unconsoled

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled

Whilst everyone else was seemingly getting themselves upset in some way over The Buried Giant, I finally got around to reading The Unconsoled. It's a novel which appears to have a somewhat contradictory reputation, it's dream logic and narrative dislocations appearing understandably jarring to some after his first three short, apparently realist texts. It was James Woods, was it not, who described it as 'inventing it's own category of badness'? Equally hyperbolic were all those words are quoted on my edition, proclaiming it some kind of masterpiece. And I've also seen it both described as overlooked in academic analyses of Ishiguro's fiction, and damned for being exactly the sort of anti-realist text that academics are going to like.

This latter judgement at least was not exactly my experience. I came to Ishiguro through my parents' bookshelves. He was a favourite of my Dad's, although I can't remember ever discussing with him what it was he liked so much about his work. I, on the other hand, with a degree in English Literature behind me and a return to academia in my future - had I but known - stumbled with this one. I'd devoured his first three books, but failed to get more than a few pages into this before giving up in exasperation. I didn't get far enough to make any judgement on it's quality. So much for any pretensions I might have to literary appreciation, over and above my dad's 'common reader' reaction!

Reading it all these years later, I'm somewhat sympathetic towards my younger self, although I do rather wish I could advise him to not be quite so impatient! The Unconsoled is a book which requires some patience I feel, although obviously everyone will have their own reactions. Not so much for it's length, although it is a long novel, but because it seems to take time to adjust to its skewed vision of the world. By his own acknowledgement, Ishiguro is far from the most stylish of writers. There's little metaphor or simile in his writing, but an earnest fastidiousness which appears to be reflected in narrators who are frequently attempting to maintain some measure of dignity amidst the chaos of lives caught in historical situations which frustrate such attempts.

Here, our narrator is Ryder, a world famous pianist, who arrives in an unnamed European city in the wake of some undefined catastrophe. His role is either to give a musical performance or possibly a lecture instead, which will provide some positive summing up of the city's recent past and current needs. That uncertainty is typical of a text which is constantly unsettling any stable sense of reality: locations are connected to each in an impossible, dream like manner. Taking place over a handful of days, each section of the novel begins with Ryder waking. Here, the normal order of things is reversed, with waking signalling a re-emersion into the dream.

Time stretches so that a conversation which could logically occupy only a few minutes instead fills multiple pages of lengthy exposition, exposition which often seems focussed on seemingly trivial matters, matters which are taken with utmost seriousness by everyone. Ryder himself is plagued by memories of his parents in England, who may or may not be about to arrive in the city themselves, and may or may not have his own family who live in the city. He repeatedly comes across people from his past, however impossible their presence might seem. Honestly, it's hard to think of any novel which manages to mimic the logic of dreams quite so effectively.

Published in 1995, it would be easy to peg the crisis the city has experienced in its recent past to the ending of communist rule in Eastern Europe just a few years before, but like so much in this novel, this is never explicitly confirmed. It speaks to a general ambivalence about memory found not only here, but in all of Ishiguro's work that I've read. Remembering is never simple for his characters; memory reveals all of the many compromises and failings which have occupied their lives. They are all, perhaps 'unconsoled' in some way.

The logic of dreams which structures the narrative also leads it inevitably towards the surreal. One of my favourite moments is from late in the book where Ryder witnesses the bizarre 'dance of the porters', narrated with a deadpan earnestness that is by turns comic in it's situation and chilling in it's consequences. In fact, that could work as a fair description for a lot of the way the narration of this novel works. There is comedy throughout but it's so well suppressed that it could be easy to miss. Equally there's also a real sadness here, mainly concerned with the expectations of others, whether that other is a lost love or disappointed parents.

Ironically, because I've read somewhere that part of Ishiguro's intention with this novel was to write an 'international novel', and moreover a novel which is set in Eastern Europe, but I find myself wanting to class it as an example of 'English surrealism'. Certainly there's little of the 'mocking stance' which Rhys Hughes identifies with the genre, but there is a concern with 'the Show', even if in this case, it is a Show which doesn't actually go on. If the narrative functions as a dream, then it is clearly an anxiety dream, in which Ryder is forever being interrupted and distracted from whatever purpose he is engaged upon - in one case even physically unable to speak. The performance which he is so intent on giving never actually occurs, except for a single practice session in a dilapidated, isolated cabin, where he is overheard by only a single person. I've seen this scene described as an example of a 'nihilistic aesthetics', and which mocks any attempt to impose a politics upon art. Which is certainly a persuasive reading, but it's also rather comic, isn't it? In some respects, it's only the elegance and poise of Ishiguro's style which ensures we can overlook the comedy of this novel, the sheer absurdity of most of it's action.

And it's incorrect perhaps to say that 'the Show' doesn't go on. There's a curious gaiety to the final scene on a tram in which, having been finally abandoned by Boris, the little boy who may be his son, Ryder finds himself unaccountably weeping. The sadness present throughout the novel has finally penetrated his restrained surface. But then it's pointed out by one of the other passengers that there is a sumptuous buffet present on the tram, and that however bad things are, he should eat and carry on with things. And so, as it does for all of us, no matter how awful things can get, 'the Show' ultimately carries on...