Freud Revisited?

Kazuo Ishiguro has for me been a master of mood, setting, and atmosphere.  The Remains of the Day is one of my all-time favorite books, and Never Let Me Go is a stunning achievement.  As I read the press releases and reviews I was a little skeptical about his latest novel, TheBuried Giant.  But it’s Ishiguro.  Gotta go there.

The underlying themes are compelling.  Memory (its reliability or lack thereof), the need to forget, the central importance of love, the eventual emergence of truth.  All of these are fascinating and worthy of exploration.  But the tone, the plot, the vehicle Ishiguro chose to carry those thoughts didn’t work so well for me.  It all seemed a bit like a cheap Prince Valiant story, something not for serious consideration.  The end moved me deeply, but along the way I was annoyed that it took so long in the book to know what it’s really about.  That comes back to my lack of enthusiasm for the medium, for the story, the time, the characters.  It just didn’t mesmerize me the way Ishiguro has in other novels.

To spin a yarn like this one just about every aspect of the thread has to be interesting and compelling, and I just didn’t find it so.  Perhaps it’s a book that demands a second read to see how the themes are actually carefully woven in from the first page.  But I don’t have the patience to wade through all of the scenery and plot again.  At least not right now.

In a way the book is a metaphor for psychoanalysis, a process designed to recover accurate memory, see the past more usefully and allow us to move forward without the unnecessary constraints of experience. But it also has to provide page to page interest as a narrative, and there I was disappointed.