Saturday, October 14, 2017

A Noble Prize for Ish

The Nobel Prize for literature is always a surprise. Though people still get surprised by it, wondering why, for instance, a slight, but popular novelist like Murakami hasn't won it. I don't know why Murakami keeps coming up, perhaps as a Japanese novelist with a worldwide audience, but if there's a British equivalent (there isn't really), then its certainly not Kazuo Ishiguro, who shares heritage and a Japanese name but little else.

Ishiguro is the first British recipient since the British-Zimbabwean-Iranian Doris Lessing. Unlike Lessing, Ish grew up in the UK, as well as coming of age in the early eighties and quickly becoming part of its literary establishment, albeit off in a side room somewhere, rather than front of house. A graduate of UEA, he was always mentioned as a second to McEwan as an outcrop of it's famous creative writing course; and a Nobel prize of course puts that to bed - and gives the UK's first city of literature its own Nobel laureate.

I recall reading "A Pale View of Hills", his debut, in the mid-eighties and enjoying it alot, though it did feel a somewhat slight, thin book, and I need to re-read it. "Remains of the Day", his third novel, didn't sound at all like my sort of thing - that default position of the English novel - a nostalgia for a country house past. I probably saw the film at the time but only read the book years later. Of course its much more than that. Ishiguro had found a perfect subject to match his interest in the unsaid, the understated, the dignity and otherwise of repressed feelings, yet one that was not set in Japan, but in England, albeit a version that was already much gone in the early eighties. It was of course a brilliant move, as it's a book that is both about the English establishment, and critical of it, and it is also a sad, human love story. Its fascinating that this would be the book that he would write. I've always wondered if McEwan, who actually comes from a very stratified British background, looked at the success of "Remains of the Day" (and later "Birdsong") and led to his own exploration of the upper class reticence that we find in "Atonement."

"The Unconsoled" - again a book I read along time ago - was my favourite of his at the time. It was another about turn. A sign that this novelist was wilful in his choice, not just of subjects, but of styles. Here we have the opposite of his Booker winner, instead of specific place and character, we have an unknown country, an unnamed protagonist. Ishiguro has never been a prolific novelist - the books seem to all come out as surprises, presumably after working on them for a few years. Perhaps this explains their diversity of theme and style. They have been popular around the world. I remember one interview where Ishiguro mentioned that he would make his language simpler, aware of the role of the translator; so he's not a writer unaware of his standing, but I was disappointed to hear this from a writer. In some ways this indicates his strengths and weaknesses. There are few writers able to build up such an accumulated atmosphere, from small moments, yet it isn't the prose that does the work so much as the accumulation. I always thought his next great success, the dystopian novel about children harvested for their genes, "Never Let Me Go", was a novella or a long story extended to novel length unecessarily. For me, the decision to set it in a fictional time place - a world that is deliberately anachronistic - was its real weakness; a sign of a novelist unable to quite deal with the contradictions of his ideas. The private school the characters are at is as if from the 1950s, and the echo of fifties Wyndham and other dystopian writers, is there, yet it is set in a notional seventies and eighties. Technology has gone on a different track, an alternate past, rather than alternate future. It makes for an odd read. Yet the humanism of the novel comes through in the end and what turns it into a great book; though I found so much of the set up unconvincing. With novels that also dabble in detective noir and fantasy history he's an impossible writer to characterise, certainly braver in his choices than McEwan or Amis for instance. Like Julian Barnes every book is different, and his lack of or avoidance of a signature style has made him convincing across the genres, whilst at the same time his books do share something - and I think this rather than prose style is what the Academy has praised - a certain atmosphere, a quietitude. His characters are almost always unknowing of their situation, accepting of their lot, until it is almost too late. It seems, in this instance, to be an update of more wilful writers like Beckett and Kafka; but there is no nihilism in Ishiguro, there is love,  and hope, and that humanism.

The Nobel, of all prizes is no judge of literary excellence, but it is it's own strange reading list; international in scope, adverse for whatever reason to the greats of American literature, and prone to like hyphenate writers - whether that is in their nationality, like with Ishiguro or Lessing, or in art form. His books, never frequent, have slipped to five year intervals, with the story collection "Nocturnes" splitting the decade between "Never Let Me Go" and the poorly received "The Buried Giant." At sixty-two this is hopefully no end of career prize though one wonders how this often garlanded, but similarly reticent writer, might be changed a little by the global status the Nobel gives him. An interesting, and worthwhile rather than worthy choice.

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