by Stephen Fife-Adams

Created on: December 22, 2006   Last Updated: April 20, 2012

Kazuo Ishiguro is best known for The Remains of the Day, a novel about a butler in late 1930's England so constrained by duty that he is functionally paralyzed when faced with his master's apparent treachery (colluding with Nazis) and thrown into an emotional turmoil he cannot bring himself to express when the possibility arises of love and marriage to the head housekeeper. Analogues to various components of this story recurred in his two subsequent novels, each of which was a pastiche of sorts. The Unconsoled, which takes place in a town in Central Europe sometime after the war, is Ishiguro's take on Kafka and Beckett; written in the form of a 500-page semi-comic nightmare, the story follows the increasingly surreal misadventures of a famous orchestra conductor who, like the butler in Remains, is paralyzed (in this case almost physically) by his sense of duty, which extends to almost everyone he meets, with the result that he lets everyone down (hence the title); as the book progresses, it becomes clear that every character in the book is a projection of the conductor himself or someone close to him, that he quite literally trapped within his own solipsistic universe. When We Were Orphans, an homage to Dorothy Sayers, Georges Simenon and other similar writers of stylish crime fiction, once again takes place partially amongst the landed estates of pre-WWII England and features as its narrator a detective whose scrupulous emotional coolness belies an inner torment for which he cannot find words. All three novels are told in first person by narrators who are unreliable at best and who reveal their stories with as many verbal circumlocutions and as much emotional understatement as possible.

Recently, I have read both his most recent book, Never Let Me Go, and his first novel (published way back in 1982), A Pale View of Hills, which I just finished tonight. Having now read 5/6 of his published work, the main impression I have of Ishiguro is that he's essentially written the same book every time out since the beginning of his career. Yet he never seems to be repeating himself, because the circumstances of each book are radically different from the others. (In this regard, he resembles another great living writer, Tim O'Brien.) A Pale View is very much a "first novel" in many respects-an untoward fascination with grisly subjects, a somewhat schematic structure, a little bit too much melodrama-but still, holy cow, what a book. Once again, the book features an unreliable

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