Reviews
I think I have been spolied by my enjoyment of Never Let Me Go, and my expectations are perhaps too high. I really wanted to love this - life after King Arthur, a loving elderly couple, a clever knight on a mission and the hunt for a dragon. The book was far too long, half could have been cut out without hurting the story or pacing. It was a slog to get to the end, and really it's in the final quarter that things really start to happen. I was tempted to DNF, but read some spoilers and thought it would be worth seeing how the end comes about. A great idea, just dragged out.
I come to this book as a relatively new Ishiguro reader. I read Never Let Me Go last year and just finished We Were Orphans (both of which I liked very much). Then I splurged and ordered this new one as soon as it was available. Comparing my reaction to some of the other reviews, this lack of "history" with the author may color my assessment. As you can see from my five star rating, I enjoyed this book a great deal. Ishiguro has woven a mysterious and introspective tale out of the mists of British legend, one with a deliciously steady build of suspense and a satisfying, but unmerciful and melancholy, sense of revelation at the end. The setting and plot seem uncharacteristic of him based on my other reading, but still offered the same probing exploration of the human capacity for love, evil, alienation, and self-deception.I really appreciate an author who can create tension and suspense, and then sustain it consistently through a novel. That was certainly true with The Buried Giant. As with those other two novels, this narrative meanders and drops hints and jumbles timelines in a way that I truly enjoyed. If you like a directly linear chronology this is probably not the book (or author) for you. I appreciated Ishiguro's method of moving forward slowly, then doubling back and doubling back again to refract the story in new ways, tease out allegiances and suspicions between the characters, and keep the reader guessing. The narrative shifts between several characters' perspectives, rather than being a first-person retelling, as he used in the novels I read before. These shifts can make the thread hard to follow at times, but I liked the challenge of that. It added to the feeling of disorientation that the story seemed to be designed to create, forcing me to constantly re-asses each character. In this case, the reason for the opacity of the story line is a more explicit plot device, rather than a function of any of the narrators' personalities, as in Never Let Me Go or When We Were Orphans. However, I felt the elements of fantasy and magic in the story were judiciously used and served the story well. I found the connections to Arthurian legend fascinating. They added to the atmosphere of mystery and foreboding (in a good way) as I tried to tie my memories of that myth to what was going on in this story. Ishiguro twists those connections to great effect, using them to disrupt my expectations and to shine a (not always flattering) spotlight on the characters' motivations in their dealings with each other. In the end, I felt like enough of my questions and guesses about the characters' pasts and outcomes were answered, without the conclusion feeling at all pat or contrived.