Always a new novel In his review of The Buried Giant, Neil Gaiman says that Ishiguro never writes the same novel twice. Ishiguro wants to make his thematic concerns so central that he almost seems to forget to tell the story well in the process. The novel is fantasy, but is also a disservice to fantasy, because its fantastic elements are used with too much of a light touch to ever make the story or the characters entirely believable. A reading of the novel confirms what both Ishiguro and Le Guin are saying. In a now infamous interview, Ishiguro exclaimed, “Are they going to think this is fantasy?” Champions of genre, most notably the grand dame of science fiction, Ursula Le Guin, have taken issue with this statement, which he has since clarified. Ishiguro himself has pointed out that writers today travel across genres more than ever before, while simultaneously betraying his insecurity over turning off some readers with what he calls “surface elements”, or mere devices used to make his larger thematic points. As with Never Let Me Go, readers of the hugely successful British novelist have had a mixed reaction to his bending of genre. Genre-bender Much has been made of the use of fantasy in the book. En route, they encounter Wistan, a Saxon warrior on a mission, Edwin, a boy ostracised by his community, and an elderly Sir Gawain. The duo set out into a treacherous landscape, inhabited by ogres, pixies, and the fearsome she-dragon Querig, in order to seek their long lost son. The two are beset by the same uncanny forgetfulness that seems to afflict everyone in the land, causing them to forget things in the deep, as well as recent, past.
Set in the disquieting period of truce between Britons and Saxons in post-Arthurian England, it follows the journey of an elderly couple, Beatrice and Axl.
The Buried Giant is Kazuo Ishiguro's seventh novel, and his latest in a decade.
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