“The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Sometimes a “classic” is only a classic because uptight literary snobs have decreed it so. Other times, a novel becomes a classic because it tells a universal story that manages to be both readable and universally relatable. The Remains of the Day is the latter.
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper.
I don’t need to be here telling people that The Remains of the Day is a good book. It’s a Booker Prize winning novel from an author with a Nobel Prize for Literature.
But then, sometimes things like this are more of a sign a book is unreadable, loved only by literally snobs. This is why I always go into “literary” or famously award-winning books with caution. Because all too often, the people who give those awards consider mass appeal a disqualifying element.
But The Remains of the Day is a classic for a reason. Ishiguro’s work is absorbing, readable, and relatable. When I started it, I thought I wasn’t enjoying it, but I soon realised this was my mind expecting it to be dense and unreadable. But once I was a few pages in, I was hooked.
I love a story that plays with linear timelines. You could argue that the present-day sections, with Stevens travelling to visit Miss Kenton, are more a framing device for the actual story, but Ishiguro blends them both together so perfectly that one honestly feels part of the other. While the two time periods are twenty years apart, with the Second World War between them, we always feel we’re in Stevens’ world, where nothing as vulgar as a global conflict is going to make an impact on his innate sense of order. Change for him comes gradually, as it does for the English culture as a whole.
It’s strange, but I find myself wanting to use the word “cosy” to describe this book, but that’s not the right description. Maybe “comfortable” is better, but still not quite it. Is there a word for when reading a book just feels right? That being in the narrative feels as if you are supposed to be there, experiencing the story? Not in a way that I’m trying to say this is the greatest book ever written, but that it's perfect within itself for what it is?
Perhaps “welcoming” is what I’m looking for.
The Remains of the Day is a classic for a reason. Though he tells a reasonably simple story, Ishiguro paints a novel that pulls us into a world imbued with the warmth of an old, familiar blanket without even falling into the traps of sentimentalism or cliche.
