‘It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake alone, in the comfort of Mr Farraday’s Ford; an expedition which, as I foresee it, will undertake me through much of the finest countryside of England to the West Country, and may keep me away from Darlington Hall for as much as five or six days.’ ( Kazuo Ishiguro , The Remains of the Day)
Ishiguro’s narrator opens the novel with a rather convoluted and ponderous discussion of a projected ‘expedition’ which seems ironically named in view of its very English geographical limitations. These limitations are immediately ‘heard’ by the reader too, as we notice the rather stilted rhythm and register of the speaker. This is a narrator who reflects, and then reflects again for good measure. And indeed each word is measured against the next so that we immediately start to inhabit the world of the speaker whose rhetorical method is one of formality and fastidious measure. Thus the voice of the narrator at the beginning of Ishiguro’s novel creates an expectation of a very delineated, bounded world through the corresponding boundedness of the point of view. And, unsurprisingly, but nonetheless brilliantly, Ishiguro delivers up a world to the reader which is studied, claustrophobic and mannered to the point of heartlessness. ‘Englishness’ is dismantled piece by piece by a writer whose ‘eye’ is relentlessly acute.
A fabulously written novel whose style of narration matches the repression of the protagonist perfectly. ( Needless to say, the speaker drives me nuts!)