Monday, January 21, 2019

the last book I read

The Remains Of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

What ho, Jeeves! Hardest game in the world, the old butlering game. Having to be on top of everything that's going on in the house, organising staff rotas, coping with armies of braying hoorays turning up for dinner unannounced, keeping his lordship's eye-wateringly sordid sexual peccadilloes discreetly under wraps, while all the time maintaining rigid standards of personal presentation and deportment. It'd be easy under pressure to allow a dirty fork to slip through to his lordship's place setting, but that sort of sloppiness simply can't be allowed to happen.

Mr Stevens has things well in hand at Darlington Hall, though, so there's no cause for concern there. Which isn't to say that there haven't been some recent upheavals - Lord Darlington, to whom Stevens gave several decades of unstinting service, has recently died and the house has been purchased by an American, Mr Farraday. Mr Farraday is still mostly living on the other side of the Atlantic, so the house is making do with a skeleton staff, and Stevens is even contemplating a short holiday, especially since Mr Farraday has offered him the use of one of his fancy cars to swan around in.

It turns out that there may be an ulterior motive for this uncharacteristic adventurousness - Stevens has received a letter from the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, Miss Kenton. Or at least she was Miss Kenton when she was employed at the house; she has since got married and is now Mrs Benn. Stevens has an eye on recruiting more staff for the house once Mr Farraday is properly installed, and has inferred that she may be unsatisfied with both her current occupation and her marriage. So with an objective in mind - visit Miss Kenton, renew their acquaintance and discreetly sound her out about a possible return to Darlington Hall - he prepares to set off down towards Cornwall.

So Stevens sets off on his road trip, and with that framing device now successfully set up, we set off on a trip back into the past to find out some details about Stevens' long service to Lord Darlington and the circumstances of his previous acquaintance with Miss Kenton. Stevens comes from a family of butlers, indeed his father had been one before him, and in fact in his later years worked at Darlington Hall as an under-butler to his son. We learn of the circumstances of Stevens senior's death on a night where the house is busy with a gathering for many international dignitaries and Stevens jr. has to divide his time between attending to the doctor who is attending to his father, and maintaining the utmost professional standards when some boorish Frenchman wants some more brandy. Stevens reflects on what makes a "great" butler and concludes that part of it is this sort of icy professional detachment and discretion.

Stevens' formative years as Lord Darlington's butler were between the wars, the 1930s in particular. Lord Darlington fancied himself as something of a facilitator of Great Men meeting up to discuss Great Things, and hosted a few dinners where diplomats, including some from the burgeoning Nazi regime, met up to do clandestine deals. It soon becomes clear that Lord Darlington hadn't taken quite as firm an anti-Nazi line as one might have wished for in hindsight, and that there was an unpleasant episode where he demanded the sacking of a couple of German-Jewish members of the housekeeping staff, much to Miss Kenton's distress.

Ah, Miss Kenton. An impeccably thorough and professional housekeeper, she and Mr Stevens develop a professional relationship based on deep mutual respect and admiration, and allow themselves some moments of informality at the end of the working day to converse in a more relaxed manner. This is not something that necessarily comes easily to Stevens, and their friendship is punctuated by occasional misunderstandings and huffy stalkings-off to the parlour. But basically in a quintessentially 1930s way Miss Kenton is wearing a sign that says AVAILABLE, or possibly RIDE ME LIKE ONE OF LORD DARLINGTON'S PRIZE MARES and Stevens is too wrapped up with his job, or, dammit, just too British to be able either to see it or act on it.

Eventually Miss Kenton gets bored with waiting for Stevens to put down the silver polish and bend her over the scullery table and accepts a proposal of marriage from a suitor she has been spending occasional evenings with (and who is called, presumably, Mr. Benn). And so Miss Kenton leaves the house, never to be seen by Stevens again, Until now, perhaps. Stevens' motoring odyssey through south-western England eventually takes him to Cornwall, where Miss Kenton now resides, and a meeting in a hotel tea-room wherein reminiscences are shared and a friendship is rekindled. But all good things come to an end and Mrs Benn must return to her husband. Mr Stevens gives her a lift in his motor car as far as the bus stop, where there is time for a brief conversation where the mask is allowed to slip just briefly and some true feelings are revealed, before the bus arrives, everyone pulls themselves together and they return to their separate lives.

Now, I want you to stay with me here, but this is not principally a novel about either English country houses or the minutiae of butlering, even though those things are discussed in some detail. It is, in its own buttoned-up and repressed way, a love story, though one primarily involving love thwarted and frustrated by societal conventions and notions of duty and service that seem quaintly old-fashioned now. Stevens is, in his own way, an archetypal unreliable narrator, although as this review says, "unwitting narrator" might be a better description, since it is not Steven's intention to deceive. Or, to put it another way, the person he is principally deceiving is himself. But how else to come to terms in his own mind with the fact that the man he devoted most of his life to serving chose the wrong side in the defining conflict of the age, and that he himself spurned the chance of love and happiness in favour of remaining in this man's service? Not to mention failing to be with his father in his final moments just to ensure he was at some drunken aristocrat's elbow in case he needed another snifter of port.

Just about my only reservation about The Remains Of The Day is the same stylistic one that I had with The Birthday Boys, i.e. it's a novel supposedly written from a first-person viewpoint in something resembling real time, but it's not completely clear by what medium the words are being delivered from the central character's voice to our ear. It could in this case be Stevens' journal, which he could be jotting in in the various inns and boarding-houses he stays in around Devon and Cornwall, but it's never entirely clear. Delivering the narrative this way allows for further stylistic tricks, though, principally the delivering of the whole thing in a very specific kind of formal circumlocutory style which never uses a couple of words where a couple of dozen will do. Part of the purpose of this, of course, is to make the moment where Stevens' icy detachment slips for a moment (and the reader has to wait until about half-a-dozen pages from the end for it to happen) all the more quietly devastating, and in that regard it works pretty well.

This is the second Ishiguro on this list after Never Let Me Go, and they're quite different books; The Remains Of The Day is written in a taut, repressed style befitting its narrator while Never Let Me Go is much more relaxed. They are both excellent, though, and I would recommend them both highly. As mentioned here Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. The Remains Of The Day also won the Booker Prize in 1989, and therefore joins the list of Booker winners featured on this blog, most recently Wolf Hall. It is suggested here that four out of the six Booker nominees is the most I've managed in any given year (and that those years were 1984 and 2001); well, I've now read four from the 1989 shortlist as well, Cat's Eye, The Book Of Evidence and A Disaffection being the other three.

The Remains Of The Day was made into a film in 1993 (my Faber paperback, as you can see, is a film tie-in edition), starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson and much-garlanded with Oscar nominations (although it didn't win any). I've never seen it, but it looks like a pretty faithful adaptation of the book.