In Ishiguro’s novel, we find an aged Sir Gawain, famed knight of the roundtable, but he’s not a hero in any meaningful sense. Honorable knights fight to the death for damsels in distress, they aspire to impossible perfection, and they are unfailingly earnest and uncynical. In this and other ways, Ishiguro’s novel is expressly unidealistic, a startling feature given the novel’s appeal to Arthurian literature, a genre that is idealistic to the extreme. Although Arthurian literature is built on nostalgia and the mourning of past greatness, Ishiguro’s attitude is not weepy. We know-from history and from the novel-that the Saxons will win. The Buried Giant inhabits the final moments of peace and explains the return to war. The virtue of Arthur is that he was supposed to have kept the Saxons and their allied forces at bay during his lifetime, but with his death the British defenses crumbled. Ishiguro sets his novel in a period of relative peace, after the initial Germanic conquest, when Saxons lived alongside the native Celtic inhabitants of England, the Britons. The most potent, and eventually successful, of them were Germanic invaders, above all the Saxons. Various foreign powers sought to take advantage of the situation. The real historical background is this: England was the northernmost possession of the Roman Empire, but when the Western Roman Empire was under attack by the Visigoths, to whom it eventually fell in 410 AD, Romans withdrew from the island and created a power vacuum. The novel is set in the immediate aftermath of King Arthur’s reign, probably in the sixth century, though it’s always tricky to date events concerning King Arthur since he didn’t exist. The problems in Ishiguro’s world rest not with her but with its human inhabitants. Far from introducing chaos, she is a conservative force, preserving a status quo barbarically established by King Arthur. But Ishiguro refuses to let Querig take the blame for society’s ills. Crossing species boundaries, medieval beasts symbolize disruption, and for that reason pose a threat to people who need the illusion of control. The anthropologist Mary Douglas explains better than anyone the particular power of anything, fantastic beasts included, that offends our sense of order. She has wings like a bird and eyes like a turtle’s. Her skin is reptilian in texture but fish-like in color. In the manner of medieval beasts, she is a composite creature with unmatched parts.

She is no scapegoat, no externalized enemy without whom humankind flourishes. In her final days, all she wants is a little beauty to contemplate. The dragon, Querig, is old and feeble, hardly the fire-breathing enemy you might expect. But this is not a standard adventure novel. Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, The Buried Giant, is about a couple’s quest to find their son and a warrior’s quest to slay a dragon. Review of THE BURIED GIANT, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro the buried giant review