“Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: “One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.” So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realize that you really are different from them.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 13, 2010)

This is a magnificent achievement, one that I personally rate above all other Ishiguro novels, because it adds an unexpected and quietly devastating emotional dimension to his already-powerful armory. Although this book has something of the alternative-reality feel of  The Unconsoled, it is by no means as difficult to read. It probably beats even The Remains of the Day in the surface lucidity of its narration, and emotions that had been denied or repressed in that earlier novel are here allowed to flower, albeit briefly. Indeed, one strand of this most unusual Bildungsroman is a love story, simple, true, and almost traditional, though denied the traditional happy-ever-after ending.

It opens at Hailsham, a secluded co-ed boarding-school in the English countryside. I am sorry that many reviewers, professional and otherwise, have given away the secret of what the book is about, since the pace at which Ishiguro reveals information is masterly. First, he gives hints that Hailsham is not a normal school and that its pupils are somehow special. Then he lets drop pieces of information, though never the complete picture. Even when the book is over, there are still larger mysteries out there that are never explained. Indeed it is not only the readers who must accept the mystery; the characters themselves are hesitant to demand explanations for what they have not been told; it is part of what sets them apart as a sub-class, living apparently full lives within a cage of which they are only dimly aware.

There is a scene about three-quarters of the way through the book, after the heroine Kathy has graduated and travels widely around Britain in her own car. She takes a couple of her friends on a trip to see an old boat, beached on the edge of the Eastern fens. It’s just “this old fishing boat, with a little cabin for a couple of fishermen to squeeze into when it’s stormy.” A common enough sight along the shoreline, one would think. But for the people in this story, it acquires almost mythic significance. Kathy first hears about it as far away as Wales, and those who have been to see the boat are given the respect due to returning pilgrims. But for people who are effectively institutionalized, such outings can seem very special indeed; I remember feeling the same about some day-trips from boarding school, or later from a long-stay hospital. It is a brilliant device of Ishiguro’s to demonstrate the smallness of his characters’ world by showing the intensity of their enthusiasm for something so apparently trivial. It is one of his dominant techniques in The Remains of the Day, and it recurs in each of the four books of his that I have read.

It is interesting that Ishiguro states the place and time quite baldly on the first page as “England, late 1990s,” five years before its actual publication. Such glimpses of the outside world as we get, increasingly towards the end of the novel, are tied more closely to place and time than is usual with this author. And yet the basic premise of his story would have been impossible in the nineties. Although he is essentially writing science fiction, he needs to set it in the familiar world to prevent his readers from slipping into a special sci-fi gear. The most touching thing about his quite extraordinary characters is precisely their ordinariness, framed towards the end by long car journeys between various decrepit facilities and lonely evenings in bed-sits. The heartbreak of the closing paragraph is conjured out of a description of windblown rubbish, “torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags,” caught in a wire fence.

In each of his novels, Ishiguro seems to take a particular genre of British popular fiction and rework it to his own ends: the Upstairs/Downstairs story in The Remains of the Day, or the Great Detective story in When We Were Oprhans. Here, although the author surely owes much to John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, the dominant genre is not science fiction but the boarding-school novel. And once again, he has captured the convention to a tee; it is also clear that he has been through such schools himself. This is all the more remarkable in that this book features a young woman as narrator and a mostly female cast, and thus breaks away from the classics of the genre (for example, Kipling’s Stalky & Co) which all have a boys-school bias. But he has the adolescent female psychology down pat, especially the way that the closest friendships can also harbor intense rivalries.

Ishiguro’s appropriation of classic British tropes is parallel to what I see as his attempts to enter British society. Even today, English society is inherently dominated by class — or rather caste — with great importance placed on being a member of an in-group, and on the numerous ways, subtle and not so subtle, of reminding others that they are merely outsiders and not “one of us.” An immigrant from another culture, however talented and however well-connected, could not help but feel this even more acutely. Ishiguro’s books are peopled with characters who believe themselves to be part of a privileged elite, but are still conscious of a true elite beyond their circle to which they will never belong. The boarding-school setting is a perfect metaphor for this, beginning with shifting in-groups among the students themselves, extending to the distinctions between the older and younger students, and eventually moving into the outside world, where having been to such a school at all is both a mark of privilege and a handicap.

One might even say that it has a metaphysical component, questioning whether a life led in accordance with rules set by an unseen power that can change them at a whim is worth living at all. What, in short, do any of us live for? Ishiguro’s answer in this book seems to be that you simply have to live as best you can. I find it a strangely reassuring one.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 958 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Mti edition (August 31, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Kazuo Ishiguro
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nocturnes And another of: Never Let Me Go Another kind of “carer:” Confessions of a Death Maiden by Ruth Fransciso

Bibliography:

• A Pale View of Hills (1982)
• An Artist of the Floating World (1986) 
• Remains of the Day (1989)
• The Unconsoled (1995)
• When We Were Orphans (2000)
• Never Let Me Go (2005)
• Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009)
• The Buried Giant (March 2015)

Movies from books:

• Remains of the Day (1993)
• Never Let Me Go (2010)

“What are you, if you’re not a jazz player?” he says. But only in my innermost dreams am I still a jazz player. In the real world—when I don’t have my face entirely wrapped in bandages the way I do now—I’m just a jobbing tenor man, in reasonable demand for studio work, or when a band’s lost their regular guy. If it’s pop they want, it’s pop I play. R&B? Fine. Car commercials, the walk-on theme for a talk show, I’ll do it. I’m a jazz player these days only when I’m inside my cubicle.

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose (DEC 9, 2009)

Music, musicians, strains of regret and longing for what never will be, come together to form Nocturnes, a collection of five short stories by Kazuo Ishigiro. Winner of the Booker and the Whitbread Prize, Ishiguro, an established master of the longer form (Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, Never Let Me Go) experiments here with lighter, briefer fare and that’s what we get.

A nocturne, musically speaking, is a composition of a dreamy, languid mood. The collection’s subtitle reads “Five stories of music and nightfall.” As only a few of the stories actually take place in the night, it’s clear the metaphorical sense of the word is intended, as well. The twilight hours of a career, a relationship, the sense of time having passed too quickly, choices made that can’t be undone. Ishiguro, who himself struggled to find success in songwriting and music before turning to fiction, knows his subjects well. All five narrators are males, musicians or music lovers, looking for The Big Break, reaching, pondering the harsh prosaic reality of the business.

In “Crooner,” set in Venice, a famous singer from a bygone era enlists the help of a café guitarist to serenade his wife for reasons the younger musician hadn’t anticipated. “Come Rain or Come Shine” features an aging bachelor still trapped in the habits of his twenties, who visits longtime friends and becomes an unwitting pawn in their marital quarrel. In “Cellists,” a classically trained cellist is drawn to the praise and advice of a mysterious tutor whose own virtuosity is alluded to but never demonstrated.

“Malvern Hills” gives us an aspiring singer-songwriter, pondering his limited success as he spends the summer with his sister in Herefordshire, where she and her husband run a busy café. He helps out from time to time but prefers to disappear into the hills and his art. A telling moment comes when his sister asks him to stop playing his guitar one night so her tired husband can watch his movie in peace.

“What Geoff needs to realize,” I said, “is that just as he’s got his work to do, I’ve got mine.”
My sister seemed to think about this. Then she did a big sigh. “I don’t think I ought to report that back to Geoff.”

“Why not? Why don’t you? It’s time he got the message.”

“Why not? Because I don’t think he’d be very pleased, that’s why not. And I don’t really think he’d accept that his work and yours are quite on the same level.”

I stared at Maggie, for a moment quite speechless. Then I said: “You’re talking such rubbish. Why are you talking such rubbish?”

She shook her head wearily, but didn’t say anything.

Unreliable narrator or misunderstood artist? Indignity or oblivion? Laziness or dedication to his art? Most decidedly the artist’s conundrum, deliciously rendered here.

“Nocturnes,” the collection’s eponymous story, gives us Steve, a saxophonist stagnating in his career, who reluctantly consents to plastic surgery in hopes of becoming more marketable as a performer. This story starts out wonderfully but seems to stagnate midway, turning rambling, a touch too farcical, too long, losing its initial resonance.

This would be my greatest complain about the collection. While all the stories are diverting, they lack the distilled, elliptical style that makes a short story work so well. In The Unconsoled,” the technique of having secodary characters digress in a long-winded fashion became a key facet of the storytelling. What seemed initially like a flaw to me soon drew me in, as did the bizarre plot twists, scene shifts and subtle hilarity, which appear here in “Nocturnes.” The Unconsoled is a masterpiece (albeit one that challenges the unwitting reader). But what worked so well in a longer form seems to fall short of making its point in this collection.

Secondly, much of the prose here comes off as informal to the point of being ungainly. I know from Remains of the Day, with its aging English butler narrator, that Ishiguro has a staggering talent for penning wholly credible characters with pitch-perfect narration and dialogue. Most likely, this more casual approach to language was intentional, given the narrators’ ages and lifestyles. As an added bonus, it make the writing instantly accessible to the casual reader who might have tried to read Ishiguro’s other novels without success.

Nocturnes might very well garner Ishiguro an entirely new set of readers. The lighter, breezy voice, the emphasis on guitar, sax, jazzy music will attract what I think of as “the Nick Hornby set,” younger male readers who play the guitar and frequent music or record stores. But this collection might serve to disappoint fans of the Remains of the Day (my particular favorite) and Never Let Me Go, seeking more of Ishiguro’s haunting creations. No, this is not the same polished, simmering prose, but, that said, Ishiguro has never been one to try and replicate a winner. Instead, he goes on to experiment with new voices, new settings, fresh material, and in this collection, he succeeds.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; First American Edition edition (September 22, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Kazuo Ishiguro
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Never Let Me Go

Bibliography:

• A Pale View of Hills (1982)
• An Artist of the Floating World (1986) 
• Remains of the Day (1989)
• The Unconsoled (1995)
• When We Were Orphans (2000)
• Never Let Me Go (April 2005)
• Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009)
• The Buried Giant (March 2015)

Movies from books:

• Remains of the Day (1993)
• Never Let Me Go (2010)