The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro – review: ‘Game of Thrones with a conscience’

Ishiguro’s tale of mists and monsters is a profound – and compulsively readable – examination of memory and guilt

In “A Village After Dark”, a short story Kazuo Ishiguro published in the New Yorker in 2001, a man comes to a village at nightfall, a place where he “had lived and come to exercise such influence”. He is greeted with a mixture of mistrust and hostility by the locals, who blame him for some terrible wrong done to the community in the past. The man, Fletcher, appears to have lost his memory, and, apart from a lurking sense of disquiet that stalks the piece, we learn little of his historical misdeeds or the reasons behind his return. At the end of the story, Fletcher is guided towards a bus stop by one of his former acolytes. The story is uncanny, dreamlike, with the seemingly logical inexplicability of dreams.

The story picks up many of the themes of The Unconsoled (1995) in which Ishiguro constructed a landscape of memory and dreams, setting within it a sfumato portrait of a pianist, Ryder, travelling to give a concert in an unknown European city. If Ishiguro’s early work – A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day – featured characters turning over the errors of their pasts, these later works appear to be about how the subconscious serves to reconfigure, to occlude, to bury the past within the tortuous narratives of dreams.

It’s Game of Thrones with a conscience, The Sword in the Stone for the age of the trauma industry

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