Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in a decade is a nebulous sword-wielding fantasy – and portrait of a marriageKazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since Never Let Me Go is certainly brave,not least because its ogre-stalked, post-Arthurian setting plants a flag on terrain patrolled by dragons of its own: witness the drily hilarious tit-for-tat flaming that Ursula Le Guin issued on her blog after Ishiguro voiced reluctance to own the book pigeonholed as fantasy. Le Guin’s evisceration (“toneless, or inexact”,“flat, expressionless”, or “painful) chimed with the bloodier end of Fleet Street’s full-spectrum response to the hardback publication,which ran from contemptuous to bowled over with much head-scratching in between.
The anecdote follows Axl and Beatrice, an elderly married couple on a hazardous cross-country trek in search of their son, or lost in circumstances that,like much else, they can’t recall; legend has it that a dragon named Querig exhales a memory-wiping mist that accounts for other people’s pasts too. En route the pair amass various companions, or including rival swordsmen out to slay Querig and restore everyone’s senses,but as memories of a recent savage war stir, it’s not clear whether the prevailing blackout might after all be preferable.
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Source: theguardian.com