Book Review | The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But at least the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased.

The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards—some strange and other-worldly—but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.

Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge and war.

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Like The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Hundred-Year-Old Man who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared, Kazuo Ishiguro's first new novel since Never Let Me Go a decade ago appears to be another of those elderly odysseys we've seen with such zeitgeist-like regularity recently—albeit one with the trappings, and the characters, of a classical fantasy.

There be dragons in this book, to be sure—alongside sprites, ogres, wizards and warriors—and you can practically taste the magic in the air of its Arthurian England. But never mind that, or the fact that its narrative is arranged around an epic quest, because The Buried Giant is at its best when it's about Axl and Beatrice, a loving couple who leave their humble home ostensibly to travel to a village a few days walk away. There, the pair hope to renew their relationship with their estranged son.

A simple enough thing, you might think, but the kicker—the tragedy, in truth—is that they don't really remember him. They don't really remember much of anything.

Perhaps that's par for the course, as Axl—rifling through the impressions of memories that have of late escaped him whilst he waits for his ailing wife to awaken—reflects in the first chapter:

He was after all an ageing man and prone to occasional confusion. And yet, this instance of the red-haired woman had been merely one of a steady run of such puzzling episodes. Frustratingly, he could not at this moment think of so many examples, but they had been numerous, of that there was no doubt. (p.10)

As it happens, Axl and Beatrice are far from the only souls, young or old, laid low by this seeping sickness. This sort of thing has been happening all across the kingdom. A plague of forgetfulness seems to have spread by way of the strange mist that's moved in, affecting almost everyone.

Everyone except Winstan, that is...

Film Review | Never Let Me Go, dir. Mark Romanek

Never Let Me Go should be a brilliant film.

From One Hour Photo director Mark Romanek to screenwriter Alex Garland, who originated the scripts of such genre touchstones as Sunshine and 28 Days Later, all the pieces appear arrayed in readiness for something truly transcendent. And of course the cast - led by the thinking man's crumpet Carey Mulligan (late of Drive and An Education) and ably supported by Academy Award-nominee Kiera Knightley and Spider-man to be Andrew Garfield - the cast is marvelous.

Never mind that Never Let Me Go is based on a contemporary classic if ever there was one; the book by Kazuo Ishiguro stands among the new century's most celebrated - "the best of the decade" according to Time Magazine - and Garland's painstaking adaptation is fairly faithful to it. In fact the single biggest difference between the estimable source material and the film is the revelation that the three characters at the heart of Never Let Me Go's narrative are clones - Donors - bred from test tubes specifically for their organs. This harrowing circumstance only becomes apparent to the reader around the midpoint of Ishiguro's novel; in the adaptation, however, the audience knows from the get-go... though Kathy, Tommy and Ruth remain woefully unaware.

 

Now change is never easy, nor easily received, but in this instance, I think, it's a change for the good of all involved, at least in theory, because Never Let Me Go has had such a wide reach that few viewers are likely to see the film of it, six years on, without some precognition of the twist, such as it is. Romanek and Garland are wise to cast aside such pointless obfuscation, and the decision to let us in on the terrible truth of these characters' lives implicates the audience in an interesting way.

Otherwise, Never Let Me Go the movie is in narrative and thematic terms much of a muchness with Never Let Me Go the book. It is the tale of three Donors coming to terms with what they are, yes - and sooner rather than later - but also who they are. In the face of utter nonchalance on the part of those people whose lives they have been bred to extend, and those institutions which have arisen to supervise the system, Kathy, Tommy and Ruth long to find love and live life in what little time they have left to them.

They needn't look far. But though Kathy and Tommy seem born to be with one another, Ruth - a sociopath of sorts played with pitch-perfect hysteria by the oft-underrated Kiera Knightley - Ruth cannily beats Kathy to the punch, winning Tommy's lust, if not his love, before quiet little Kathy can tell him how she feels. It's this heartbreaking love triangle that carries the viewer through the lives of these three star-cross'd Donors, from the austere boarding school at Hailsham where they spend their formative years to the homes and hospitals they each end up in, as they edge ever closer to "completion."

As aforementioned, Knightley equips herself very well as Ruth, and Andrew Garfield is an acceptable Tommy, but it's the two young actresses who portray Kathy at various stages of her short life that really steal the show. It doesn't hurt that Isobel Mielke-Small and Carey Mulligan actually look quite alike, yet the correspondence between their respective performances - all nervous energy and thousand-yard stares - runs much deeper, lending a real sense of continuity to Kathy's character that the other leads lack in comparison.

Nor does Mark Romanek disappoint. A director only occasionally given to come outside his comfort zone - which is to say the music video - Romanek's first feature since One Hour Photo seems somewhat removed from the clinical imagery of that Robin Williams vehicle, but not entirely: here however the filmmaker's sterile sensibilities are filtered through the necessarily more naturalistic lens of rural England in the 60s and 70s. In feeling and appearance, then, Never Let Me Go is a bleak, bleached thing - windswept, you sense, and bitterly, bitterly cold - yet it is beautiful, too.

So what's the problem? Because there is a problem. Never Let Me Go should be a brilliant film - all the parts are in place - but in the end it is no more than a faithful but unremarkable adaptation of a remarkable novel. The fault, I think, lies with the decision to arrive at the revelation that our characters are clones early on. Much as I understand the reasons for it in principle, in practice this gloss of the period during which the three Donors wonder what in God's name is going on comes at a cost: namely the development of a halfway heartfelt dynamic between Ruth and Kathy and Tommy. Lacking that, the betrayals of fate and friendship that Never Let Me Go turns on feel not exactly empty, but inevitable.

Never Let Me Go Hunting for Trailers

Just a quick one for you all today. Quick, but utterly worth the two minutes it'll take you to watch. Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2010, I give you the trailer for the hugely promising adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's deceptively speculative powerhouse of a novel, Never Let Me Go.

Bit of a spoiler here, so avert your eyes if you don't want to know it is about this apparently unassuming film that makes it of interest to genre fans...

Carey Mulligan? Andrew Garfield? Keira Knightley? They're all clones, people. Clones.

Never Let Me Go is a hell of a book, people. And with a cast like that, a screenplay by Alex Garland based on the highest caliber source material I can imagine, and Mark Romanek of One Hour Photo in the big chair, this is one to watch.

In fact, I'm going to call it right now. If audiences can get past the sci-fi angle, or indeed if the producers are smart enough to squirrel it away during the publicity blitz that'll precede the release of Never Let Me Go, it'll be this year's Atonement, easily, and a shoe-in for Best Picture contention at next year's Academy Awards.

If you haven't already, read the book while you still can! It really is all that.