It begins in an unusual narrative voice - "Most of the roads left by the Romans would by then have become broken or overgrown, often fading into wilderness. Icy fogs hung over rivers and marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land ... in the shadow of some jagged hills, lived an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice. Perhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them"
Individuals (and social groups) have hazy memories (there's mist and fog). The couple have no candles for their room - they're used to navigating in the dark. She isn't well. She has a pain in her side. They decide to visit their son who lives in another village. They set off on foot with walking sticks. They don't always recall what he looks like or where he lives.
The narrator interjects "I might point out here that navigation in open country was something much more difficult in those days, and not just because of the lack of reliable compasses and maps. We did not yet have the hedgerows that so pleasantly divide the countryside today into field, lane and meadow" (p.31).
It's a world of fable. They meet an old woman and a ferryman sheltering in the ruins of a Roman villa. The old woman and her husband of 40 years had asked the ferryman to take them to an island. He took the man and returned. He didn't take the woman. Since then, whenever he returned to the ruins, his childhood home, she would slit the throat of a rabbit in front of him. He says that the island is special, a place where people are solitary. Just occasionally there are couples who will remain a couple when transported to the island. The ferryman is the judge, and he says he'd told the woman that if he ferried her over, she's become solitary - their love wasn't strong enough. Earlier a strange woman had asked Beatrice "How will you and your husband prove your love for each other when you can't remember the past you've shared?" Beatrice hopes that seeing her son will revive memories.
Is the mist God's forgetfulness? It doesn't just affect the old. It causes temporary mass amnesia too.
They reach a Saxon village. They leave with a boy, Edwin, who's suspected by the Saxon of having been infected by an ogre. The warrior, Wistan (from the Fens, on an errand for his king) accompanies them. They meet Sir Gawain, old nephew of Arthur. It's revealed that Wistan's mission is to slay the she-dragon Querig. Sir Gawain says he will do it. The 4 continue to a monastery. Winstan claims that Querig causes the mist and that the monks are protecting her. Lord Brennus has commanded that Wistan be found. Brennus and Wistan knew each other as kids.
Soldiers get into the monastery. The couple and Edwin escape through a tunnel where they meet Sir Gawain, who slays a monster. He tells them that the monks are trying to kill them - Edwin in particular. Edwin was bitten by a dragon which makes him eager to mate with dragons and v.v. When they reach the surface Edwin rushes back to help Wistan. Edwin recalls a tied-up girl from when he was 12. He'd been raised by an aunt because his mother had been taken away. He's looking for her.
The group split. Black widows challenge the knight. Pixies attack the old couple. They survive. They meet a family of abandoned children who give the couple a goat with poison inside it to feed to the she-dragon. If the dragon's killed the mother might remember the children. Edwin confesses to the warrior that he's leading the two of them to his mother, not the dragon.
All the main characters meet on the hillside towards the lair. Edwin and the goat are tied up while the other continue. The knight, the warrior and Axl knew each other when young. Axl had believed in diplomacy. Beatrice is worried that if they get their memories back, some bad memory will split the couple. Axl claims that the knight is actually the dragon's protector.
They find the dragon. She's old and ill. Merlin had cast a spell over her, giving her the power of forgetfulness. It allowed old enemies to live in relative peace beside each other, said the knight. The knight and warrior fight. The night dies.
The knight and warrior fight. The warrior kills the knight then the dragon. He admits that his king wants that dragon killed so that the Saxons can conquer the land.
Beatrice now recalls that their son is on an island. They meet a boatman. Axl recalls that she was once briefly unfaithful to him. While they argued, their son left and died of the plague. He's been playing her along, knowing that they'd find only their son's grave. At the end the boatman takes only the wife to the island.
Doubtless I've missed much but I don't think much of the book. And why the goat? When random memories come to Axl, they often concern a moment of emotional inference, a realisation. The Axl/Beatrice relationship reminds me of the old couple in Briggs' "When the wind blows".
Other reviews
- Tom Holland (the narrator’s show of objectivity, garnished as it is with seemingly authoritative allusions to the iron age and Roman roads, is itself a deception. At times, it will speak as though from the present day; at other times, as though from an age in which its audience might well have grown up in roundhouses. Geography and details of history are similarly scrambled – and literary influences too. ... If there are rare moments in The Buried Giant when the plot does teeter into pastiche, and the swords and sorcery can seem a tad silly, then these are more than compensated for by a power and a strangeness that are, in the Shakespearean sense of the word, weird.)
- James Wood (his novels are daring in the way that they seem almost to invent their own gauges of verisimilitude ... in his new novel Ishiguro runs the great risk of making literal and general what is implicit and personal in his best fiction. He has written not a novel about historical amnesia but an allegory of historical amnesia ... “The Buried Giant” has far too much dialogue like this, more Monty Python than William Golding ... “The Buried Giant” points everywhere but at us, because its fictional setting is feeble, mythically remote, generic, and pressureless; and because its allegory manages somehow to be at once too literal and too vague)
- Thomas M. Wagner
- Susan Lever (If it is a challenge to write a novel mainly through the consciousness of a character with little memory, Ishiguro makes it more difficult by consistently telling the immediate story as recollection. ... Much of the novel is dialogue, written in a conventionally stilted and archaic mode that can become laughable. ... Much of the novel is dialogue, written in a conventionally stilted and archaic mode that can become laughable.)
- Eileen Battersby (Ishiguro quickly dispenses with this avuncular “I’, reverting for most of the novel to a detached third-person voice. But not until Axl’s dilemma is made clear: he can’t remember anything. No one can. Memory has been lost. The central theme of the novel is that of a crisis; the despair of having forgotten one’s past and the terror that could be caused by retrieving it. ... Too much of the narrative is interred beneath a tentative layer of literary allusion. The first-person voice, the witness, is a boatman. The final image brings to mind the solitude of the Anglo-Saxon lament Wulf and Eadwacer, which is considered a riddle. So is this cautionary, half-hearted novel that is not quite a fairy tale, not quite a fantasy. Instead it dangles unconvincingly somewhere between the two.)
- Neil Gaiman
- goodreads
