There is a mist that takes memories: good memories and bad, lost children, old rancors and wounds. But the problems with memory and event are not just theirs all the people in their community, and even those in neighboring villages, Briton and Saxon, appear to be having the same difficulties. They have reached the age when their memories have become unreliable, when names, faces and even events slip away. Beatrice has a malady, a pain in her side she insists is nothing serious, for which she seeks a cure. Axl and Beatrice love each other deeply and care for each other as best they can.
The elderly couple are Axl and Beatrice - “Perhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them” - who start out living in a hill-warren village, ill treated by their fellow Britons. Other oddities come from the characters, many of whom navigate their way through the story as if asleep and uncertain whether they will like what they find if they wake up. The Britons have been driven west and the Saxons control the east of England, but Saxons and Britons live side by side in a post-Arthurian twilight, in a mythical time of ogres, sprites and dragons - most of all the dragon Querig, who dominates the second half of the book, in which one character needs to kill her as badly as another needs to keep her alive. Some of the oddness comes from the medieval terrain: This is a novel about an elderly couple going from one village to the next, set in a semi-historical England of the sixth or perhaps seventh century, in which the Britons and the Saxons have been at bloody war. In “The Buried Giant,” his seventh and latest, he begins with clear, unhurried, unfussy language to describe the England of some 1,500 years ago, in a novel as well crafted as it is odd. Kazuo Ishiguro is a remarkable novelist, both for the quality of his work - because his novels share a careful, precise approach to language and to character - and because he does not ever write the same novel, or even the same type of novel, twice. This has left me a little shy of talking about allegory, and very shy of ever mentioning “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
Once, many years ago, a French translator decided that my novel “Stardust” was an allegory, based on and around John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (it wasn’t), and somewhat loosely translated the book with footnotes to that effect. It is a way of making our metaphors concrete, and it shades into myth in one direction, allegory in another. It is a way of talking about things that are not, and cannot be, literally true.
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