Books |
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
By
Published: Dec 11, 2023
Category:
Fiction
“The Remains of the Day” won the Booker Prize. The film adaptation was nominated for eight Academy Awards. In 2017 Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech, he talks about this book:
The story is about an English butler who realizes, too late in his life, that he has lived his life by the wrong values; and that he’s given his best years to serving a Nazi sympathizer; that by failing to take moral and political responsibility for his life, he has in some profound sense wasted that life. And more: that in his bid to become the perfect servant, he has forbidden himself to love, or be loved by, the one woman he cares for.
That double plot — politics and romance — has been written before, and often. The trick here is that the narrator is an English butler who has given impeccable service at Darlington Hall for three decades. But now it’s 1956, and the castle life is shrinking daily. Lord Darlington has died. The new owner, an American who was once a Congressman, likes to banter. And Stevens is about to borrow a car and take a rare holiday. Or as he puts it in the book’s first sentence: “It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.”
More correctly, he’s going on a mission. There’s a vacancy at Darlington Hall. Miss Kenton has written him to say she has separated from her husband. She once worked as housekeeper at Darlington Hall. Perhaps she’d like to return. And perhaps… [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. To rent the stream of the movie, click here.]
A change of scene produces reflection. The first level isn’t deep. The English landscape is the most deeply satisfying in the world, Stevens muses, because of “the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle… The sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and America, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.”
By American standards, Stevens is in desperate need of a proctologist: “What is the point of worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took?” Better to think about what makes a great butler, a topic that has provoked “much debate in thought” and continues to obsess him throughout his narrative. The key is dignity, which means the ability “to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of dignity.”
More memories surface. Because Lord Darlington wanted to advance the common good of humanity, he lobbied English and European statesmen after World War I to amend the Treaty of Versailles; it was, he said, too harsh on the Germans. In the 1930s, in the hope of an alliance with Germany, he dismissed — that is, he had Stevens dismiss — two Jewish housemaids. His guests included Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister and Ambassador to Britain.
Darlington took the wrong path. As was his duty, Stevens followed. At last that stings: “All those years I served him, I trusted that I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really — one has to ask oneself — what dignity is there in that?”
He was also too dignified to tell Miss Kenton of his feelings for her. Now he has another chance. Will he take it. Can he?
“What I’m interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have done things they later regret,” Ishiguro has said. “I’m interested in how they come to terms with it. On the one hand there is a need for honesty, on the other hand a need to deceive themselves — to preserve a sense of dignity, some sort of self-respect. What I want to suggest is that some sort of dignity and self-respect does come from that sort of honesty.”
Dignity and self-respect come from honesty? Always hard to see that as a popular truth. For spiritual refreshment as well as a few hours of pleasure, reading this short novel is an important reading experience. Oh, that’s too English. Strike “important.” This novel is unforgettable.
