Ishiguro took six years over his next novel,
The Unconsoled (1995). It's a biggie - at 535 pages, more than double the length of any of his others - and in a sense completely mystifying. I remember before it came out I read a piece in satirical magazine
Private Eye which said that his publishers Faber & Faber were completely bemused by it, and certainly the reviews when it came out were overwhelmingly hostile. A very few people liked it, such as Prof. John Carey on
Late Review (as it then was) while other panellists were suggesting that it should literally be
burned (!), and it's only with the reissued paperback edition, now that
The Unconsoled has shown some staying power, that Faber feel able to admit in the blurb that it was met on publication with "consternation" and "vilification." Why so? Simply because everyone was expecting another subtle, shy study like his earlier novels. What they got was a strange story of a concert pianist called Ryder who arrives in an unnamed European city to give a recital. However everything conspires to stop him from practising, meeting the organisers, and generally getting the job done. Scenes do not follow logically from one another. The sense of frustration is immense. What seemed clear to me as I read the book was that it was a dream story - which is not to give anything away as this too is now hinted at on the paperback. Ishiguro also said in an interview that the various characters were intended to represent Ryder himself at various stages in his life, and John Carey (who ultimately chose it as one of his best reads of the 20th century in his Sunday Times column, collected in the book
Pure Pleasure) had this to add:
This novel is about stress, a problem of epidemic proportions in our culture that modern fiction largely ignores.
Ryder is crippled by desire to please his parents, and indeed to please everyone, so that he finds that the resurrection of the whole 'soul' of the city is dependent on his successful performance. He becomes distracted and more distanced from his aims than ever. At the same time he cannot distinguish between his private and public selves, and hears (or imagines he hears) people's private criticisms of him as well as their public praise. And anyone who has felt out of their depth at a task, wondering when they will be 'found out,' only to end up attracting praise for a job well done, will know something of how Ryder feels. It's a dazzling and dizzying creation.
However, Ishiguro himself was disappointed by the reaction to
The Unconsoled. He was wounded by the notion that he had tried deliberately to be opaque, and declared that his next novel -
When We Were Orphans (2000) - would be a rewritten version. This seems an astonishing thing to do, but of course the resulting work is a significant achievement in itself, and only tangentially reminds one of
The Unconsoled: in the narrator's inability to work out what is happening, and his obsession with his parents. Like
An Artist of the Floating World and
The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans has a complex time structure which sees it set in a historical context and with the narrator looking back from there to earlier times. The narrator, Christopher Banks, is a famous detective - though we only hear of his skills and fame from him and have no direct evidence of them - who is, of course, haunted by the past. Like Ishiguro's earlier work there is considerable satisfaction to be had in working out where we are heading and where the narrator is really coming from, though here, as with
The Unconsoled, the narrator's unreliability is more through ignorance and confusion than wilful covering up.
His new novel,
Never Let Me Go, which StillILearn has been so positive about, is much more straightforward in narrative than most of his books, and more fully comprehensible than any since
The Remains of the Day. For me the fact that for once Ishiguro has a B-movie style scene where one character explains to another everything that has happened, was a weakness. And yet there is still enough lightness of detail and wealth of moral ambiguity to justify much strokey-chin thought after the last page has been closed, and even to warrant an early re-read.
The setting of the book is "England, late 1990s," but not as we know it. We can tell this even from the limited narrative offered by Kathy, who tells us very little of the real world outside her immediate (and past) environs. There are words dropped innocently but sinisterly: donations, carers, completing, none of which have the meanings we understand. Kathy was a student at Hailsham, a residential institution for children which educated them and encouraged creative expression, but was not quite a school... They are being prepared for lives as 'carers' and 'donors', and they are a form of experiment made possible by advances in technology which, in this parallel world, came in the 1950s but which we are only seeing now.
To say more than this would ruin the story, as there are two mighty coups of revelation delivered about a quarter and halfway through the book, which resonate through the rest of the story and are quite impossible to free from your mind. After this, there is perhaps less mystery than we would expect from Ishiguro, which is disappointing but necessary to enable him to explore the characters' reactions to the truth of their world in full. Seasoned readers of his novels will be slightly surprised by the relatively informal tone of Kathy's voice, and her willingness to talk about things like sex (has any Ishiguro character ever done so before?), though the familiar languid phrasing and unrushed delivery is all present and correct. At the same time, despite the bizarre sci-fi-ish condition of the characters' lives, they have something to say about all our lives, and how we cope with the knowledge of mortality - which is where some criticisms I have read (such as 'why don't they try to escape?') utterly miss the mark. The point is that they, like us, cannot escape. They may not even want to since (again like us) it is what they do that gives their lives purpose and function: such as it is.
Ishiguro has delivered another reliably fine confection in
Never Let Me Go, perhaps without the pixel-perfect wondrousness of
The Remains of the Day, or the mad beauty of
The Unconsoled, but with more accessibility than any of his other books and, despite the unruffled surface, a cast iron certainty to perform open heart surgery on any reader who's got one to give.