COURTESY: THEBURIEDGIANT.CO.UK
“The Buried Giant” is the first novel the immensely talented Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro has published in ten years. This fact alone was enough to persuade me to pick it up.
Early news of this book left me a little alarmed, however, when it warned that this novel was — gasp — a fantasy novel and a complete departure from Ishiguro’s previous work. (By the way – if you haven’t read Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go,” you owe it to yourself to do so.)
Certainly different from the fairly modern settings of his previous novels, “The Buried Giant” is set just after the death of King Arthur in Britain, where some mysterious event has caused an utter hatred between the Britons and the Saxons. Ogres, knights, giants and monsters roam the land — at least, according to the people. All of the details are covered by this strange mist, and the reader is never completely sure what has happened — and the characters in the book aren’t either.
Axl and Beatrice (“perhaps they are called this” the novel suggests) are an elderly couple who seem to faintly remember they have a son, possibly in a nearby village. They set out to find their son but instead, are quickly joined by Wistan, a Saxon warrior, Edwin, a young boy with a mysterious injury, and Sir Gawain, the gallant knight whose chain mail is growing rusty.
Enduring trials and tribulations as in any quest, this group, urged by an ache in Beatrice’s side, descends upon a monastery where they learn the real source of the mist and begin to realize its real purpose.
What was for Axl and Beatrice a quest to find their son becomes a quest for their memories, for a recollection of everything they have shared together. While Axl and Beatrice long to have their memories restored, some characters seek to clear the mist for possibly more sinister reasons and still others believe the mist should be protected.
In a strange style that blends contemporary and Middle English, this novel succeeds in establishing an anxious, uncomfortable undercurrent.
Because everyone is so forgetful, the characters constantly reassure and remind each other of everything, even their presence. This effect is disorienting and shadowy, suggestive of how people might act without a history to serve as a baseline. As the sinister events of the past begin to unfurl through this dark novel, the reader is forced to grapple with the importance of memory and history.
Are we better people without memories that might hold us down and further provoke our hatred for one another? Or should we grapple with them anyway, trudging ahead and fighting to live in the truth? It boiled down to this: Are our best memories worth retaining our most terrifying and horrific ones?
Similar to any fantasy novel, the book concludes with the completion of a “quest” and a dwindling love story for Axl and Beatrice, but what makes this novel such a departure is that the reader is left unsure whether good, evil or something in between has triumphed.
Don’t expect to be lulled to sleep as the knight saves the day. By the end, you will be forced to confront the possibility that our memories are all we really get to keep of the people we love, but they are also the source of our hate. As all good novels do, “The Buried Giant” holds up a mirror for you to examine yourself but leaves you wondering, a little unsure of what you have discovered.
