Review: The Buried Giant

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sometimes the rules of a genre aren’t clear until someone manages to break them.

Fantasy, especially quest fantasy, is supposed to be center on the young and on memory. Telemachus is still almost a child, but he remembers his father and sets out on what becomes the beginning of The Odyssey. Bilbo’s too old, so Frodo has to go, and they know to go on the quest in the first place because Elrond and Gandalf are the only ones who remember the old lore.

In this remarkable fantasy, our protagonists are a compelling older couple, Axl and Beatrice, and they are motivated to embark on a quest to find their son because they cannot remember anything. The two have recently been told by their village elders that they can no longer be trusted to keep a candle burning in their home at night. They are otherwise almost blissful in their life together.

And put the emphasis on “together.” The two are deeply and touchingly in love. He calls her “Princess” most of the time, and she both supports and depends upon him. They seem the idea of what it means to grow old alongside someone who complements you.

They learn before long, however, that the reason they have forgotten so much is that a dragon has been breathing out a mist that produces a kind of amnesia.

In the end, two characters come to embody different philosophies for confronting that fact. One (SPOILER: Wystan, the Saxon warrior) believes that killing the dragon will end the amnesia and free everyone to a fuller experience of the world. Another (SPOILER: Gawain) argues that the forgetfulness is necessary. In its absence, he fears that old memories and old hatreds will erupt, shattering the peace and happiness of the country.

SPOILER FROM HERE ON OUT: As it turns out, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that it’s Gawain who’s right. With the dragon dead, it’s likely the Saxons will recall the awful slaughter the Britons perpetrated in an earlier generation. He and Arthur, with Axl as a key envoy, brokered a peace across the land. Then, in a deep betrayal, they killed Saxon elderly, women, and children in a war crime, and Merlin enchanted the dragon to produce the effect.

Wystan is a young hero, one who knows only that he should hate the Britons even as he comes to appreciate the old couple (who are Britons themselves). In his youth, he believes that full knowledge, full memory is just and right. He’s motivated in general by good intentions – though his hatred erupts every so often – but he risks a war that will consume the countryside.

We never see that great war – which is a skillful move by Ishiguro – but we do see how it affects the old couple. As the dragon’s mist slowly evaporates, they remember the painful – staggeringly painful – truth that their son died long ago during a plague. Even worse, they’d quarreled before his death, and Axl had forbidden Beatrice to go and pay her respects to his grave. Their quarrel was so deep that, at one moment, Axl left her to sleep with another woman.

Memory reveals, then, that the two have had a difficult life together. Once they recall it all, they vow to remain together, but they are left at the conclusion with the challenge of proving to a mystical boatman that they are a rare couple that knows true love. They insist that they are until the very end, but I read the final, gorgeous scene, as showing us Axl forgetting her on an enchanted isle that represents a kind of death.

It’s a beautiful and harrowing end, but it implies the dark philosophy that we have to be prepared to forget if we are ever to allow ourselves true happiness. That’s a vision of the fantastic that flies in the face of what fantasy has held as a kind of axiom, and it’s memorable and powerful.

Kashiguro is a chameleon of a writer, someone who seems entirely to reinvent himself at every turn. I admired Remains of the Day very much, but found it somewhat flawed. Unlike most people I know, I did not like Never Let Me Go, which I found overly contrived. This, so far, is my favorite of his work, and I feel I’ve learned a great deal from reading it.


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