As always, Ishiguro's writing is exquisite. He leads the reader down a path that has no discernable destination, and let's the story take its course without authorly intervention. It's a grown-up's fairy tale, set in the experience of aging and challenges of memory. ( )

I enjoyed The Remains of the Day, the story of an ageing butler reminiscing about serving Lord Darlington between WWI and WWII, while Klara and the Sun was an interesting science fiction novel about artificial intelligence. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro was published in 2015, however it was a disappointing read for me. Australian author Ben Hobson recently shared his love for this book but wondered why so many readers didn't enjoy it. Here's why.

This is the story of Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple in a fictional post-Arthurian Britain where people across the land suffer from forgetfulness and a type of collective amnesia. The pair set off on a quest to find their son and discuss the mist causing the memory loss with others they meet along the way. What I found instantly irritating and relentlessly repetitive was the overkill with regard to the characters using each other's names ALL the time. Axl calls Beatrice princess and it drove me up the wall. I've flipped to a random page to share an example with you:

"It can wait till the morning, Axl. It's not even a pain I notice till we're speaking of it." "Even so, princess, now we're here, why not go and see the wise woman?" Page 55

Stilted dialogue aside, The Buried Giant is a post-Roman fantasy with touches of Tolkien complete with pixies, ogres and even a dragon. Intergenerational conflict is an important topic in the novel with the hatred and distrust between the Saxons and the Britons sure to resurface if the memory dampening mist is dispersed. Axl and Beatrice contemplate whether it's better not to remember at all if there's a risk the traumatic memories of war and genocide could come tumbling back with the years of separation, love and loss.

I might have cared for all of this - the vicious cycle of hate and violence and the hopelessness of war - but the overarching narrative was unclear. I was unable to decipher the meaning of the ogres or the purpose of the pixies; if indeed there was any. Did they represent foreign powers? The mixed tense was often confusing and what was that about the black birdlike hags/women? Is the boatman death? Or does the island represent death? Or am I wrong on both counts? The mysteriously omniscient narrator who revealed themselves at the end (I think?) as part of a frustratingly ambiguous ending only served to increase my ire.

It would seem I don't belong to the literary 'in crowd' for whom this was written, but in my opinion, there was too much expectation on the reader to pick up on the hidden meanings, subtext and literary devices that must be holding this up. If I have to work hard in order to figure a book out, then it needs to deliver, otherwise the reading joy ebbs away and that's what happened here.

If you've been following Carpe Librum for any length of time, you'll know I'm not a fan of an ambiguous ending, and boy do we have a doozy here. Published in 2015, and with many of you having no doubt read this before me, I think I can safely ask... What do you think happened at the very end? After being questioned, did they stay together or not? Did Axl? Or didn't he? Someone put me out of my misery, quick!

After reading The Buried Giant, I think Ishiguro and I are done for now. ( )

This book is a masterpiece, hands down. It conjures the magic of the best LeGuin and Tolkien's the Tale of the Children of Húrin into a tragic story set in a semi-mythical Britain just coming out of King Arthur's reign and before the definitive triumph of the Saxons. There are dragons and ogres, but like most of the masterworks of fantasy and sci-fi, they're just the dressing, or the sometimes allegorical means to point to our humanity. I get what Ishiguro meant when he didn't want his work to be labelled "fantasy". It IS definitely within the fantasy genre, but he probably didn't want his audience to be limited to the hardcore fantasy readers. He wanted everyone who has grown out of fantasy to come back to it, for in myths there is power.

The story is pretty straightforward, though, as in all of Ishiguro's works (I read everything of his except "A Pale view of Hills") there's a deep undercurrent of things left unsaid. In this case, the story is told in third person so Ishiguro doesn't use his signature unreliable narrator. Instead, the things left unsaid are due to a magical mist that robs people of their memories. It's a good tool to use, which allows for him to keep things mysterious until the very end, and is probably the whole justification for the fantasy setting of the book.

It is, anyway, a love story between two older people who set out to look for their estranged son, knowing only that he "moved to another village less than a day away". In the way, they meet ogres, dragons, saxon warriors and even an elderly Sir Gawain. But if the plot sounds like an adventure story, it's not like that at all. It's a melancholic work, filled with sadness from the first page to the last, as Ishiguro foreshadows and implies what came before, always trapping the reader in the same mist as its protagonists, giving us just enough light to walk ahead but not enough to discern the path.

In the end pages, I wanted to cry. I didn't, though. I don't know if it was a failing of emotion on my part, or the book just lacked that final shove to push me over the hump of emotions. But the journey was well worth it, and made me appreciate things differently and to get out of the couch and hug my wife and son, because in life there's never enough of that. The book moved me.

That's what great art is meant to do. ( )

A master storyteller pursuing his craft. It is a well told tale casting some light on English history, and transposing us into a world not so very different from our own, even if they believed in dragons. ( )

Really liked the book. The story was slow but moved along. Great use of language. Everything seemed very metaphorical and I'm sure most of it went past me but I liked it a lot. ( )