Book Review: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Stevens, butler of Darlington Hall, has plenty to say about the correct way to serve breakfast, the merits of the West Country, and the precise nature of dignity. He has almost nothing to say about the woman he is driving two hundred miles to see, the evening his father died upstairs while he served dinner below, or the fact that the years which mattered most are already behind him. Kazuo Ishiguro's third novel lives in that gap between what Stevens reports and what we understand, and it is one of the quietest devastations in post-war British fiction.

Small trip, large novel

The present tense of the book is July 1956. Lord Darlington is dead, and Darlington Hall has been bought by an American, Mr Farraday, whose easy friendliness leaves his butler faintly alarmed. Farraday suggests a motoring holiday and offers the loan of his Ford. Stevens accepts, ostensibly because he wishes to discuss staffing matters with Miss Kenton, the housekeeper who left years ago and who now lives, married, somewhere in the West Country.

That framing device — a week's drive through Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and on into Cornwall — is generous of Ishiguro. It gives us hills, tea rooms, wet afternoons, a village where Stevens is briefly mistaken for a gentleman, and a stranger on a bench in Weymouth who offers the kind of plain talk Stevens cannot manage himself. Around the journey the author arranges memories of the 1920s and 1930s: the heyday of the house, Lord Darlington's private diplomacy, Miss Kenton's arrival, the decline and death of Stevens's father.

The shifts between 1956 and the past often happen mid-paragraph, signalled by little more than a change of tense. Trust it. The drift of Stevens's attention is the plot.

Dignity, and what it costs

Stevens's governing ideal is dignity. He worries at the word the way other people worry at a loose thread, and defines it in professional terms: a butler who does not abandon his post, who is not shaken by whatever happens in the room. The novel tests that definition and finds it wanting. His father, once a butler himself, spends his last months as an under-butler at the same house, and dies during a crucial evening downstairs while Stevens carries on serving dinner above. He mentions it, then moves briskly on to other business. That briskness tells you everything.

Miss Kenton, meanwhile, is the one person in the book who speaks to Stevens as an equal and as a person, and he spends years politely deflecting her. The sadness of The Remains of the Day is not that something terrible happens; it is that nothing quite does, and the chances go by while Stevens is attending to the flowers and the silver.

A narrator who tells more than he means

Ishiguro's style here is deceptively plain. The sentences are formal, balanced, grammatically tidy, and the reporting is scrupulous. What Stevens cannot do is name a feeling. So he describes weather, timings, and duties instead, and lets the reader do the rest. Watch for the hedging phrases — "I do not think", "it would be wrong to suggest", "one could not fault his lordship's sincerity" — and notice how often he announces that he will not dwell on something, immediately before dwelling on it.

This is unreliable narration of the most subtle kind. Stevens is not lying. He is a man editing himself in real time, and the edits are the most revealing thing about him. There is comedy in it too: his fumbling attempts to "banter" back at Mr Farraday are both funny and almost unbearable, like watching someone try out a language they will never learn.

The politics upstairs

Lord Darlington is a well-meaning English gentleman who dabbles in foreign affairs between the wars, sympathises with defeated Germany, and is used by people with far darker aims. That the novel is about misplaced loyalty is clear; what makes it more than a period piece is that the moral failure is never announced. It arrives sideways, through the dismissal of two Jewish maids because a guest demands it, and through Stevens's insistence that his employer must have had reasons.

Stevens is loyal to the idea of a great house and a great man — and never quite asks whether either deserves it. The novel's judgement is severe but never shouted.

Who will enjoy it

• Readers of character-driven fiction. There is no mystery, no twist, no villain. The interest is entirely in a person slowly becoming legible to himself.
• Anyone drawn to the twentieth-century English country house and its long dismantling — the fading drawing rooms, the shrinking staff, the American buyer.
• Book groups. It is short, it invites argument, and it rarely produces a shrug. There is much to disagree about, especially the ending.
• Admirers of Never Let Me Go, who will recognise the same technique: restraint used as a method of delivering grief.
• Who might not: readers who want incident on every page, or who dislike spending three hundred pages inside a voice they cannot fully trust.

How to read it well

1. Keep the dates in mind. Ishiguro rarely announces a flashback. If a passage suddenly involves chambermaids and a full dining room, you have moved back a decade.
2. Follow the word "dignity". Each time Stevens uses it, ask what he is really defending.
3. Read the landscape as character. The hills, the "greatness" of the view, the pleasure he takes in the route plan: these are the feelings he cannot express about people.
4. Notice the pier at the end. The final conversation is the closest Stevens comes to honesty, and even there he swerves. Ask yourself how much he has understood.
5. See the 1993 Merchant Ivory film afterwards, not before. Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are wonderful, but the film shows us grief on Stevens's face that the novel deliberately withholds.

The verdict

Give it a quiet fortnight. The Remains of the Day is a short novel that rewards slow reading far more than fast reading, and it improves on a second pass, once you know what Stevens is avoiding. It suits long evenings, a train journey, or a rainy Sunday afternoon rather than a snatched half hour, because the book's whole effect depends on your patience being greater than its narrator's candour.

If it lands, go next to An Artist of the Floating World or A Pale View of Hills, both of which work the same seam of memory and self-deception. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, and this is the book most readers point to when asked why.

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