The Failure of Sir Gawain by William Morris
I’ve struggled for two days with what to say about The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel. I guess I will begin here: it’s a knights and dragons fantasy, an Arthurian romance, a Medieval adventure, a journey, a treatise on love and loss, an allegory, a meditation on war and peace and success and failure. It’s beautiful, it’s sad, it’s occasionally funny.
As the best novels do, The Buried Giant begins with a journey. Axl and Beatrice emerge from a barely-remembered and undefined term of darkness in their buried city with a plan to take a journey.
“You’ve long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it’s time now to think on it anew. There’s a journey we must go on, and no more delay.”
“A journey, princess? What sort of journey?”
“A journey to our son’s village. It’s not far, husband, we know that. Even with our slow steps, its a few days’ walk at most, a little way east beyond the Great Plain. And the spring will soon be upon us.”
The journey is prompted by the couple’s wish to remember. Not only Axl and Beatrice, but their entire country, where Britons live shoulder to shoulder in an uneasy peace with Saxons, is surrounded in a mist of forgetfulness. “We can’t even remember [the days when we were foolish young lovers]. We don’t remember our fierce quarrels or the small moments we enjoyed and treasured. We don’t remember our son or why he’s away from us,” Beatrice frets.
The setting of the novel is somewhere in Southern England between the fall of the Roman empire and the driving out of the Celtic tribes by the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh or eighth century. To me, a big fan of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table, I imagine that Ishiguro chose Glastonbury as the setting for The Buried Giant. Glastonbury has long been linked to Arthurian legend and particularly to Avalon, the isle of the dead, where the spirits of the deceased would dwell. In a story told by Caradoc of Llancarfan, Melwas, king of the “Summer Country,” kidnapped Guinevere while she was a-maying. It took Arthur an entire year to find her and then he and his army attached Melwas’ stronghold but it was not until Gildas, the Christian cleric said to reside in Glastonbury, negotiated a peace treaty with Melwas that she was released. (Another version has Lancelot responsible for her rescue and thus begins their affair). King Arthur and the Gods of the Round Table, David Dom (lulu.com 2013).
This becomes more important, perhaps, when the first person Axl and Beatrice meet on their journey is a boatman and one of his former, would-be passengers.
“Good lady, the island this old woman speaks of is no ordinary one. We boatmen have ferried many there over the years, and by now there will be hundreds inhabiting its fields and woods. But it’s a place of strange qualities, and one who arrives there will walk among its greenery and trees in solitude, never seeing another soul. Occasionally on a moonlit night or when a storm’s ready to break, he may sense the presence of his fellow inhabitants. But most days, for each traveller, its as thought he’s the island’s only resident. I’d happily have ferried this woman, but when she understood she wouldn’t be with her husband, she declared she didn’t care for such solitude and refused to go.”
Their next stop, in a Saxon village, brings them in contact with Wistan, a Saxon soldier, and Edwin, a Saxon teenager, recently rescued by Wistan from something terrible which may or may not have involved a dragon’s unhealing wound. Wistan and Edwin will travel with Beatrice and Axl to find none other than Sir Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew and the last surviving knight of his realm. As they quartet commences to fulfill a quest which now includes slaying a dragon as well as finding a son, they meet crones, monks, secret fortresses, pixies, hidden tunnels, treacherous allies, and ultimately, one very sad dragon. Essentially, one episode of Game of Thrones, I take it.
From Disney’s Sleeping Beauty
Ishiguro is a master storyteller and draws the reader through the landscape with increasing anxiety for our protagonists. First Wistan, then Galahad, claim to recognize Axl from the distant past. Axl himself seems to remember a time before the mist when he may have been a man of some importance, a man negotiating a peace as suggested by the meaning of his name. Beatrice, whose own name means traveler, recalls the journey of Dante’s Beatrice in The Divine Comedy, where Beatrice guides Dante through the celestial spheres of Heaven.
Or maybe I am digging too deep or imprinting my own interpretation. Alex Preston wrote in his review for The Guardian:
It is possible to construct specific interpretations for Ishiguro’s novel. One thinks of Primo Levi in 1948, feeling that If This Is a Man, his memoir of the Holocaust, was a “discourtesy” in the forward-looking postwar world. We can view the “buried giant” as the way history has been swept over any number of genocides, from Armenia to Rwanda. It may even be an explanation for the disappearance of the Britons – killed not by marauding Saxons, but by their own guilt.
Focusing on one single reading of its story of mists and monsters, swords and sorcery, reduces it to mere parable; it is much more than that. It is a profound examination of memory and guilt, of the way we recall past trauma en masse. It is also an extraordinarily atmospheric and compulsively readable tale, to be devoured in a single gulp. The Buried Giant is Game of Thrones with a conscience, The Sword in the Stone for the age of the trauma industry, a beautiful, heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to forget. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/01/the-buried-giant-kazuo-ishiguro-review-game-of-thrones-conscience
Neil Gamian, master storyteller himself, reviewed The Buried Giant for The New York Times:
Alfred Kappes, 1880
Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle huge, personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic as the tools to do it. “The Buried Giant” is an exceptional novel, and I suspect my inability to fall in love with it, much as I wanted to, came from my conviction that there was an allegory waiting like an ogre in the mist, telling us that no matter how well we love, no matter how deeply, we will always be fallible and human, and that for every couple who are aging together, one or the other of them — of us — will always have to cross the water, and go on to the island ahead and alone. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/01/books/review/kazuo-ishiguros-the-buried-giant.html?_r=0
My recommendation: read it. I think you will enjoy it. And I think there is quite a bit to discuss. Lots of symbolism. And meaning of life. And if you have married couples, you can debate whether you will be able to both cross the lake and be able to stay together once you reach the island. Just don’t blame me for the fight!
MENU
I’m choosing a menu taken directly from the pages of the book. Beatrice and Axl are guests of village elder Ivor at the Saxon village. He serves them bread, honey, biscuits, jugs of milk and water and a tray of poultry cuts.
Bachelor Biscuits — my favorites (and easy)
1/4 c. shortening
1 c. milk
Preheat oven to 450 to 475 degrees. Place flour in mixing bowl; add shortening. With pastry blender or blending fork, cut shortening into flour until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.Gently push the flour mixture to the edges of the bowl, making a well in the center. Blend the milk with a fork until dough leaves sides of bowl. Do not overmix.
Turn dough onto lightly floured surface. Knead gently 10 to 12 strokes. On lightly floured surface, pat or roll dough to slightly more than 1/2 inch thickness. Cut with 2 or 2 1/2 inch cutter, dipping cutter into flour between cuts.
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