If you’d been asked at the beginning of the year whose new novel would feature ogres, pixies and a she-dragon called Querig, I suspect you might have taken a while to guess that the answer was Kazuo Ishiguro. Admittedly, since his career-establishing 1980s triumphs with An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro has been at some pains to distance himself from poignant, perfectly-wrought narratives by uptight self-deceivers who find themselves on the wrong side of history.
There was, for example, the long, dream-like and famously punishing The Unconsoled. More rewardingly, Never Let Me Go — published ten years ago — took place in an alternative Nineties world in which clones were created to act as organ donors. Even so, it’s hard not to feel a degree of sympathy with his clearly rather baffled American publisher, who announced last year that Ishiguro’s forthcoming novel was ‘something of a departure’, which ‘took us all by surprise’.
The main characters are Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple in post-Arthurian Britain who set off from their home village to visit their son — if they can find him and, indeed, remember who he is. The reason for their confusion is that the country is covered with a ‘mist of forgetfulness’, which has rendered memories of even the most recent events mysteriously out of reach.
On the long walk to wherever they’re going, the couple meet an impressively complete range of folkloric types: among them elderly hags, monks (wise and villainous), knights (including an ageing Sir Gawain) and all manner of monsters. Yet, as has often been pointed out, Ishiguro’s novels are rarely what they seem: Never Let Me Go, for instance, is no more ‘about’ cloning than The Remains of the Day is ‘about’ being a mid-20th-century butler.
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