The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Book Reviews of The Remains of the Day
Book Review: Subtle, Understated, Brilliant
Summary: 5 Stars
Years ago I had a discussion with someone I had only just met, sitting at a bar or something, and he mentioned to me that he was retired, and retired from a career as a waiter. This struck me for some reason. I thought, how does he justify himself? How does one justify an entire life spent in the service of others? I thought of this when I first picked up this novel, which is also about one who has spent his life in the service of others; in this case an English butler, a Mr. Stevens. It takes place during the early to mid-part of the twentieth century, and in one of the great houses of England. Mr. Stevens' claim is that service to one who serves humanity, is--in his self-admitted small way--of service to humanity itself. It is therefore important that one performs this service with as much skill and ability as one is able to muster. It is an entirely convincing argument, made by a complex and fascinating character. But as this brilliant novel progresses, we realize that the philosophical premise on which Mr. Stevens has based his life has not remained entirely intact.
The premise of the novel is that Mr. Stevens is keeping a journal while taking a week-long automobile journey to the west of England, for the purpose of relaxation, and also to visit a former employee of his ostensibly to rehire her. It is a sound literary device: his observations of the people he meets and the events which occur on his journey keep us from getting too bogged down in his reminiscenses. Eventually, we discover that this device serves another purpose: Mr. Stevens' current actions in fact add a great deal of understanding to that which he has left unsaid in his reminiscenses, and our picture of him is greatly illuminated.
You see, Mr. Stevens is a very proud man. He is proud of the meticulous care he takes in his work, and he is proud of the stoicism and grace he displays under intense pressure. He relates a remarkable event. During the course of a dinner given for political dignitaries, and at which delicate and controversial issues were being discussed, Mr. Stevens' father, after a brief illness, passes away in the servants' quarters. Miss Kenton, who will figure prominently later in the novel, comes to let him know. "Will you come up and see him?" she asks.
"I am very busy just now, Miss Kenton. In a little while perhaps."
As she ascends the stairs, he says, "Miss Kenton, please don't think me unduly improper in not ascending to see my father in his deceased condition just at this moment. You see, I know my father would have wished me to carry on just now."
"Of course, Mr. Stevens," she replies.
How understated, elegant, and moving this is. He relates this to show us, and without being bombastic, that this is the sort of thing to which he most aspires: maintaining one's dignity and aplomb even under the most difficult of circumstances. He recalls the incident with a sense of triumph.
But if he is rightfully proud of his work, his journey causes him to reflect on the person to whom he has donated this magnificent service, and it is here, initially, that his not-so-tiny doubts creep in. For Mr. Darlington, his employer for most of his life, has had his reputation damaged, and is no longer held in the esteem he had enjoyed prior to World War II. His reputation, in fact, is in tatters.
And his journey also causes him to reflect on the relationship he had had with Miss Kenton, gone these twenty years, and to whom he is now going to visit. Without his ever mentioning it, it becomes clear to us that his feelings for Miss Kenton were much greater than he is letting on, and it is also clear that she had feelings for him. The climax of the novel is their meeting, in which they continue to handle themselves in the restrained, elegant, and understated manner to which they have subjected their entire lives. As they are about to depart from one another, Miss Kenton, whose subsequent marriage to another was not entirely successful, acknowledges that she has occasionally thought about what life would have been like with Mr. Stevens. Mr. Stevens finally lets his reserve down for one brief moment, and acknowledges to us that his heart is breaking. This scene, along with the one which follows, is almost unbearably moving.
What a masterpiece Mr. Ishiguro has created. This novel succeeds in every conceivable aspect: from the unusual and perfectly realized characters; to the careful and meticulous way in which the plot is revealed; and finally to its rich, thematic nature, one and not the the least of which is perseverance in doing a job well, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant. This book is a dazzler; the sort of thing we dream about and hope to get each and every time we pick up a novel we have not yet read.
Book Review: A true tour de force
Summary: 5 Stars
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Highly recommended.It's difficult to believe how much Kazuo Ishiguro packed into this short (by today's standards), highly praised novel -- a lifetime of work and relationships, the realization of inescapable regret, and the hope it is not too late to join the rest of humanity.
Stevens is a butler for an English house that is no longer great, nor is it owned by the family for which it is named. His postwar employer is, instead, an American named Farraday; as a stranger will point out to him later, "An American? Well, they're the only ones can afford it now." Farraday "affords" Darlington Hall by shutting much of the house down and using a reduced staff, which Stevens can understand, as the staff that would be available would not be up to his own high standards. When he receives a sad, lonely letter from Darlington's former housekeeper, Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn), and later is told by Farraday that he can borrow his employer's car for a vacation on the road, he weighs the opportunity and decides to take it for "professional reasons" -- to see if he can lure back the highly qualified Miss Kenton to her former position. During the brief journey, he spends much of his time contemplating what "dignity" in his profession means -- and whether he lived up to it. After a plethora of recollections about the late Lord Darlington during the prewar years and after his meeting with Miss Kenton, Stevens comes to two great understandings: he did not serve a great man as he thought he had, and, in doing so, he had missed a chance for love and fulfillment. His devotion to Lord Darlington has betrayed him, personally and professionally. "I can't even say I made my own mistakes," he laments. "Really -- one has to say -- what dignity is there in that?"
This revelation does not come quickly or easily to either Stevens or the reader. Each anecdote that Stevens recalls to illustrate a point he wishes to make to himself -- the definition of dignity, how he upheld dignity by serving his employer while his own father lay dying -- subtly reveals how much he has shut himself down emotionally in order to serve. With each story, it becomes clearer that Lord Darlingon is an easily manipulated man, out of his league in world politics but insistent on playing the role of peacemaker -- even when it is no longer appropriate or wise. When his friendship with a woman leads him to firing two Jewish maids, it foreshadows his attempts to influence the British government into appeasing Hitler and the Nazis at any cost. He goes so far as to say that the U.K. should perhaps follow Germany's lead. "Germany and Italy have set their houses in order by acting . . . See what strong leadership can do if it's allowed to act. None of this universal suffrage nonsense." Stevens unwittingly proves Lord Darlington's point for him -- he trusts Lord Darlington's judgment as blindly as any German trusted Hitler's, believing that "people like him" are too ignorant to make the decisions that must be made and following the great man contentedly -- and thus making a bad decision.
When it comes to Miss Kenton, here too his perception is kept in check by his need for professionalism and dignity. His repeated emphasis on their "professional" relationship and his desire to reconnect with her as a "professional" only highlight the extent to which he will go to suppress his real feelings -- and the very real possibilities that existed.
In life and love, Stevens realises he has been avoiding both. In the end, however, there is hope. After sending Miss Kenton home, back to her husband, Stevens turns to "bantering"; that is, engaging with people without resorting to pre-programmed professional phrases --in short, truly interacting with his fellow humans. "After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in -- particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth." Indeed it does.
One doesn't have to be a butler in service to others to use the remains of his or her own day to look back and appraise where one went wrong and where there is still room for hope. This is an incredible journey toward understanding, written in a concise, spare manner that fits perfectly with the character of Stevens. Few writers have the gift of saying so much in so little space. More should learn it.
Diane L. Schirf, 18 November 2001.
Book Review: The Cost of Analysis
Summary: 5 Stars
I haven't more enjoyed a novelist's craftsmanship in a long time. Ishiguro explores the same theme in all his work. Speaking of it, he says: "What I'm interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have done things they later regret. I'm interested in how they come to terms with it." Indeed, Ishiguro's characters define themselves - and Ishiguro uses the first-person point of view -- through their regrets. But ironically, their definition is incomplete, and reveals the incompleteness in their lives, because they are only dimly aware they have regrets. Ishiguro's plots are designed to aid and show the way in which each character begins to understand and reconcile his false memory and view of the world with the actual reality.
Ishiguro's use of the first-person point of view emphasizes his character's incompleteness because they are at once unreliable narrators engaging in interior monologue. This produces an interesting dissonance. In each of Ishiguro's novels the protagonists balance between their conscious intentions and the ellipses and elisions, divisions and conflagrations of memory, which in each character, subvert and obscure that intention.
Ishiguro employs the first-person narrative to illustrate the discrepancies between the narrators' current account of events and conversation with those they had remembered. It is as if in describing past events that had for long been forgotten, each narrator has finally gained enough distance to recount differently. The struggle to understand why the versions differ provides a vehicle for self-analysis. And that struggle is painful because it threatens to expose the repression and denial upon which each character carefully based his life. For each character to acknowledge that denial and repression means to admit his own emptiness or wickedness.
Ishiguro's plots are simple. They exist only to facilitate each character's internal dialogue -- this acknowledgement and admission, the tension contained by this struggle, of having the courage to face the mistakes of one's life, is exquisite. When Ishiguro is at his best, this tension threatens to break the character apart. Thus, while Ishiguro's plots may be simple and cumulatively linear - in The Remains of the Day, the farther Stevens travels from Darlington Hall, the closer he gets to understanding his life there - each character doesn't go gently. There is a limit to how much anyone can stand to know of oneself. And there is a limit to how much anyone can take at once. So Ishiguro's characters skirt back and forth between insight and defensive recoil to long-held repression.
Even when the protagonists have revelations, they are not complete. At the end of the novel, the protagonists know and accept more than they did, but their defensive mechanisms are still strong. And this makes them more realistic and believable - they are still fragile, paradoxically much stronger than if they had a complete life change.
I was at first puzzled that a Japanese writer would choose an English butler as a subject for the kinds of psychological studies he conducts. But the more I thought about it, the more alike Japanese culture and manners and English domestic service appear. One of the values Mr. Stevens's based his life was his idea of dignity: suppressing one's feelings for the greater good of being a consummate professional, which is very Japanese. The most poignant scenes in the novels occur when Stevens suppresses feelings that we know shatter his psyche. Part of Ishiguro's skill is his ability to at once describe the power of Stevens's repression while at the same time revealing how much it unconsciously or consciously costs him.
Book Review: Sunset on the Empire
Summary: 5 Stars
The Remains of the Day is the portrait of a culture in decline. This is the England that has fascinated, amused and bewildered Americans for well over a hundred years: the England of great Halls encompassing great families, of dignity, decorum and stiff upper lips, of afternoon tea and evening port, of endless nattering over details that tilt the balance of the world. Stevens the Butler manages a diminishing staff at Darlington Hall with (he fears) diminishing competence. When the narrative opens, the Darlington family has fallen on hard times and their ancestral Hall has been transferred--along with Stevens--to the proverbial rich American, Mr. Farraday. Farraday suggests a vacation for his butler, an unprecedented idea that receives an impetus through the mail. Miss Kenton was formerly the housekeeper at Darlington Hall and the closest thing to a "friend" that Stevens ever had until she gave up her position for a husband and family. Now she writes, hinting at some dissatisfaction with her life and a desire to return to her former post. Or is Stevens merely imagining these intimations? He determines to pay a visit to her in the course of his south country tour and ferret out the truth.
So the journey is defined and its goal determined; a voyage of self-discovery. But as Stevens motors on through the quietly beautiful English countryside, his mind resists the broadening influence of travel and continues to circle Darlington Hall, turning over memories with meticulous detail and banal observation. These memories reveal much more to the reader than they do to Stevens himself, who seems impervious to revelation. The fine old English virtures--restraint, self-possession, rationality--have eaten into him with the unthinking viciousness of parasites, and by the middle of the journey a light dawns on the reader: perhaps there is no self here to discover. It's no coincidence that Stevens never discloses his first name.
Britain is also struggling with identity, after a three-century rise to world domination that produced, as its signature achievement, the likes of Darlington Hall and the sort of life that "only Americans can afford now." A great and notable tradition has sunk into a caricature of itself, outdated at best and, at worst, sinister. The late Lord Darlington, whom Stevens served for 35 years, was a sterling specimen of his time and class and, not incidentally, a dupe of the pre-war Nazis. His name has come under such a cloud that Stevens is unable to claim it. Three times, like Peter, he denies his Lord--when asked, he disavows any relationship with the man. Does this make a sham of his proud profession? Stevens skirts the question, but can't bring himself to confront it.
Or to confront anything else, including Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn). Their long-awaited meeting opens subterranean sores; in the most understated, unimpeachable manner their regard for each other is made clear at last, now that it's far too late to do anything about it. To the unceasing cliches that have peppered his observations throughout the book, Stevens adds one more: "Indeed--why should I not admit it--my heart was breaking." At that moment, we understand how much of this honorable life was squandered on mere show.
The show, of course, was supposed to reflect what was underneath, and indeed it does: the ideal of British virtue that claimed everything Stevens has, now bankrupt. The evening of life is all that's left to him, and the Empire--the Remains of the Day. Still time to quit one ideal and find a new one. Will he? Can he?
Not likely.
Book Review: A masterwork of reflection...
Summary: 5 Stars
My first experience with Kazuo Ishiguro was with his novel `Never Let Me Go', which drew me in and blew me away. I have been a longstanding fan of the 1993 film adaptation of this particular novel, and so I have wanted to read it for some time. Truth be told, the idea of reading a novel about a butler's revelations didn't seem all that appealing. Some stories are better told on the big screen, for reading their plights can become rather monotonous and redundant. After reading `Never Let Me Go' though, I was so enamored with Ishiguro's magnificent writing technique that I became confident that this novel would please me.
It did, and then some.
I find it rather baffling to read some (very few thankfully) reviews that lambaste this novel for being boring or uninspired. Yes, to the untrained eye this may seem like a longwinded exercise (which I can't say I rally behind in the slightest since I was unable to put this engrossing piece of literature down and finished it rather rapidly) but quite frankly there is so much to be absorbed here.
The story tells that of an English butler named Mr. Stevens who takes a much deserved holiday to visit an old acquaintance and former co-worker, Miss Kenton. Over the course of this trip, Stevens recalls his life in segments that add layers of development over his own person and the people with whom he shared his company, namely Miss Kenton and his former employer, Lord Darlington. While it may be instantaneously ascertained that Stevens is quite oblivious to his former employers real life ambitions, the reader soon become privy to the fact that Stevens is searching for a meaning to his own existence that causes him to place unnecessary adoration on his late-employer. Stevens, a man so dedicated to his craft that he has made other people's mistakes, is stumbled by his own lack of `dignity', as he sees it. Feeling lost and inadequate, Stevens focuses his reflection on times when he felt most amenable, completely worthwhile and needed. This reflection, when recollected in like manner, paints a vivid picture of a man who is just beginning to grow outside of himself.
Some have balked that this story is far from the `romance' is it trying to be, but for me that anti-climactic finale only further bolsters the story's romantic subplot.
There is a passage near the beginning of the book where Stevens comments on the meaning of greatness, and when discerning the reason many consider the landscape in Britain to be `great' he states: "I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart." That is precisely how I feel about this beautiful novel. The `obvious' theatrics are stripped away to reveal a story that is pure and believable and relatable, no matter what your nobility.
I must also make a quick note in regards to Ishiguro's writing style. This man is a genius. I've only read two of his novels and yet I'm ready to pronounce him one of the greatest novelists I've ever had the privilege of reading. His ability to transport the reader into another world is unsurpassed. Comparing the style of this novel and `Never Let Me Go', it is outstanding to see how he was able to capture such completely contrasted personalities so effortlessly.
This novel breathes.