This Booker Prize winning novel from 1989, brought Ishiguro to a wider reading audience, became a huge international literary, and later cinematic, success. It has only increased in reputation since then, and could be considered a classic of late 20th century literature. I picked up my copy up for £1 in a charity shop in Nottingham a year ago. It has sat their, as the smallest volume on my pile, unread, simply because my attention was elsewhere. But after recently reading one disappointingly remote and dull novel, I felt the need of something more assured and engagingly written. I didn't know whether this would be it, but after barely a few pages in I was confident this would more than do.
The entire novel is written from the perspective of Mr Stevens, a butler in Darlington Hall. Now owned by Mr Farraday, an American who bought the hall on the death of Steven's former employer Lord Darlington. Farraday is going to be away for a season, and urges Stevens to go on holiday, borrow his Rolls and take a break. And the journey and the places he stops off in, prompt a collage of recollections about his Father, also in service, butlers he admired, what makes a butler 'great', and the changes he has seen over his time in service. He emerges as a man who has become so institutionalised he's unable to really step outside of being a butler. He intuits that his new employer might appreciate a bit of banter in their exchanges, but doesn't really understand what banter is, and makes a few cackhanded attempts to discover what banter is.
So caught up in the life of service, that he's lost the ability to think and respond to what he himself actually thinks or feels. Às he recounts a time when Lord Darlington asks him to sack two Jewish maids he does so, despite any qualms he may have. And appears to downplay Lord Darlington's flirtation with fascism the 1930's, to the point of self delusion. The housekeeper Miss Kenyon is appalled by both these events and berates Stevens for his silent compliance.
His trip in the car to the West Country is in order to meet with Miss Kenyon, who recently wrote to him. Is he misinterpreting the intention of that letter? He thinks he is going to ascertain whether she will return to work at the hall, but really is there another motivation for his visit, one that he cannot quite bring himself to fully acknowledge?
Stevens is the unreliable narrator, who you have to read between the lines to discover what unconscious feelings might be buried underneath his 'dignified' exterior. He represents throughout the novel a way of life and society that was in decline before, but has all but disappeared after, the last war .A way of being British, reserved to the point of emotional paralysis, obsessed with doing the right and proper thing, and exhibiting unwarranted defference towards those in a higher position in society.
Once in charge of running a household employing dozens, he now has to service the needs of his employer with four members of staff, including himself. He recognises that standards are slipping, including his own, and he believes he simply needs to make a better staffing plan. But this is the poignancy in this novel that Stevens' s self delusion cannot recognise how changed the circumstances are. That even he as 'the great butler' is becoming an anachronism. The novel demonstrates the decline of The Big House, and this is used as an analogy throughout the novel for the end of Empire. How even today people are still deluding themselves about regaining the colonial 'Greatness' of Britain.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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