6/11/2023 0 Comments Ishiguro the buried giant reviewThe characters address one another with elaborate courtesy and formality, even at times of stress or approaching violence. The dialogue, in particular, though baffling at first, beguiles through slow accumulation. In the manner of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Ishiguro has created a fantastical alternate reality in which, in spite of the extremity of its setting and because of its integrity and emotional truth, you believe unhesitatingly. Open it at any page and you will recognise the cadences of the cool, restrained, meticulous sentences and paragraphs. It’s less a case of “ Game of Thrones meets The Hobbit”, as one wag has dubbed it, than a novel of imaginative daring that, in its subtleties of tone, mood and reflection, could be the work of no other writer. Yet for all its flights of fantasy and supernatural happenings - a mist has settled over the land forcing people into a condition of forgetfulness, or so they believe - The Buried Giant is absolutely characteristic, moving and unsettling, in the way of all Ishiguro’s fiction. But I never expected to encounter a she-dragon in his fiction or, for that matter, the wizard Merlin, from Arthurian legend. Ishiguro has set novels in a parallel dystopian England in which child clones are being reared for organ donation in ignorance of their ultimate fate ( Never Let Me Go, 2005), and in an imaginary central European city in which a concert pianist finds himself lost in a kind of surrealist nightmare of coincidence, farce and mistaken identity ( The Unconsoled, 1995).
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