Kazuo Ishiguro
As a child I used to read the novels of Dostoyevski, J. P. Hartley and Henry James. The characters were full of emotional complexity, bursting with motivations and sensitivities. The people among whom I grew up were simple-minded, half-animalistic by comparison.
For a long time I held the idea that the people in those times and places were more real, and that mankind had degenerated since into superficial, babbling creatures, without thoughts inside their heads.
What does this have to do with Ishiguro’s novel?
Mr Ryder, a famous musician, has arrived in a provincial city to give a concert. The citizens are worried about the direction musical taste has taken in their city over the past couple of decades. There is a lot of anxiety between them over obscure points of musical interpretation. They are concerned to give the right impression, to provide appropriate care for Ryder’s elderly parents, to ensure his stay among them is comfortable. This extreme sensitivity extends to other parts of life. The porter lectures Mr Ryder over four pages on the honour and discipline of his job, and the decline in the porter’s craft over recent years. He invites Mr Ryder to see the ‘Porter’s Dance’ – just one of many traditions surrounding the trade.
Read on …
The hotel proprietor at one point relates to Mr Ryder a series of events trivial in themselves, but which under his interpretation portend the negation of his life’s work and a future split between him and his wife. There is no bottom to the depth of interpretation in this novel. The characters have a complexity which opens inward to an infinite space.
Maybe Ishiguro wanted to portray an alternative world of dignified, deep personalities. Or maybe he just loved setting up a sense of mystery. He could have done it in half the number of pages. Once we get the idea that, for example, the porter worries incessantly about the dignity of his craft, there is no need to see this pattern implemented with other characters. Obsessive contemplation recurs again and again, just a few times too many.
The novel is ultimately disappointing. It captures an atmosphere of repressed communication, of hearts churning beneath a white shirt and bow-tie. But it captures it repeatedly, and the ending just peters out.
It’s a strange book however. It leaps back to the days before psychology, extermination, mass media and terror. It skips the whole 20th century and reclaims a sense of the diginity of the characters in this story. The drive of much modern fiction is that our motives are not as pure as we think. If a character in such a novel were to jump into life and read it, he would feel hollowed out, exploited and cast aside.
A character in Ishiguro’s novel on the other hand would be likely to commend the author on his perceptiveness and point out a few instances of misinterpretation.
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
.
Irish Times Q+A