Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant: A Book Review

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After completing Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, a novel exploring England after the Norman invasion, I ventured into Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a much kinder, gentler walk through the same land, this time following the journey of an aging couple of Britons named Axl and Beatrice. This couple, deeply in love and facing the inevitable product of old age, set out to find their son, a man who had left them many years back never to return. Like much of the region, they have problems of memory—much of their personal past, the regions past, and even their son’s own face have vanished from recognition. Axl cannot remember why his son had quarreled with him, and as time passes he comes to understand that his fundamental drive and purpose had also been forgotten, for he has forgotten his life as a young man as well.

Undeterred, Axl and Beatrice set out into a land where dragons, ogres, and sprites are real. This is a place where racial tensions between Saxons and Britons exist, but while they are a powder keg ready to blow at any minute, the mist as it is called, keeps them in check. People go out for a walk, never return, and society forgets. Ogres attack and wound a boy, and he becomes an anathema, a Grendel that must be killed lest he become a beast himself. Boatmen question lovers before placing taking them on their journeys to see if their love stands the test of time, and if not, the separate the couple forever with nary a word. The Christian God is here and accepted, but to many, the mysticism of the land speaks and rules the day, the two philosophies growing in concert even if no one can remember why.

Ishiguro’s tale shows a novelist at his best. The prose, even when times are tense, remains calm and poetic, the events believable. We meet the famed Sir Gawain, but find a man broken and grayed by age, yet he defends Arthur’s cause, working to kill the Buried Giant that lurks nearby and haunts the land. It is with this giant, that the reader is drawn in, for it is the true quest, uniting an aging night, an elderly couple, and a brazen warrior for a common cause whilst each attempts to maintain their own, disparate quest.

Favorite Lines:

• “The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers. Men will burn their neighbors’ houses by night. Hang children from trees at dawn. The rivers will stink with corpses bloated from days of voyaging. And even as they move on, our armies will grow larger, swollen by anger and thirst for vengeance.” (297)

Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake: A Book Review

Much has been made of the language in Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, and rightly so. The style blends Old English with the modern, and in doing so creates a daunting visage of the post-apocalyptic life of the Anglo-Saxon farmer Buccmaster. Now this not the nuclear winter we all await nor is it the global environmental calamity standing in our path, but is the end of a way of life and thus the emergence of new way. So in a way Kingsnorth is right: this text would not stand in modern English and would be illegible to most in the Old. To understand Buccmaster, we must think like him, to think like him we need his language, his thoughts, and his culture.

Distracting at first, after a few pages the text flows, and we find our way into Buccmaster’s skull through the word play. The language imbeds, forces one to understand and comprehend just what Buccmaster should be and is. Coupled with Kingsnorth’s extensive research, the novel claws at you, dragging you down and into the era. Buccmaster is at the end of his rope. An English man in a time of French invasion, a pagan man in a time of Catholic insurrection, a father that finds himself without children, a son who once banished from his own home, and ultimately, a man who seeks to reclaim all of that in more, only to find that the world is not willing, that the old gods are just that: old and so is his now passing life. Thus the reader travels with him, looking through his eyes, feeling his pain and confusion. It is a long, slow trek, a wake that will not end at times, but one the reader will gladly endure. He builds a band of warriors only to watch it crumble, he built a family only to have it endure the same fate when he refused to pay tribute to his new king. All in all he suffers, but that is the outcome of war, something that Buccmaster, even in the end is too blind to see. His world is burning, but he is unable to make the world around him burn.

Favorite Lines

• “so it is when a world ends who is thu i can not cnaw but i will tell you thu this thing be waery of the storm be most waery when there is no storm in sight” (2).
• “angland was not in synn angland was in fear now the bastard he grows fatt on it” (24).
• “my grandfather woulde sae men does not lysten to the wise for what the wise has to sae is not what they wants to hiere for what thewy wants to hiere is that their lifs is right as they is and that they is good folc and does not need to do naht” (71).