The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro: A Plodding Remembrance of Things Past
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which comes ten years after the author’s last book, Never Let Me Go, is a rumination on the ethics of war and a vicious cycle of vengeance and imperialistic avarice set within a fantastical rendering of medieval Britain. It employs aspects of Arthurian romance, and of imagined histories steeped in allegory and myth that allow for a lucid meditation on competing, unresolved moralities. However, these greater philosophical questions are only incidental to Ishiguro’s enduring obsession with irredeemable love.
Ishiguro sets his story in a Britain marked by an uneasy sense of peace post King Arthur’s victory over the Saxons. It is a place where people reputedly coexist in harmony, but are mysteriously stripped of memory, and hard-pressed to find attribution for the status quo. The lead characters, Axl and Beatrice, are an elderly Briton couple, who live in a warren and have been forbidden from using candles at night as punishment by the village council for a misdemeanour that neither of them can seem to remember. Their love and tenderness are repeatedly emphasised.
Her grey mane, untied and matted hung stiffly down past her shoulders, but Axl still felt happiness stir within him at the sight of her in the morning light.
In their quest to reunite with their son who lives in another village across far river, the two embark on a journey through an arduous terrain.
En route, the couple meet their illustrious supporting cast: Sir Gawain (a Knight of the Round Table and nephew of King Arthur), Winstan the Warrior (an indomitable Saxon warrior), the Boatman (most likely inspired by Charon), and Edwin (a Saxon boy, who becomes a pawn in the politically charged intrigue). The story is shrouded in a pall of misgiving, rarely betraying its consistently ominous tone. Tolkien-esque dungeons, dragons, ogres and minor horrors loom at every corner. There are also medicine women, sagely men and deceitful Christian monks that make appearances in the meandering plot that is sometimes made incongruous by the myriad encounters.
As Axl and Beatrice chance upon odd happenings and cross paths with the pivotal figures who hold the power to decide peoples’ fate, they also seek to solve the mystery behind their amnesiac disposition. They meet Winstan the Warrior at a Saxon village and learn that the cause of the “mist” is the Querig’s (a she-dragon) breath. One of Arthur’s most influential sages, Master Merlin, cast a spell on the dragon’s breath right after the war, so for as long as she breathes, the kingdom would be robbed of its memory.
Winstan the Warrior, who doesn’t seem to be afflicted by the mist and is thus chosen by his king to find the dragon and slay her, finds unlikely allies in Axl and Beatrice. The three encounter Sir Gawain—who is charged with the Querig’s protection—on the way to the Querig’s lair, and Winstan raises suspicion about Arthur’s nobility, asking of Gawain
By what great skill did your great king heal the scars of war in these lands, that a traveller can see barely a mark or shadow of them left today?
At the core of the book lies the author’s engagement with the thorny issues of forgotten and forgiven war crimes, and spirited-away genocides. In this fiction, in particular, he questions Arthur’s betrayal of the Law of Innocents wherein he slaughtered Saxon civilians to win the war. But Ishiguro counters this amorality with Gawain’s plea to Winstan, asking him to consider the virtues of forgetting—the peace that is assured them if the Querig continues to live. Winstan stands undeterred, disregarding the warning that his action—awakening the buried giant of vengeance—would spur a discordant future. It is in Ishiguro’s definition of the Querig’s cairn that the essence of the forgotten is disinterred:
Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooded crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history. You are in any case part of an ancient procession and so it is always possible the giant’s cairn was erected to mark the site of some such tragedy long ago when young innocents were slaughtered in war.
Much like in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain upholds the values of the royal guard. But one wonders if Ishiguro didn’t mean any of this to be obliquely parodic; in The Buried Giant, Gawain is righteous to a fault, his chivalric courtesy tantamount to foolhardiness.
Ishiguro also takes the reader through something of a fever dream, presenting absurd encounters that don’t cohere. Earlier in their journey, the couple encounter the boatman and an old lady while taking shelter from the rain. The old lady accuses the boatman of deceit, not ferrying her along with her husband, and now she torments the boatman as she seeks vengeance for what he has done. While the boatman is tasked with simply ferrying passengers across the river, it is rumoured that they are taken to a land where people are doomed to roam alone, and only an exceptional few, who can convince the boatman of their love, stay together.
The dangerous implications of the dissipating mist trouble the lovers as well, as they worry that certain remembrances might conjure up demons from their dark past, and the irreparable hurt they might have caused each other. In the concluding chapter of the novel, devastating revelations are made on account of their memory being restored to them. And even though they have assurances from the boatman that he intends on returning to get Axl after he takes Beatrice, so that they might be reunited, the feeling of the wait being eternal is cemented.
The book follows a linear narrative, but sometimes induces illusory forgetfulness in the reader, which sounds clever, but in actuality plays as more of an impediment. Although not as chimerical as Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red—which betrays the ponderous aspects of mythic literature and contemporises it with ingenuity—it wouldn’t be too off the mark to assume that The Buried Giant is driven by a similar intention, to perhaps subvert or reinvent a genre. Ishiguro’s distinctive, spare language, while dissonant with the florid and daunting prose characteristic of literature of the genre such stories belong to, could be refreshing. But his contemporary and unimaginative use of English—except for a ceremonious veneer—lends an absurd, anachronistic quality to the novel, and not in the best way. It is an ineffective literary device when furnishing a world removed from ours by eons. Ishiguro is known for his masterful orchestration of language and his rewarding restraint, from affecting Stevens’ eloquence infused with requisite dourness in The Remains of the Day, to the peculiar singularity of the students at Hailsham in Never Let Me Go. In comparison, The Buried Giant is linguistically uninspiring and compositionally bleak. Even though Ishiguro clearly gets his point across, he takes a longwinded, tedious route. The writer seems a touch lost, even disinterested, in the moorlands of fantasy. For a decade’s wait after the indelible Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant is not sufficiently remarkable.