Cannonball Read 3 Review #14 - The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-English writer who is somehow able to completely capture the restrained, reserved English personality while writing complex and developed characters who go through trying ordeals. In Never Let Me Go, the novel was centered around three friends who love and hurt each other while on growing up and then on the verge of their deaths. He expresses their pain, confusion and passion while never being melodramatic or amateur. In The Remains of the Day, the narrator is a proper English butler who has worked most of his life in a great English house for Lord Darlington. Not only is Stevens a stiff-upper-lip Brit, but he is a butler who takes his job very seriously and dedicates his life to serving his master. So when I say that he is restrained, I mean he is really restrained. Yet his story, told in diary form, is so clear and thoughtful and coherent that you don't feel a disconnect. Just because he doesn't flail around or cry out about his feelings doesn't mean we don't feel his frustration at his weaknesses, befuddlement over the housekeeper's mood swings and sadness over the decline of his beloved Lord Darlington. In the present day, it is the 1950s and Stevens works for an American man who has bought the Darlington manor after the lord's death. Stevens sets off on a brief road trip to meet with Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper of the home, and during his trip he thinks back to the days working for Lord Darlington, the height of his career in the years leading up to the second World War. Through Stevens reflections, we explore the ideas of what it means to have dignity, the social constraints of English society, and the complicated relationships in his life, both personal and professional. Stevens is trained to always do the right thing, to be loyal and gentlemanly, and it is interesting to see how he struggles to do his best while others around him falter or try to pull him down. Ishiguro's language in the book, through Stevens narrative, is straightforward and sparse, fully illuminating his narrator as a character. I can't wait to see the film, as Stevens is played by Anthony Hopkins and Miss Kenton is played by Emma Thompson. You can't really get much better than that.