Outrageous Game

Frank Kermode

  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
    Faber, 263 pp, £16.99, March 2005, ISBN 0 571 22411 3

All of Kazuo Ishiguro’s six novels are first-person narratives. For the most part the voices of these narrators are quiet, civilised, rather formal. This is so whether the speaker is the obsessive butler of the most famous of the books, The Remains of the Day (1989); or one of the somewhat demented heroes of The Unconsoled (1995) or When We Were Orphans (2000); or the Japanese, guilty or exiled, of the first two books, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986). Indeed this way of speaking seems appropriate to Japanese conversation, to the talk of a society in which manners are always important, and in which they might sometimes take precedence over candour. The characters do a lot of deferring and apologising, and even when they aren’t expressly said to be bowing gently to one another you can easily imagine they are.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

Vol. 27 No. 8 · 21 April 2005 » Frank Kermode » Outrageous Game (print version)
Pages 21-22 | 3060 words