The Buried Giant

"I absolutely love this book. It’s extraordinary. It’s quite different from the other books that I’ve chosen today. As you say, it has a fantasy element; all the other books I’ve chosen are more obviously realist. This is a book which is more mythic, more symbolic, and it’s also set in a different era. The medieval period is ridiculously long, about 1,000 years. The other books I’ve chosen are all set in the later part of that period, after the Norman Conquest. This is set after the Romans have left the British Isles, at a time when there are Britons on the island and the Saxon tribes have started to come over from Germanic lands. It’s a book that I find powerful in so many ways. It’s essentially about memory and forgetting. It’s about terrible atrocities that have happened between different groups of people and how they can then manage to live together, and how they can break out of cycles of revenge and trauma. It’s very obviously relevant to all kinds of conflicts—to things that have happened in Northern Ireland, or Israel and Palestine, for example. It’s a book that speaks to experiences that cut across time and space. It also reminds us that the history of this country has always been a history of immigration, of lots of different kinds of people coming here. Immigration is not a recent, 20th century phenomenon. We’ve always been a place that has a mix of different peoples and that’s been a great strength. The book also makes us think about historical fiction itself, about why we want to remember our own past. Why does it matter to us? It kind of thematises the reading experience, if that makes sense, because it is so profoundly about this issue of memory. ‘The Dark Ages’ is a bit of a contentious term because it implies not only that we know nothing about it, but also that the things going on were inherently dark. In fact, we do know some things about this period and what was going on: we have chronicles and poems, particularly as the period goes on. There’s always been some reasonable bureaucracy in this country that has left records, so we do have written artefacts. We also have archaeological evidence. And yet, at the same time, I think that Ishiguro is right that we really don’t know much about what happened to the people that were here before the tribes of Angles and Saxons came. There is debate about to what extent they were wiped out, or intermarried, or were driven out. There is certainly a space there for being very imaginative about what happened. I really love the way that he does that, the way that he imagines how the Britons were living, the way that he thinks about the relationship between the people that were here before and the people that came later. It’s a mistake to read historical fiction as a history lesson and I think Ishiguro absolutely does not want us to do that. His book features Gawain as a character, for instance, a mythic character. It also features a dragon, who symbolizes important themes in the book. The country is covered with a mist, which is making people forget. He is not trying to write a book that teaches us about what the period was like. He’s very explicitly saying that in the quote that you gave because he’s saying, ‘this is a place where I felt I could be imaginative.’ He uses symbols and so on, to try to imagine us into the time. That’s hugely effective in helping us to try to get inside the mindset of people who are struggling with change, with what’s changed in their country, with what they need to remember in order to move on, and the way in which dealing with that memory might cause real problems. It makes you think about issues to do with truth and reconciliation, how different countries or systems have dealt with the trauma of the past. The kinds of things that this book is doing are very consciously not just about that particular historical moment."