Review

There are novels that become permanent fixtures of the literary conscience, books you carry inside you long after the final page, whose characters resurface unbidden in your own moments of self-assessment. The Remains of the Day is emphatically one of them. Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize winner is a study in the archaeology of a wasted life, told with such controlled precision that the devastation arrives not in any single moment but in slow accumulation, like fog thickening over water.

The narrator is Stevens, a butler of impeccable professional standing who has spent his career in service to Darlington Hall, the English country house of Lord Darlington. The novel takes the form of a six-day motor trip through the English countryside in the mid-1950s, Stevens has borrowed his new employer’s car to visit a former colleague, Miss Kenton, a housekeeper he worked alongside during the great days of Darlington Hall. What unfolds is less a road novel than an interior journey: as Stevens drives through the West Country, he reflects on his career, his understanding of professional dignity, and his relationship with Miss Kenton.

Ishiguro’s masterstroke is the unreliable narrator deployed at its most exquisite. Stevens is a man of extraordinary self-deception. He describes his loyalty to Lord Darlington, a well-intentioned aristocrat who was manipulated into Nazi sympathies in the 1930s, in terms of professional pride rather than moral failure. He recalls his relationship with Miss Kenton in the cool language of professional observation, carefully avoiding the word “love” while describing, in perfect circumstantial detail, every moment in which love was offered and refused. The reader sees what Stevens cannot.

Prose and Technique

The prose is a technical achievement of the highest order. Ishiguro writes Stevens in a formal, slightly archaic register, the English of a man who has absorbed the diction of his employer class, whose very sentences reflect the discipline and emotional compression he believes constitutes dignity. The irony is that this voice, so carefully constructed to project competence and control, inadvertently reveals everything Stevens most wishes to conceal. The novel’s celebrated restraint is not Ishiguro’s restraint: it is Stevens’s. Ishiguro is, in fact, showing us everything.

Particular praise is due to the flashback structure. The interleaving of present-day observation, the English landscape, small encounters at village inns and petrol stations, with memories of Darlington Hall in its prime is handled with exceptional dexterity. The present scenes are never inert or perfunctory; they carry their own weight, functioning as counterpoint to the remembered past and gradually clarifying what Stevens has lost.

Themes

The novel operates on multiple registers simultaneously. It is a portrait of a man who has mortgaged his emotional life to a professional ideal. It is a meditation on the nature of service and dignity, what it means to subordinate oneself entirely to another’s vision, and whether such subordination can constitute a worthwhile life. And it is an elegy for a particular England: the England of country houses and landed aristocracy, of diplomatic salon politics and class deference, which the Second World War had swept away.

Lord Darlington’s tragedy, a decent man destroyed by his own misplaced loyalty and political naïveté, mirrors Stevens’s own. Both men subordinated their better judgment to an ideal (professional honour, gentlemanly codes) that proved unworthy of the sacrifice. The novel is, in this sense, a critique of a certain English disposition toward deference and emotional reticence, rendered with compassion rather than contempt.

Verdict

The Remains of the Day is a masterwork of modern English fiction. It demands active reading, the reader must supply the emotion that Stevens withholds, but the rewards are proportionate to the effort. This is a novel that grows in the memory, that becomes more devastating the longer you consider it. The final pages, in which Stevens sits on a bench at a seaside town as the evening light falls, and briefly, almost, acknowledges what his life has cost him, are among the most quietly heartbreaking in twentieth-century literature.

Ishiguro has written several fine novels since, including the extraordinary Never Let Me Go (2005), but The Remains of the Day remains his most perfectly achieved work: a novel of flawless formal control in the service of profound human insight.

Bibliographic Details

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