Dare I claim such a thing? Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for
Literature last year, as you may know. I have just re-read his early novels
written in the nineteen-eighties, A Pale
View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, two short but perfectly formed novels that have aged on my
bookshelf to the point where they are now falling apart!
I was totally transfixed listening to his Nobel Laureate speech given in
Stockholm,
when he explained how memories do not just fade but also may be
coloured, even distorted by time and later assumptions. He sees reality as
being at best fragile and refers to Marcel Proust’s ‘Memories of Things Past’ –
I found this exciting as I refer to this in my novel No
Gypsies Served when my half-Gypsy hero decides to write his life story and
reflects upon a quotation from this very book. This comes close to the end of
chapter 2.
The following day Dunstan switched on his computer with a heavy
heart, recalling books he had read in his ‘literary phase’ in his thirties, and
in particular Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, or, as he
read it, Remembrance of Things Past and he had recently come across a
quotation from it: We find a little of everything in our memory, it is a
sort of pharmacy, a sort of chemical laboratory, in which our groping hand may
come to rest, now on a sedative drug, now on a dangerous poison.
Indeed. Well, he had started something he knew he must follow
through but his reasons for trying to unearth memories, revisit his childhood
and those troubled days as a younger man, had changed substantially. Initially
it was to please Kay. How feeble and pathetic that seemed now. He had to
chuckle. It was a poor reason to commit to such a massive undertaking.
Since
dipping a toe in those turbulent waters, feeling their danger and strength suck
him in, he could see it was no mean task to rekindle emotions and recall
harrowing scenes of his life that he had conveniently tucked away for so long.
The sentiment in the Proust quotation describes well how Ishiguro's characters' recollections are sometimes unreliable. Delusion, memories that shift and slide form a recurring theme in his novels.
I
personally love his disdain for genre, as being mostly a marketing tool, and
indeed he sees the barriers now breaking down, as genres merge more and
more. I wrote a couple of blog posts in
November 2009 on this vexed question Still bugged by genres and how it can sometimes seem like
the tail wagging the dog; so this was music to my ears when I tuned into an interview and heard his thoughts. (Where he also confessed to having problems
with setting – not that you’d notice!) Like many writers he likes freedom in
writing, not the confines of a particular label and in his latest book The Buried Giant he uses myth and
fantasy.
You
might be forgiven for thinking that he was brought up in Japan when you read
his first two novels, but he and his parents came over to England when he was five years old, so as a young man he felt largely ignorant of his
homeland. Of
course the aftermath of the 1941 nuclear bomb in Nagasaki, where he was born,
was not only well documented but must have been in the background of many a
family conversation, especially where his grandparents were concerned. He came
to realise that the old way of life he could vaguely remember, mostly through
stories he had heard as a young child, may have been to some extent an
‘emotional construct’. This idea seems to flow through his characters’ struggle
to grasp memories with clarity. Also the switches in chronology – now so
commonplace in fiction were not the norm thirty years ago.
Remains
of the Day, Man Booker Prize winner 1989, and Never Let me Go have both been
made into films and he finds TV and cinema exciting. Literature in its printed
form must offer something special in its storytelling to compete culturally with the screen. He
believes that a novel can build up gradually to achieve a satisfactory
resolution, rather than is found in many films, where the viewer’s attention is
grabbed boldly only to find that the momentum may peter out. This is my
understanding of what I have heard him say and, again, is something with which
I dare to whole-heartedly agree.
