The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

A couple of years back, I read my first Ishiguro, The Buried Giant, which was one haunting book, a parable about the legacy of genocide which underlies “civilization.” I put The Remains of the Day on my list, and picked up an audiobook for what I thought would be a commute on a court case. Covid and other events turned that series of appearances virtual, and I ended up listening to this mostly while driving for a music gig. 

The Remains of the Day won a few awards, and was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, which sounds interesting. (Although the book is usually better in my experience…) It is easy to see why it became Ishiguro’s best known work - it is iconic and nuanced and memorable. 

 

Pretty hard to improve on that casting, honestly.

The English butler is as much of a stock character these days as the Fool used to be in Shakespearean times, and I believe that this book along with P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves books are responsible for that. While Jeeves is played for comedy, albeit as the straight man to Bertie and his friends, Stevens is very serious indeed. He is perhaps the quintessential English butler, perfect in his professionalism. But at what cost?

 

The book opens with Stevens working for Mr. Farraday, an American who has purchased Darlington Hall after Lord Darlington’s death. Stevens came with the property, so to speak. Farraday tells Stevens to take a vacation (for the first time in his life) and take the car. Stevens visits the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, Miss Kenton, now married and Mrs. Benn. Along the way, he reflects on his life and career, most of which was devoted to serving Lord Darlington. 

 

Darlington is largely based on Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Lord Londonderry. In the interwar period, Londonderry engaged in “amateur diplomacy” with Nazi Germany, becoming part of a group, the Anglo-German Fellowship, which played a dubious role in trying to bring England and Germany together. Historians consider the AGF to have been enthusiasts for the Nazis, rather than pragmatic appeasers. In the end, Hitler was able to manipulate British politics through Ribbentrop’s close relationship with the AGF, going behind the backs of the official diplomatic channels. 

 

Stevens is fiercely loyal to Lord Darlington, and refuses to question any of his decisions, until near the end of the novel. After all, his role is to be a butler, and someone like Lord Darlington has certain aristocratic values which make him better able to understand politics, right? 

 

So, that is the political context, and a significant theme of the novel. The other main plot revolves around Stevens’ personal life. He, like his father, has chosen to devote himself completely to his career, making no room for personal relationships or even a separate human existence. As a result, his father dies without him, while he serves guests.

 

Even sadder, he and Miss Kenton clearly have feelings for each other - she knows this - but he is unwilling to acknowledge that part of himself. Eventually, she leaves Darlington Hall to marry. The marriage isn’t bad, but she doesn’t really love her husband, and wonders (as we find out at the end) what might have been had Stevens allowed himself to be human. 

 

The book unfolds at a maddeningly slow pace, mostly because Stevens is unable to get to the point. He is avoiding being honest with himself (although he at least admits his memory is unreliable), and so keeps circling around to avoid emotional pitfalls. He gets off on rabbit trails numerous times, mostly musings on the nature of “dignity” and what that means as a butler. (Hint: it means failing to be with your dying father because some rich prick wants his port right now. And showing no emotion about that.) 

 

The thing is, Ishiguro does pace the book in a deliberate manner, revealing the truth so gradually, and then letting the final pieces fall exactly where you feel you should have seen them falling from the beginning. He also messes with the reader, because Stevens is both clearly a not-entirely-reliable narrator, but he also is convincing. You really do feel sympathy for Lord Darlington’s desire for decency and generosity toward other nations. At least until he fires the Jewish house staff. It is, like many issues, complicated. Personally, I think that looking back, the time to have been more generous was immediately after World War One, not once Hitler gained power. Perhaps Hitler would have died in obscurity had the Allies not tried to brutally punish Germany for the war. But once Hitler came to power, he was an existential threat to the rest of the world. 

 

The relationship between Miss Kenton and Stevens is superbly done. Although, to be honest, one does wonder what Miss Kenton sees in Stevens - he is so maddeningly unable to leave his “playacting” as a butler (as Miss Kenton puts it to him.) If he would just once act like a human, not a Butler™! But Ishiguro writes a tremendous amount of sexual tension into an outwardly excruciatingly formal relationship. 

 

One could spend time analyzing each incident in the book, including the contacts that Stevens has with “normal” people during his trip. Nothing Ishiguro writes is unimportant. All the rambling, all the delay and sidetracking - it all means something, and despite the seeming plethora of redundant words, nothing really is superfluous. It all is part of the complex understanding that Stevens needs to make of how he is and how his life has been. It is excellent writing. 

 

Ishiguro hasn’t written a particularly large number of books, but their combined excellence led to a Nobel Prize in 2017. I have a couple of his other books on my reading list for the future, and look forward to experiencing them in good time. 

 

I can’t forget to mention the narrator of the audiobook, Simon Preeble. Who was simply outstanding. His range of British accents was wide, of course, but his renderings of the American, French, and German characters was spot on. If you experience this on audiobook, look for this version.