The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Summary
Stevens has been butler at Darlington Hall for thirty years. In 1956, with the house sold to an American and the staff reduced to four, he takes his new employer's car and drives to the West Country to see Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper, on the pretext of a possible staffing solution.
The journey takes six days and he spends all of them remembering. The house between the wars, full of appeasers and diplomats. His father, also a butler, dying upstairs while Stevens serves dinner. And Miss Kenton, over twenty years, saying almost everything and being answered with almost nothing.
The whole novel is Stevens's voice, formal to the point of absurdity, forever explaining the nature of dignity and greatness in a butler, and the reader understands long before he does what it has cost him and what Lord Darlington was actually doing. Not one sentence tells you directly.
It is short, quiet and entirely without incident, and it is among the most devastating novels in English. Ishiguro is doing something extremely difficult: writing a man who cannot say what he feels, in his own words, so that you feel it instead. The scene on the pier at the end is the payment for everything withheld. Do not read the last thirty pages in public.
It is around two hundred and fifty pages and among the easiest of the great novels to read, which makes it an ideal entry point to Ishiguro and a reliable choice for a reading group. Nobody finishes it without wanting to talk about it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989, Kazuo Ishiguro's third novel, after An Artist of the Floating World had been shortlisted three years earlier.
It beat a field that included John Banville's The Book of Evidence, a result that acquired a second life in 2005 when the two writers were shortlisted against each other again and Banville won for The Sea, with Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go the losing book.
The Merchant Ivory film of 1993, with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, took eight Academy Award nominations and made the novel permanently famous. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, and the Swedish Academy's citation, describing novels of great emotional force that uncover the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection, describes this book more exactly than any of the others.