The Remains of the Day (novel) by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is a bit outside the normal preoccupations of this blog but I thought I would share it with you all anyway. I managed to get my first tutor marked assessment done today so I am quite pleased. This isn't related btw, it is a posting/review to my OU group.

I thought I might share with the group a recent experience of reading a novel which indicates to me personally what might be achievable when writing.

I had a transatlantic phone call some time ago with my brother in Virginia. He mentioned that he had recently seen the film ‘The Remains of the Day’ with Anthony Hopkins. I think he might have said he had watched it again, because I seem to remember him talking about it before.

“It’s a wonderful film” he said. “Hopkins is fantastic in it, he subtlely seems to portray a sort of reserved inner sorrow. Emma Thompson is wonderful as well.”

He said more of course than this, but such is my memory of the incident.

“Oh yes,” I said “I have the book. I think you mentioned it before, I’ll have to see it sometime.”

At that point I meant to obtain the film and indeed I might have, or I may have just seen the trailer. I can think of the characters, and I can think of a number of incidents from it however I have just read the book and now I am no longer sure!

I had been to an interview yesterday. It was for a job I have always wanted and my preparation was quite intense. I have no idea if I will be successful, certainly I hope so but it is the nature of interviews to be confusing and I have my doubts. The field was cut from sixty two to ‘twelve strong candidates’, all of whom are being interviewed and one out of twelve is not the best odds!

Anyway, that doesn’t really have much bearing on my story, however I was lying in bed, sweating a bit, the temperature seemed to have changed and I turned my pillow as it was wet. Sharon was turning over, and said sleepily:

“Are you all right?”

“I think I’ll get up”, I said “I feel a bit restless.”

I had actually been lying awake for some time mulling things over, the past interview and other related ideas.

Anyway I jumped up, pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and wandered through to the living room. There I sat and looked around and my eye was drawn to the book ‘The Remains of the Day’ by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I took it down from the bookcase. I had bought it some time ago from a second hand shop for a few pounds. Perhaps it was before seeing the movie, perhaps it was afterwards, I only know that for a while as I read the book the faces of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson would swim into mind as I read the dialogue.

I’ll give it a go I thought, as I settled onto the couch, I was intrigued by the subject matter and that the writer was of Japanese origin, given that the story is about the inner machinations of an English butler.

[Strangely enough I reached this point in writing and suddenly stopped, I thought I’ll just read my emails! I think this would have interrupted my flow fatally so I will carry on regardless! The emails can wait.]

The story is of a butler named Stevens and his relationship with his employer and fellow staff in a large English mansion from the 1920’s onwards. Stevens prides himself on his professionalism and his decorum, his essential ‘dignity’ which he believes marks him out as a true gentleman’s gentleman. On a road trip to meet up with an old colleague Stevens looks back at his time in service and reflects on his life and his theories about being a great butler.

He relates his story in the first person and we gradually realise that in amongst his colourful reminiscences there is more than meets the eye. How this is revealed is very subtle and the descriptions of the surrounding characters are quite extraordinarily well done.

Stevens’s father in particular is very ably portrayed. He is an uptight emotionless man who nonetheless Stevens is tremendously proud of and who he imitates, to his own folly. Stevens relates one incident in particular which gives the audience a measure of his father’s character and it is perhaps my favourite part of the book, relying as it does on action to illustrate the man.

There are many such moments however. I started the book in the early hours of this morning and I had finished it by about 11am with a break of a few hours sleeping in between.

The quality of the prose is really quite lovely and the only thing to touch it to my mind is George MacDonald’s Fraser’s ‘Mr American’. That novel is very different but it is also beautifully written with a tug of nostalgia towards a forgotten age (in this case the American west) and is superior in my mind to his wildly successful ‘Flashman’ novels, even though I do rather enjoy them as well.

The Remains of the Day contains timeless themes, of love, of regrets, of a sense of wasted opportunities and it really is a quite marvellous novel. On the face of it Stevens is a blinkered fool and his boss is a deluded Nazi puppet, but when one understands the background to their characters a much more complex picture emerges.

Stevens’s employer, Lord Darlington, can’t quite understand anti German feeling. He sees the Germans as honourable foes who were harshly treated after World War one was over. So far so good, but later he extends this sympathy and sense of decency towards the later German state and fails to realise the real threat that Hitler poses.

[Another film which covers similar themes of war, honour and modernity and is also quite fantastic is Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’. All their films are superb but Blimp is particularly satisfying.]

Stevens’s convictions that “great affairs must be left to great men” is entirely outside what we believe to be correct in the modern age. His class bound ethos blinds him to the poor treatment he receives personally and to the faults of his employer while his emotionless behaviour restricts his life. Stevens’s father works in the same household and their attitudes to each other are revealing.

Nonetheless, he does appear to have a great personal dignity (many of the people he meets on his travels mistake him for a landed gentleman himself) and we sympathise with his behaviour because we can see that the son has followed in the footsteps of the father. Stevens is a real character and his actions are utterly consistent with that character. He is completely and utterly believable and he holds the entire novel together.

It occurs to me that this is what we should aspire to as writers. To create a work which is utterly gripping, which may be quite outside our normal experience, but nonetheless is recognisably authentic on both an emotional and practical level.

The amount of research that must have gone into this book has to have been absolutely tremendous yet it flows effortlessly and there is not a word within it that seems to be superfluous. Little nuggets of humour add to the whole experience. It is a quite tremendous feat and even if we don’t achieve such heights ourselves nonetheless the example provided here is very inspiring.