That is to say that The Buried Giant is is a fantasy novel in much the same sort of way that Never Let Me Go was a sci-fi yarn... Ishiguro is in full genre-occupying mode here, settling an imaginative region, capturing its tropes and conditions, and establishing within it his own peculiar sovereignty ... The story he tells here is set in a mythical early-Medieval England, in the years after the death of King Arthur ...are addressed, with an intriguing combination of distance and familiarity, by an omniscient narrator...clothes itself in the armor of chivalric romance and fantasy, it is also subtly using these formal structures to subvert from within the kinds of national mythologies that are so often built around them ... But it builds, in its final third, toward what might be described as a devastating anti-climax—the sort of conclusion you don’t realize you’ve been expecting all along until you’ve encountered it.
In The Buried Giant, his seventh and latest, he begins with clear, unhurried, unfussy language to describe the England of some 1,500 years ago, in a novel as well crafted as it is odd ...is a melancholy book, and the mist that breathes through it is a melancholic mist. The narrative tone is dreamlike and measured. There are adventures, sword fights, betrayals, armies, cunning stratagems and monsters killed, but these things are told distantly, without the book’s pulse ever beating faster ... At the heart of the novel is a philosophical conundrum, expressed first by an old woman whose husband has gone on before her, crossing the bar, as it were, to a mystical island to which she has not been allowed ... Still, The Buried Giant does what important books do: It remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to turn it over and over.
...so we come to The Buried Giant, a spectacular, rousing departure from anything Ishiguro has ever written, and yet a classic Ishiguro story. Set in the misty bogs and moors of England in A.D. 450, not long after the death of King Arthur, the novel is a daring venture into a medieval wilderness of monsters, pixies, dragons, wizards, aging knights and sword-swinging, sanguinary warriors ... has the clear ring of legend, as graceful, original and humane as anything Ishiguro has written. By the end of it, we are made to see that a dark grain can enter our collective bloodstream and poison it with a baffling hate ...Ishiguro seems to say, some things are best forgotten: Betrayals in a long-suffering marriage can be as devastating as the human impulse to war.
Unfortunately, Ishiguro’s new novel, The Buried Giant, does not generate the kind of pressure that might wring shadows from the bemusing transparency of its narration ... He has written not a novel about historical amnesia but an allegory of historical amnesia, set in a sixth- or seventh-century Britain, amok with dragons, ogres, and Arthurian knights. The problem is not fantasy but allegory, which exists to literalize and simplify. The giant is not buried deeply enough ...has far too much dialogue like this, more Monty Python than William Golding...points everywhere but at us, because its fictional setting is feeble, mythically remote, generic, and pressureless; and because its allegory manages somehow to be at once too literal and too vague—a magic rare but unwelcome.
This is an interesting but problematic passage, suggesting the potential of The Buried Giant and also the failings it cannot, finally, overcome ...there's the tone of exposition, of a story explicated rather than told. Certainly, The Buried Giant requires explanation, its world so different from the one we occupy. At the same time, this leaves the narrative at a peculiar distance, one Ishiguro never overcomes ... On the one hand, he remains, as he has often been, compelled by questions of love, commitment, deception — a deception that is not always external but also grows within ...involves people with no real sense of their own past wandering through a landscape with no real sense of its own past, with consequences that don't seem dire or dangerous enough, which means that nothing, really, is at stake ...is not to say that the book lacks anything to merit our attention.
...the way that a single person remembers and forgets is not the same as the way a nation does, and what one wants to remember can also be what the other needs to forget. This is the conflict that lies at the heart of The Buried Giant ... Ishiguro never explicitly tells us what period we are in, and the resulting vagueness shrouds the story in myth ...actually feels very modern — despite all its talk of ogres, warriors, and dragons. It reprises the same themes Ishiguro has dealt with his entire career: deeply flawed people grappling with dueling impulses and loyalties — to their ideals, identities, and nations ... The writing is at times lush and thrilling, rolling the gothic, fantastical, political, and philosophical into one ... The Buried Giant may feel very different from Ishiguro’s previous works, but the concerns that lie at its heart have preoccupied him his entire career.
Which is all a way of saying, I suppose, that it's worth paying serious attention to The Buried Giant, Ishiguro's first novel in 10 years. That's not an easy thing; this one's an odd one ... Taken on its own, the story is unpersuasive. Of course, it's allegory, a mode in which Ishiguro has never worked so definitely... it's not his strongest subject, and as a result The Buried Giant isn't his strongest work. Its action is too pointedly moralistic, and the author's unique, weightless prose is more effective when he's dealing in personal rather than in civic memory ... Effortlessly, almost incidentally, the conversation creates an entire field of unspoken meaning, illuminating the kind of elusive truths about love, time, death and memory that other novelists have to strain even to brush.
In the past, he focused on individual experiences, but now he wanted to look at the behavior of societies as a whole. Specifically, he was interested in memory, and the role that collective remembering and forgetting plays in the ways societies recover after catastrophes ...The Buried Giant is set in a misty, primordial England populated by feuding Saxons and Britons and haunted by traces of a great age just gone by: the ruins of the collapsing Roman Empire and the shadow of the late King Arthur... If at first Ishiguro's language sounds flat and unadorned, it's that very flatness that makes you wonder what's buried underneath. It's a voice he found before he ever started writing, back when he was still a singer-songwriter.
How you respond to Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel may depend on how well you handle sentences like 'We hear the she-dragon Querig roams that country, and only fools would be abroad there in the dark' ... The Buried Giant is set in Britain not long after the death of King Arthur — and along with the dragon, it features ogres, 'savage pixies,' a cranky and elderly Sir Gawain and a strange memory-erasing mist ... One monk they encounter raises an issue that seems to be at the heart of the book: 'Is it not better some things remain hidden from our minds?' By the time that question is asked, readers may be wondering what on Earth Ishiguro is up to ... The trouble with his use of fantasy in The Buried Giant is that it dissolves the whole moral compass of the book.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s long-awaited The Buried Giant, his first novel in ten years, is set in a mythologized fifth-century Britain in which pixies, dragons, and ogres live alongside humans ... Fantasy or not, at the heart of The Buried Giant is a love story, even though the main characters, Axl and his wife Beatrice, are not your typical lovers in fiction ...is its ability to make readers empathize with the weary couple’s urgency to locate their son and lost memories ...a heartwarming and heartbreaking love story in equal measures ... Despite the mist of forgetfulness, relentless and omnipresent, the elderly couple hold on to fragments of their past and are determined to restore more of their lost treasured memories. Theirs is a love story that triumphs over memory loss, old age, and dragon’s breath. Theirs is a story of hope, even though the ending of the book is left ambiguous.
It's that shadowy state of knowing, but mostly living as though we don't know about all these looming terrors that Kazuo Ishiguro captures in his latest novel, The Buried Giant ... In The Buried Giant, an exhausted group of medieval travelers cross a blasted landscape straight out of the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett ...Ishiguro quests after far more profound mysteries here than the location of that dragon ... This is yet another radiant and deeply moving Ishiguro riff on loss and the tragic nature of life. It'd pay at the tribute of saying that as a novel, it's unforgettable.
Veteran readers of Ishiguro therefore will approach The Buried Giant, his first novel in a decade, in a spirit of deep precaution ... It is hard to shake the sense that Ishiguro is up to his old tricks: one expects the ogres to be revealed as members of a rival village, the dragon to be some kind of a communal delusion, and Merlin to be a crackpot ...he is just as interested in collective memory. What does a society choose to remember? ... For all its dragon-slaying and swashbuckling, The Buried Giant is ultimately a story about long love and making terms with oblivion. It is an eerie hybrid: a children’s fable about old age. In Ishiguro’s novel, as in life, love conquers all—all, that is, but death.
We are in a weird world indeed, not just because it is populated by ogres, sprites, demons and dragons, but also because Ishiguro puts a fog over the narrative, littering it with elisions, false turns and feints that make us doubt what we have read ... The dialogue is uniformly archaic, leaden almost ('I wish it right enough, sir,' etc), as if a distinctive voice would itself be anachronistic ... That may be too specific, but the book can be applied to our own times. It turns out that the collective amnesia of the dragon’s breath may have a more benign purpose than we first thought.
Even so, The Buried Giant, his first novel in 10 years, is likely to surprise with its fantastical events and setting...the mistiness that clouds the minds of the British characters may suggest symbolic interpretations, yet without demanding them ...it’s hard for a 21st century author to work with fantasy without being exposed to charges of delving the mines of allegory or wandering in the clouds of mysticism. The obverse of these charges seems to be what Mr. Ishiguro has achieved ... Readers may admire this novel; many indeed will feel that its oddity demands a second or third reading. With or without such revisiting, it is a novel that solicits respect rather than love, and is likely to garner admiration for its prose and its ambition rather than affection for the experience it delivers.
In Giant, Ishiguro explores love that lasts – but at what cost? ...narrative is seemingly straightforward: An older couple embarks on a journey to reunite with their estranged son whom they have not seen in many years ... It covers just four days and three nights – and yet lifetimes of myth, allegory, and epic discoveries are contained within ...Ishiguro nimbly plays with both content and form. He imbues his leading man and woman with much more than just simple appellations... The changing viewpoints underscore the mutability of memories, and hint at the unreliability of storytelling ... Ishiguro’s 10-year investment comes to eloquent fruition here. The result is a provocative, multilayered mosaic.
...The Buried Giant (four stars out of four), Ishiguro's first novel in a decade, is an engrossing narrative, implacable in its exploration of the same thematic territory (memory, guilt, love and war) that has always preoccupied him ...a fable for modern times set in the ancient past ...are complicated by a kind of mass amnesia that has settled on the land like a fog, robbing its inhabitants of all but the most recent of memories ...Ishiguro invests his tale with almost unbearable metaphoric weight. We long to remember the past, but if forgetting is a burden, it can also be a mercy... It's one of the deftest bits of sleight-of-hand in recent fiction, a literary tour de force so unassuming that you don't realize until the last page that you're reading a masterpiece.
Ishiguro's new novel is set in Arthurian England — not the mythic land of knights, castles, and pageants most of us are familiar with, but a primitive and rural country likely far closer to historical reality ... It's a sad, elegiac story, one that has a tone and texture suited to its subject matter: a dreamy journey, repetitive and searching as lost memory.
There be giants buried beneath the earth — and also the ancient kings of Britain, Arthur among them. Ishiguro’s tale opens not on such a declaration but instead on a hushed tone; an old man has been remembering days gone by, and the images he conjures, punctuated by visions of a woman with flowing red hair, may be truthful or a troubling dream ... The premise of a nation made up of amnesiac people longing for meaning is beguiling, and while it opens itself to heavy-handed treatment, Ishiguro is a master of subtlety; as with Never Let Me Go, he allows a detail to slip out here, another there, until we are finally aware of the facts of the matter, horrible though they may be ...a fairy tale for grown-ups, both partaking in and departing from a rich literary tradition.
