Kazuo Ishiguro – A Pale View of Hills
A new Kazuo Ishiguro novel is always something of an event and his latest, Klara and the Sun, looks to be no different. I’m just sorry I can’t get more excited about it. Despite their regular appearances on best-novels-of-all-time lists, I never warmed to The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go and thought, after the second disappointment, that that was it for me and Ish. But now with this new book coming out, and not much else to look forward to at the moment, I thought I would at least try to muster some enthusiasm for Klara and would give the man another chance. Well, having now read A Pale View of Hills (1982), I am afraid to say that Ishiguro’s blown it again.

Like those other two books, Pale View is a memory novel. In this case, the memories belong to Etsuko, a Japanese widower whose daughter, Keiko, has recently committed suicide. Holed up in an English manor house with only her younger daughter, Niki, for company, Etsuko spends most of her days reminiscing about Japan. Specifically, she keeps returning to those few months before Keiko was born, when she was living on the outskirts of Nagasaki and becoming friendly with a neighbour called Sachiko. This is shortly after the War and the dropping of the atomic bomb, and Sachiko and her young daughter, Mariko, are among the many people displaced by those events. Though clearly of good stock, the pair’s straitened circumstances lead them to take up residence in the tumble-down cottage opposite Etsuko’s high-rise, and Etsuko can’t resist making their acquaintance. It’s not like she has much else to do. Still under American occupation at this point, Japan’s post-war economic miracle is yet to take hold and, though there is the sense of things changing, the country remains in the grip of old, patriarchal family values. Hence Etsuko stays at home while her husband, Jiro, goes to work.
The relationship that develops between the neighbours is a curious one. Etsuko, young and pregnant, is deferential towards Sachiko, who is older and already a parent. Yet Etsuko is far more of a mother to Mariko in these months; Sachiko is positively negligent, not seeming to mind if her daughter runs off or gets hurt and regularly leaving her to fend for herself. Sachiko is rather irritated, in fact, when Etsuko suggests they look for Mariko or offers to mind her. Still, the two women spend an increasing amount of time with each other, to such an extent that one cannot help but wonder why these memories are so preoccupying the older Etsuko. There is no great falling-out between the friends, no major drama. Why is she not thinking about Keiko, whom we never learn very much about?
By Ishiguro’s own admission, his answer to this question is not a very satisfactory one and the way in which Pale View’s final pages try to draw past and present together is far too hasty and abstruse. But that was the least of the book’s problems for me. What annoyed me most was what annoyed me about the other Ishiguros I’ve read: its self-possession. Ishiguro’s famously simple language, I don’t mind in and of itself. In fact, it works terrifically well at points, when the simplicity is concealing complexity. Like here: “Jiro looked up and threw me a glance. I put down my sewing and got to my feet.” There is so much going on between these two sentences – years of marital discord, for one thing – and yet the elision of this emotional history and the prose’s bare statement of facts suppresses all that, performing the novel’s theme of convenient forgetfulness. But when Ishiguro literally repeats the same plain sentences over and over again, it does become tiresome. This is at its worst in the dialogue, where characters will often alight on a phrase and then reiterate it several times over the course of a conversation. I see the desired effect – to amplify the sense of amnesia – but it just doesn’t work for me.
I feel the same way about the book’s structure. You can almost hear Ishiguro at times, his stage-management is so apparent. This passage comes from near the beginning:
I have no great wish to dwell on Keiko now, it brings me little comfort. I only mention her here because those were the circumstances around Niki’s visit this April, and because it was during this visit I remembered Sachiko again after all this time.
Where’s “here”? “This point in the book”, you mean? Now, I am under no illusion that I am reading a book, but for a novel trying to replicate the function of memory, this withholding of information – this wish not to dwell – simply does not ring true. That is not how memory works: we can’t choose not to think about something because it is painful. No, this is the author speaking here, not wanting to spill the novel’s secrets too soon. It smacks of the creative writing class to me.
In fairness, this was Ishiguro’s first novel, and he had just completed a creative writing course when he wrote it, but truthfully I don’t think he writes memory any better in his later books. The way in which one memory seamlessly leads to another, and often chronologically: those things don’t ring true either. At least in The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro doesn’t write anything as on the nose as this:
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here.
Yes, I had got the message.
A Pale View of Hills is published by Faber & Faber and is available here.