![]() ![]() Like Never Let Me Go, it appropriates many of the conventions of genre fiction, although this time it is fantasy rather than science fiction. It was in this allegorical mode that I began reading The Buried Giant. We sensed it operating in the signature tense of dystopia, the “not yet”, but also (and particularly when read alongside Atul Gawande’s recent Being Mortal– about the failure of late-life care) holding up a mirror to our present age, to the horrors of our drip-fed deaths, our inhumane, overpopulated nursing homes, our rapacious healthcare industry. The multi-million-selling Never Let Me Go (2005) marked a departure for Ishiguro, although perhaps not as pronounced as it initially seemed. If Ishiguro’s early work – A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day – featured characters turning over the errors of their pasts, these later works appear to be about how the subconscious serves to reconfigure, to occlude, to bury the past within the tortuous narratives of dreams. ![]() The story picks up many of the themes of The Unconsoled (1995) in which Ishiguro constructed a landscape of memory and dreams, setting within it a sfumato portrait of a pianist, Ryder, travelling to give a concert in an unknown European city. ![]()
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