![]() It’s a dark, intriguing, foreign world, as the narrator - some omniscient voice that at times when telling the story takes on the collective first person tense this is our storyteller, pulling us in - tells us in the opening paragraph: ![]() King Arthur’s golden age is recent - though not well remembered - history. The Saxons have invaded and are pushing the Britons to the west. With The Buried Giant, Ishiguro surprises by writing his first fantasy novel (I’m going to call it that with no qualms - fantasy does not mean it is not “literary,” whatever that means), set around the sixth century AD in an England we know relatively little about. I’ll read Ishiguro’s novels until he’s done, in spite of the sadness I feel reporting that I am not a fan of The Buried Giant. I actually didn’t love Never Let Me Go as much as almost everyone else, but for my money Ishiguro wrote two of the great novels of the late twentieth century - The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled - and I’m a great admirer of When We Were Orphans, the novel Ishiguro published in 2000. ![]() That 2005 novel was Never Let Me Go, a strong contender on a strong Man Booker Prize shortlist. ![]() Of course, following his work has turned out to be quite easy: before this week’s publication of his seventh novel, The Buried Giant, Ishiguro’s last novel was published a full decade ago, and I’ve been anticipating his follow-up ever since. I follow few contemporary authors as closely as I follow Kazuo Ishiguro. ![]()
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