giant is that it is funny in an almost-Monty-Python-andthe-Holy- Grail way.
“I’m glad you say that,” he says. “Often people don’t realize I’m trying to be funny. I thought the butler in Remains of the Day was comic.”
A butler who doesn’t have sense of humour is Ishiguro’s ultimate straight man.