books

There is a particular kind of sadness that only the English seem able to produce in fiction, the kind that arrives politely, takes its hat off at the door, and ruins you by inches. The Remains of the Day is perhaps its definitive expression. Published in 1989 and awarded the Booker Prize that same year, Ishiguro's third novel has settled into the canon as quietly and firmly as its protagonist settles into a room, and it rewards every reread with some new quiet devastation missed the first time through.

The premise is disarmingly slight. Stevens, a butler in his later years, takes a motor trip through the West Country in the summer of 1956 to visit a former colleague, Miss Kenton, the housekeeper at Darlington Hall during its glory years. That is the plot, essentially. What gives the novel its astonishing weight is everything happening beneath that simple frame: a lifetime of self-justification, a world order quietly disintegrating, and a man slowly discovering, against his own considerable resistance, that the ideals he built his life around were not what he thought they were.

Stevens narrates the entire book himself, and his voice is one of the great ventriloquist acts in modern fiction. Every sentence is corseted, formal, obsessively preoccupied with what he calls dignity. What makes it extraordinary is how much leaks through regardless. The novel's real technique is the gap between what Stevens says and what the reader understands him to mean, a gap that widens steadily until the ending delivers a blow entirely out of proportion with the modesty of the materials. Very little actually happens. The book is almost unputdownable anyway.

Two things Stevens cannot bring himself to look at squarely are the political disgrace of his former employer, Lord Darlington, whose well-intentioned but catastrophic dabbling in appeasement and anti-Semitism between the wars has left a permanent stain, and his own feelings for Miss Kenton, which he recognised too late to act on and now manages by not recognising at all. Ishiguro handles both of these submerged currents with remarkable restraint. There are no grand confrontations, no moments where Stevens breaks down and admits what he has done to his life. The reader does that work instead, and the quiet horror of assembling it piece by piece is the reading experience.

The Englishness of the book has been much discussed, and rightly so. The great house in decline, the American buying up what the aristocracy can no longer maintain, the sense of an entire social order being politely shown the door - all of it is rendered with a precision that feels lived rather than researched. There is also a gentle Chekhovian melancholy running through the whole thing, a sense of watching something fall apart while observing the proper forms throughout. Against this backdrop, Stevens' tragedy takes on a strange doubling quality: he is both a specific, pitiable man and a small representative figure for a whole class and era that mistook its own rigidity for virtue.

It is not a flawless book for every reader. Some find Stevens' reserve so complete that the novel remains at arm's length emotionally, and the deliberate dryness of the prose can read as airless on a first encounter. That is, in fairness, rather the point - the novel is doing something extremely difficult in staying so tightly inside a voice designed to conceal, and those who aren't moved by what is concealed may not be moved at all. For most, though, the final scenes on a seaside pier deliver one of the most quietly shattering endings in contemporary literature, and the hint of hope that accompanies the devastation is what gives the book its lasting tenderness.

It is a short novel. It fits comfortably inside a long afternoon. It will stay with you for considerably longer than that.