The Buried Giant
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This novel would be PERFECT as a short story. Honestly, Penguin Random House, make me an editor because someone should have advised Ishiguro, Hey, you have an excellent premise but if you drag it out for 300 pages, people will stop caring and they won’t like your book.
It’s set in 6th century Britain during a time of peace between the Britons and the Saxons, right after King Arthur’s rule. The land is covered in a mist that makes people forgetful. There’s some philosophical musings here about forgetting and forgiving. The Britons and Saxons have a lot of beef, and they wouldn’t coexist peacefully without the mist-spell, but at what cost?
Of note, I am just now finding out that King Arthur isn’t a confirmed real person. Do people know this? Am I okay?
Anyway, this book tries to do too much but weirdly ends up doing too little. It follows an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, moving through the mist to find their estranged son. They encounter some interesting people, but it leads to too many moving parts and compounded by the magic of it all, I never felt properly grounded in the plot. The premise had promise but it became drawn out and repetitive. We never stopped hearing about this freakin mist but there were plenty of compelling components that were left unresolved. Like, there was a teenage boy with a mysterious wound that (inexplicably) connected him with a sought-after dragon, but he was written like a caricature and he was under-utilized in the story.
It speaks to the lack of focus. I would have loved a short story about Axl and Beatrice navigating the mist, but instead it became this blurred narrative where randos popped in and I think we were supposed to care about them?
Overall, I’m disappointed in this novel because I expect more of Ishiguro. I absolutely loved The Remains of the Day; he made me care about a world that I would never have considered worth reading and the voice of his writing was so specific and well-executed. I really love thinking about that book. Never Let Me Go was a little slow-moving for my liking and the voice, while still distinct, was less gripping. The Buried Giant is also slow-moving but the voice is dull, perhaps because, unlike those other two works, he writes this novel in third-person. It has brief moments of Ishiguro’s gentle, emotional writing style, but the lack of voice is a let-down. It receives 2 out of 5 flames.
