Gawain has his own duties, which he claims involves slaying the dragon. Ishiguro’s Britain is a land of fantasy: full of ogres, magic mists, a series of Charon-like ferrymen, a dragon, water pixies, and King Arthur, who is now dead, but whose faithful servant and nephew Sir Gawain remains to uphold the Arthurian legend. Hatred is impossible to maintain without memories, but so is identity and Axl is particular finds himself cut off from the man he once was – a man is recognised by others as he moves through his journey.
Most of the novel focuses on Axl and Beatrice’s attempts to recover both their memories and the sense of self that has disappeared with these memories. Everyone seems to be under the spell of forgetting, due to the “mist” which surrounds the land. The setting is Britain in 450 AD, and the two main characters, elderly husband and wife Axl and Beatrice, are on something of a quest to reach their son’s village, and perhaps recover some of their lost memories. The actual revelation doesn’t truly arrive until the very end, and even then, much remains unclear. At the surface, surprisingly little happens, though the novel always seems on the brink of revelation and transition. So much happens in subtext that it’s as if inference were the main plot, drawing meaning through layers of allegory. The Buried Giant has all the hallmarks of classic Ishiguro. Faber Fiction (Distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin)
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