Review: Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Buried Giant"
Mystic chords of memory
Several years ago, I realized that all of my favorite authors had something in common. They were all dead, for centuries, in some cases. Long years of reading dreary historical monographs and writing lectures for students had pretty much dulled my sensibilities, so that I could scarcely name a contemporary novel or novelist I liked.
Ever since, I have been working to find contemporary novelists whom I can adopt. I have read multiple books by two novelists in my search. One is Orhan Pamuk, whose novel Snow I recently reviewed. The other is Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novel Klara and the Sun I reviewed a while ago. I recently finished his 2015 offering The Buried Giant, and now humbly offer my take on that one as well.
The Buried Giant is an Arthurian fantasia which follows the journey of an elderly married couple, Axl and Beatrice. They are seeking to visit their son, who lives in a neighboring village. There is just one problem. They cannot remember exactly where he lives. In fact, their memories have become unreliable, and never in the course of the novel do we actually find out their son’s name. They visit a nearby village to inquire about their son, and learn that a mist has covered the land, which is causing people to lose their memories.
In the course of their travels, they come upon a warrior named Wistan, who aids them in their journey. Axl and Beatrice are Britons and Christians, while Wistan is a pagan Saxon, and gradually we learn that the there had been war between the Saxons and the Britons. Wistan befriends a young Saxon boy named Edwin, whom he brings along with him. Eventually, the group comes upon an old knight, who turns out to be none other than Sir Gawain, one of King Arthur’s knights, who aids them.
[Note: Spoilers to follow]
Axl and Beatrice find out that there is a wise monk at a nearby monastery who can aid them, and Wistan agrees to go with them till they reach it. When the couple arrives at the monastery, their memories begin to reveal things to them. Axl is convinced he has served with Sir Gawain, and Wistan is pursued by soldiers from a Briton nobleman named Lord Brennus. More than this, Father Jonus tells them that the cause of the mist impeding their memories is the breath of a she-dragon named Querig, and in fact, it turns out that Wistan’s king has sent him on a mission to slay the dragon. It turns out that the monks of the monastery had been providing food to the dragon but was beginning to have doubts about this.
Axl and Beatrice are awakened by one of the monks, who says there are soldiers in the monastery. Axl and Beatrice flee with the help of the monk, and they are joined by the boy Edwin, while the soldiers look for Wistan. They escape into a tunnel, where they find Sir Gawain waiting for them. He takes them to the end of the tunnel, which leads to a pit where a violent dog is kept. Gawain kills the dog, and Edwin runs back to the monastery to find Wistan, while Gawain and the couple part ways.
Edwin catches up to Wistan, who managed to kill the soldiers by trapping them in a tower and setting it alight. They begin their quest to find the dragon. On their way to find their son, Axl and Beatrice struggle with past memories, in which they seemed to quarrel. On their way, they encounter three young children, who are feeding poison to a goat, in order to feed it to the dragon. They volunteer to take the goat to the dragon themselves.
They are soon joined by Sir Gawain, who guides them to the dragon’s lair. They are met by Wistan and Edwin. By this time, Axl realizes he once fought with Gawain against the Saxons, and in fact had brokered a peace between them, which Arthur broke, leading to the slaughter of many, including children. It turns out that Gawain is the dragon’s protector, as Merlin had cast a spell on the dragon, to make people forget, as that was the only way to ensure peace. Wistan and Gawain fight, and Gawain dies, and Wistan finally kills the dragon. Wistan tells them that the Saxons are coming and will push the Britons out of their homes, and bids his friends go. Axl and Beatrice go to the west, their memories returning, as they meet the boatman to take them to an island where their son is supposed to be. This is how the novel ends.
One thing I must admire about Ishiguro is that he writes in such different genres. Klara and the Sun was a form of science fiction, while The Buried Giant is a quasi-medieval fantasy though for some reason it does not really feel medieval. There is something that does not quite fit about the world he creates but then the story calls for that. The world Axl and Beatrice know is partially lost to them because of the mist, ironically, since in a historical sense it will be lost almost completely as Wistan reminds them.
I have written before that Ishiguro is a superlative writer but not the most spell-binding storyteller, and yet this one was much more engaging to me than Klara and the Sun. My reading experience was similar, in that I came for the writing, but this time I greedily finished up the final chapters in one sitting, and even though I wasn’t quite sure about the ending—it is not clear if Axl and Beatrice are dead, and are going to the Isle of the Blessed, or a real island off the coast of Britain—but it is haunting and movingly written, Axl wading into the sea, waiting to be taken across by the boatman.
There were a few features of the novel I found puzzling. For the most part, the book is written in the third person (omniscient?) but a few of the final chapters are written in the first person, from the perspective of Sir Gawain and finally the boatman in the final chapter. I thought perhaps this was the author’s way of signaling that the couple really were passing into the afterlife, but then why do that for Gawain? It might be because he is linked to Axl. At one point, Gawain recalls Axl striking King Arthur (because he broke the truce) but Arthur treats him gently. Axl and Beatrice going to the island to find their son, suggests perhaps they were his adopted parents, perhaps? I am not well versed in the Arthurian legends, so I cannot say.
Based on a mixture of myth and history, the novel deals with themes of memory and forgetting both personal (Axl and Beatrice’s marriage) and public (the war between the Britons and the Saxon). Without doing any research on this, something makes the book feel topical. Just before they face the dragon, Wistan tells Edwin to swear that if he does not come back, he will learn to hate all Britons, even those kind to him, for what they did to the Saxons (both Wistan and Edwin lost their mothers in the wars). This, despite the fact that Wistan lets Axl and Beatrice go in peace at the end. Wistan gives a long speech to them after he has slain the dragon in which he says that “the giant, once well buried, now stirs,” and predicts the Saxons will drive out the Britons and erase their memory from the land (which is not true, since the Welsh are descendants of the Romano-British). Ishiguro’s book was published in 2015, so he might have written it by 2014—the year of Brexit. It seems like a possible allusion to me, given Ishiguro is a British man of Japanese descent. Perhaps Ishiguro was thinking of the return of the “strong gods” to use R.R. Reno’s phrase.
The idea that it is an allegory of the collapse of the Western postwar consensus is probably a stretch. (I should say that these are pretty much my gut reactions to the book, and I have done no research on the author or the book other than reading it.) What seems to motivate Ishiguro is relationships, the personal, not the political or public. The book is really about Axl and Beatrice, and the fear of losing—or recovering—their memories. (In my head, I kept comparing The Buried Giant to the TV show The Americans. The former purports to be a medieval fantasy and the latter a spy thriller, but both are really about a husband and wife and their marriage.) I am not sure if I have ever read a novel whose main characters were an elderly married couple, and I do not think I would have read the novel if that were its main selling point. But it is about as moving a picture of that relationship as I think could be written, and the end of the novel is deeply moving, and wistful.
My only other thought about the novel is that it does not make much of religion. I believe I have read somewhere that Ishiguro is a Christian of some sort, but it does not appear to feature in his novels. There is a brief exchange between the pagan Wistan and Father Jonus, Wistan expressing some skepticism about a religion of forgiveness. But beyond this, there is little in the way of the supernatural or the spiritual explored in the novel. That is probably why the story does not feel “medieval” to me, because Christianity is so crucial to anything medieval in my mind.
But that should not stop you from enjoying The Buried Giant, and perhaps my tastes are not yours, but I heartily recommend it. I also look forward to reading more of Ishiguro’s books in the future.