Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. Vintage Canada, Toronto 1988. F;8/24.

After reading Ishiguro’s more recent Never Let Me Go I wanted more so started this1988 shorter novel. I had the same impression of subtle-yet-overstated characters, which might seem contradictory, but this author seems to manage coming at us on two levels through the same fictional people. More about that a bit later.

It’s mid-1950s England and the traditional households of wealthy nobility are changing hands. The mansion Darlington Hall, former home of Lord Darlington, has been bought by an American. Mr. Stevens who has been head butler there since the 1930s and has stayed on is on a several-day road trip in his employer’s antique Ford as he narrates flashbacks about his experiences in his profession. He’s received a letter from former housekeeper Miss Kenton, now married but apparently separated, hinting she might like to return. Stevens is headed for her present home hoping to renew acquaintance and possibly bring her back.

A lot of Stevens’s internal monologue concerns his definition of excellence in a butler. Near-perfection of housekeeping and service are he says subordinate to “dignity”. This includes a kind of spiritual support of his employer: participating in the employer’s great and world-changing actions. So in Stevens’s mind his role can make a difference in the world. A variety of scenes establish Stevens as preoccupied with his professional role to the exclusion of emotion.

Miss Kenton’s and Stevens’s relationship when she was employed at Darlington Hall is obviously potentially emotional as well as professional but her romantic feelings are continually frustrated by his formality. He’s critical of her physical performance to the point where she insists on his communicating with her only in writing. Lord Darlington objects to two Jewish housemaids and wants them fired, and Stevens and Miss Kenton disagree about this and she insists if they go, she goes. The two confront after the death of Miss Kenton’s aunt about which she is obviously upset and grieving, but Stevens adopts a chilly formal dismissive demeanour and then stops outside her door wondering whether he should have been more consoling.

During a particularly important meeting among his employer and dignitaries Stevens’s father who also was also a butler and now works in the same house is very ill, actually dying.

(The father) said slowly: ‘I hope I’ve been a good father to you.’ I laughed a little and said: ‘I’m so glad you’re feeling better now.’ ‘I’m proud of you. A good son. I hope I’ve been a good father to you. I suppose I haven’t.’ ‘I’m afraid we’re extremely busy now, but we can talk again in the morning.’ My father was still looking at his hands as though he were faintly irritated by them. ‘I’m so glad you’re feeling better now,’ I said again and took my leave.

It’s clear that Lord Darlington who is Stevens’s icon of a great man of world affairs is both antisemitic and sympathetic to Hitler during the late 1930s. He in fact participates directly in the appeasement of Germany. Stevens minimizes this because it undermines the train of causation supporting his idea of his importance.

As his car trip approaches the town where Miss Kenton (now Mrs. Benn) lives there’s a mechanical breakdown and Stevens stays with an obliging simple elderly couple in a small town. Taken to be a great gentleman he is the centre of a gathering where townspeople put forward some of their political ideas. Stevens, who hasn’t dissuaded anyone from their opinions about him, is driven back to his car in the morning by the local doctor and in conversation strangely defines “dignity” as not being naked in public.

(Plot alert) he and Miss Kenton meet and converse for a couple of hours, she revealing that she is reunited with her husband and quite happy. She says, “One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.” He realizes this means she will not come back with him:

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed – why should I not admit it? – at that moment, my heart was breaking.

(End plot alert)

The author is doing something similar to what I saw a bit less vividly in his later novel. The character Stevens is as clear-cut as a caricature, and we can picture him as allegory. He is (as he actually says) afraid to show himself naked to the world. He builds an apparently impenetrable wall of acceptability around himself and as a result is unable to capture his life’s greatest opportunity for happiness.

And don’t we all do this sometimes, at least a little? At times have to do it? Protect ourselves from intimacy and then miss out? And even lucky people who bravely take opportunities for happiness often end up disappointed. But that’s Isiguru’s art masquerading coyly as simple metaphor and allegory. I think there’s “more to” his Stevens. He’s real enough to touch my imagination the way someone I knew might move me to sadness. But I also experience sympathetic identity beyond the cautionary allegory. I can’t easily separate the man from his simple story, and I don’t want to.

Lovely book.

9.2 (based on my interpretation)/9.0