Review - The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber and Faber, 1989
PB, 256pp

The Remains of the Day has been adapted for the stage, and I'm going to see it in a couple of weeks! So it seemed a good time to put up this review, which I wrote last year as part of the Shiny New Books celebration of fifty Booker Prize years. Hopefully, after i've seen the play, I will write a but about how that was. But first, the book.

I first read The Remains of the Day (first published in 1989) more than twenty years ago now in the mid 90s, before (I think) the book was filmed. I reread it for the review, but before doing that, I put down my recollections from the 90s (yes! I'm OLD!)

In memory, then, the central character, Stevens, middle aged butler from Darlington Hall near Oxford, recalls his life in vivid episodes. The one that stood out most for me was his employer's dalliance, in the 1930s, with fascism, mainly during weekend gatherings of the English country house-party set, a fraction of which seemed to have curdled into love for Hitler.

I vividly remembered the scene in which Lord Darlington asserted that democracy had had its day, was outmoded (really, I remember thinking? In the 30s? It had hardly been tried). The humiliation of Stevens when he's invited to comment on some abstruse economic issue, his failure to grasp it taken as proof that he and his class should leave government to their "betters".

That last scene stood in - for me - for much of the book, for a man oppressed and ruled by the last gasp of an ancien regime, almost forbidden by a self-imposed code to step outside his role and live. Rereading in 2018, of course, one irony was the degree to which - after the past couple of years - the authoritarian Right is clearly not (yet) banished to the pit prepared for it.

So, what did I make of The Remains of the Day when I reread it?

Well, I’d forgotten just how riveting the book is. I went through 200 odd pages one night and the remaining 50 at a gallop next lunchtime - despite there being few ‘events’ in the story.

Yes, Stevens takes a road trip - but this is really a gentle meander giving him occasion to muse on what he’s done with his life. He has a goal of meeting Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at the Hall who walked away twenty years before, but this doesn’t actually happen till late in the book and it is a vary short episode.

While very little might seem to happen, all that does illuminates Stevens’ life and character. He was invited by Mr Farraday, the new American owner of the Hall, to go out and see his "own country" - but characteristically most of what he does see arises not from intention but from missteps or random encounters with helpful strangers. It's fascinating that Stevens is so passive. This is I think key to his character - with his philosophy of ‘dignity’, the quality that makes a "great" butler, to which he adds ideas of living vicariously (and contributing to the world) through one's master's doings, and of never dropping the ‘mask’ of the butler - unless alone. When he’s caught out of role (for example, reading a romance novel from the library) he makes such an extraordinary fuss, such a business of distancing himself, that you can only wonder what is going on underneath.

In fact Stevens seems to aspire to an almost mystical degree of self-effacement. It's not surprising then that he's so much an unreliable narrator that he actually tells us so, the version of events he gives often being unpicked later. What life, what reality, can a man like Stevens have, when his ultimate triumph is to stand in the shadows proudly serving his master even when that master stumbles morally?

Because Lord Darlington did stumble, allowing allowed himself to be used of in the murky Establishment plots of the 30s, when there was much cosying up to the Nazis. Stevens is right, of course, to point out that the (fictional) Lord Darlington wasn't alone in this. I suspect this is an episode of English (especially) history that has been kicked into the shadows, rather as Stevens suppressed any judgement on his own employer. In that sense, Stevens' sometimes painful reckoning with his past might be taken as a rather prescient commentary on the country as a whole, as might other aspects of the book.

But that’s not all there is here. The Remains of the Day is a subtle, mulitlayered book with a great deal else going on. In places very funny, but often deeply sad, it also tells the story of two (once) young people - Stevens and Miss Kenton - trying, at some level, to connect but either afraid, constrained or just too inexperienced to do so.

Both strands lead to bleak conclusions. There is the ultimate revelation of a man who sees all he has lived for knocked down. Lord Darlington is disgraced and dead, the Hall sold, the society of "professionals" by which Stevens set such store scattered to the winds (I lost count of the number of times he says he has ‘lost touch with’ one or another well-known gentleman's gentleman. Are they dead? Retired? Or is he now a pariah, given the Darlington connection? Stevens is not to be trusted on such matters and we can only speculate on this as on so much else.) There is also that lack of connection.

Stevens himself is a magnificent character, at once so stiff upper lip that you wonder he doesn’t crack his toothbrushes and also sad and vulnerable. And this is an extraordinary book, with so much to give. A worthy winner of the Booker in any year, and still so readable.

Review - I Only Killed Him Once by Adam Christopher

I Only Killed Him Once (LA Trilogy, 3)
Adam Christopher
Titan Books, 10 July 2018
PB, 224pp

I'm grateful to Titan for a review copy of this book.

This review first appeared on Shiny New Books here.

This is the final outing, as far as I'm aware (though it would be nice to have more), for Ray Electromatic, Adam Christopher's wise-cracking, Chandleresque robot detective and hitman. Ray's investigations (and assignments) are made more difficult by the fact that his memory tape only lasts for 24 hours. After that he shuts down, to be awoken by the sultry Ada, his computer-embodied secretary to "another beautiful day in Hollywood, California", with a fresh assignment and no knowledge of what's gone before.

Ray was first introduced - as detective - in Made to Kill, where, apart from cracking the case, he discovered his true nature as a killer. The pattern of revelations as to Ray's background continued in Killing is my Business (no spoilers!) so with the present book we're primed, perhaps, for the focus of the case to be on Ray, what he is, where he came from - and what his future will be.

While the stories are set in the late 50s or early 60s, some years after an attempt at introducing human-like robots - of which Ray is the last - has been dropped, Adam Christopher beautifully evokes the noirish detective classics of the 40s, both in setting and language:

"They say you should never start with the weather, but look, it was a dark and stormy night and I don't care who knows it".

I Only Killed Him Once is peppered with references to the classics, from the idea of having a man come through a door with a gun (but who, Ray wonders, said that?) to men in black suits to the diner late at night where Ray observes his latest target through the rain. (There is a repeated focus on looking in and out of windows - of various sorts - which made me thing of Edward Hopper's paintings).

There are other, more recent, references too:

'"Work of art, that is" he said. "Frame that; you could hang it in the Louvre."

"Somewhere in the back," said Philip from the memory machine.

"Hey, who cares, still the Louvre."'

I wouldn't want to give the impression, though, that this book is only enjoyable for its allusions, like some kind of puzzle. There is much more to it. I loved that way that Ray struggled with his memory limitations, still recognisably the same character even as he tells his story in a recurring, continuous present. I liked his being the same character but developing (and challenging the idea that you make a robot once, to do a  certain task perfectly, and it never changes). The curious relationship he has with Ada (who is a whole other mystery) is touching. A book like this could so easily become just a challenge - write a Chanleresque detective story who protagonist is a robot - but Christopher does so much more than that.

While, to a degree, this story is wrapping up loose ends and bringing a conclusion, Christopher gives us a good meaty plot, plenty of action and a lot of mystery. Great reading, and full of ideas, this is a fitting conclusion to the trilogy and recommended whether you like SF, crime or just want to see how the two come together.

Review: The Vagrant by Peter Newman

The Vagrant

Peter Newman

Harper Voyager 23 April 2105

HB 404 pages 

ISBN 9780007593071

This review first appeared in Shiny New Books.

‘The Vagrant is his name’ runs the strapline for this book. ‘He has no other.’

In fact, the titular character is never called ‘The Vagrant’ by anybody else and he doesn’t refer to himself as such, because he never speaks. But it describes him well. He is homeless, outcast, a scavenger. But as this is a fantasy novel, he is not merely wandering – there is a quest to pursue: he must deliver a renowned sword to its keepers. Eight years before, the demon horde rose from another reality and defeated the armies of the Winged Eye. The sword’s owner then fell to the demon leader, the Usurper, and the weapon is, apparently, a key to victory or defeat: both sides now covet it.

If you’re not a reader of fantasy, that may sound like an offputting summary of a stereotype fantasy novel. I hope that I can convince you otherwise, because

this isn’t an ‘ordinary’ fantasy novel. As he strides through the demon-infested wasteland, the Vagrant also has a baby to care for: to feed (he acquires a goat to supply milk), to clean, to entertain and (when she becomes ill) to find medicine for.  And there is more, much more. Those who do read fantasy will of course know already that it’s a varied and surprising genre and that the ‘ordinary’ version, while it exists, is paradoxically not representative and that you never really know what to expect – but this book makes that point in spades.

One can only admire both the Vagrant’s determination (how DO you get out of a tricky situation when you can’t draw your sword for fear of dropping Baby and you can’t talk your way out because you can’t talk?) and Newman’s confidence in his storytelling, especially given this is a first novel.  Both do, however, pay off as the book moves through a series of ever more perilous, ever more intricate adventures.  Luckily (…perhaps…) the wasteland isn’t completely empty. There are shattered towns, and shattered people.  Food, shelter and even medicine are available, at a price. But the people are desperate and even more of a threat than the demons. There are dark trades in human flesh. There is collaboration with the occupiers. Everywhere, the struggle for survival taints the spirit as the demon-stuff taints the body.

These demons aren’t just scaly monsters from the Abyss, they are formed from an essence, an undifferentiated, fluid contagion that flows through and transforms things, bringing mutations to humans and animals and sometimes congealing dead (or living) bodies to create a new being.  Such are the Uncivil, the Usurper, the Half-Alive, the Hammer and the feared Knights of Jade and Ash.  The descriptions of some of the fully demonic – dark souls cloaked in vestments made of reanimated, fused human bodies – are vivid and truly horrifying and the transformed humans no less disturbing.

It is a strength of the book that all the creatures that the Vagrant he meets –demon, corrupted human or wretched survivor – are fully rounded and, often sympathetic, even the ‘monsters’.  The Vagrant himself senses this. As he travels among these wretched folk, he seeks to retain his own humanity and can’t but try to help – defending a village here, freeing a group of prisoners there, paying for food he recovers from a band of marauders who stole it from him.  When he cannot help, and has to abandon to death a woman who aided him, he rages (and Newman is adroit at showing, not telling, you this, even without speech).  The tone and setting reminded me somewhat of a Western: the Man With No Name comes into town, standing up against the outlaws and improbably rallying the townsfolk – but always risks losing his way, becoming one of his enemies.

And like the best Westerns, the book doesn’t deal in black and white. There are no rescuers. When we eventually meet the remnants of the force the demons overcame, the Seraph Knights of the Winged Eye, they’re an aloof, arrogant and entitled lot, obsessed with ‘purity’ and expunging the demon taint, even if it means killing those who carry it. At one level, there isn’t much to choose between the demon army and the Winged Eye, indeed in some respects the demons themselves are more sympathetic, more capable of change and possibly redemption. Some offer (dubious) compromise and try to make a reality of the new mixed world created by their eruption from the Breach. In contrast, the Winged Eye shelter behind their force barrier, maintaining their purity and waiting for the magic sword that will save them (but rather scorning the ragged man who carries it).

While most of the action of the story takes place in the present there is a series of flashbacks, describing how the demons came into the world and who, and what, the Vagrant is. I generally don’t like too much flashback but these episodes are integrated well and there are not too many of them. My only (slight) criticism of the book would be that there is a slight jarring between these events purportedly having begun eight years before, and the descriptions of the wasteland and its people which seem to suggest a much longer period of decay and decline. But that’s to nitpick.  It’s a compelling and vivid world, peopled by well rounded and sometimes tragic characters (I’d defy anyone not to cry over the fate of one, in particular, of the Vagrant’s band).

Newman explores prejudice and redemption, the need for compassion set against the drive for survival, even the treatment of refugees (regarded by one side as at best useless mouths, by the other as a source of body parts and slaves). The choice to make his central character voiceless seems risky to begin with, but pays off brilliantly in this intelligent, readable and absorbing novel.