Tony Rossiter examines the very different novels of one
of the most celebrated writers of contemporary fictionrented a cottage in Cornwall and spent
a month teaching himself to write
short stories – structure, viewpoint,
how to tell the story, and so on. By
the end of the month he had two
completed short stories.
His tutor at UEA was the novelist
Angela Carter who, despite her totally
different writing style, became the
primary influence on his development.
One of his stories was set in Nagasaki
at the time the bomb dropped, and
it was told from the point of view
of a young woman. The positive
reaction of his fellow students gave
his confidence a great boost, and he
realised that his imagination came
alive when he moved away from the
immediate world around him. ‘When
I wrote about Japan, something
unlocked,’ he later said. While at UEA
Faber accepted three of his stories, and
gave him an advance so that he could
complete his first novel, A Pale View
of Hills (1982). He had started a story
set in Cornwall about a young woman
with a disturbed child, but he realised
that if he gave the story a Japanese
dimension, things that had seemed
small and parochial would reverberate
more widely.
Despite growing up and being
educated in the UK, Ishiguro has
always said that because he was
brought up by Japanese parents,
speaking in Japanese, his way of
looking at the world is Japanese – and
that this has made him see things from
a different perspective to that of many
of his English peers. He did not return
to visit Japan until 1989.Three novels
It’s impossible to categorise Ishiguro’s
writing. The three novels we are
considering here could hardly be
more different. The Remains of the
Day (1989) is a poignant, rather sad26 MARCH 2020
N
ovelist, screenwriter
and short-story writer,
he has been nominated
four times for the Man
Booker Prize and won
it in 1989 for The Remains of the Day
(subsequently made into a hugely
successful film starring Anthony
Hopkins and Emma Thompson). He’s
among the small number of authors
who are both critically praised and
commercially successful; in 2017
Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature.Beginnings
Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954,
Ishiguro moved to Surrey with his
Japanese parents when he was five
years old. He went to Woking County
Grammar School and then took a gap
year backpacking through Canada,
the United States and Europe. As a
teenager he played music, watched a
lot of films and barely read anything.
He started writing songs and had hopes
of becoming a singer or a rock star. It
wasn’t until his early twenties, when he
suddenly discovered Dostoevsky and
Charlotte Brontë, that books came
into his life. He studied English and
Philosophy at the University of Kent,
Canterbury (BA hons), and then worked
with homeless people in Glasgow and as
a social worker in London.
He was 25 before he started to write
seriously. He sent the BBC a half-hour
radio play which was rejected. Then he
spotted an advertisement for a creative
writing MA taught by Malcolm
Bradbury at the University of East
Anglia (UEA). He applied, attaching
a copy of the rejected radio script, and
was accepted. The only obligation on
students was to produce thirty pages
of fiction by the end of the course.
Realising that he would have to show
UEA more examples of his work, hestory set in an English country house,
with the butler (Stevens) looking
back in the 1950s on goings-on and
relationships in the inter-war years.
Never Let Me Go (2005) is set in a
realistically portrayed England of the
1990s, but with protagonists from the
world of science fiction. The Buried
Giant (2015) is a mythological fantasy
of the post-Roman dark ages, with
King Arthur dead, Britons and Saxons
uneasily at peace, and the elderly Sir
Gawain (King Arthur’s nephew) tasked
with slaying the she-dragon Querig.
There was a ten-year gap between
his previous novel and The Buried
Giant. ‘It takes me a long time to
find a project that I think is going
to be good enough,’ he said in an
interview for the Telegraph. ‘I think I
just reject a hell of a lot of stuff now.
Often I have themes or a story – the
emotions, even, that have to come
out of it – but I haven’t got that last
piece of the jigsaw.’
Ishiguro dislikes genre boundaries
and believes that neither readers
and nor writers should take them
too seriously. One characteristic of
all three novels is their emotional
force – and a feeling that there is a
lot going on beneath the relatively
simple and still surface. Memory – its
importance, its loss and the way it
influences our lives as human beings- is important to Ishiguro, and it
plays a central role in these novels.
Two of his themes are self-deception
and misplaced idealism, and we can
see this in the main protagonists
of all three stories. In The Remains
of the Day there is a lot of emotion
beneath the surface which, because
of misplaced loyalty or personality
constraints, neither Stevens nor
the housekeeper Miss Kenton
can express. Kathy (the narrator),
Ruth and Tommy, the principal
KAZUO
ISHIGURO
The style & technique of
http://www.writers-online.co.ukCC BY-SA 4.0 Frankie Fouganthin