FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews NocturnesBy Kazuo Ishiguro Faber, 221pp, £14.99
SOME WRITERS have a way of making you feel that you simply have to read everything they write. Kazuo Ishiguro, born in 1954 and a member of the original Granta Best of Young British Novelists class of 1983, has always possessed quiet insistence. Back then, at 29, he had secured his place with his debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, a beautiful, elegiac performance drawing on his Japanese heritage and the themes of displacement and betrayal which would become important to his fiction.
His marvellous second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize and failed to win, although it was by far the most accomplished. Three years later he did take the Booker with The Remains of the Day, a brilliant tale about wartime naivety and a legacy of guilt within which a butler trained to ask no questions places duty above love. Many things made it a special book, not least the fact that it survived the hazards of film adaptation to make a superb movie, but then its survival was hardly surprising – Ishiguro wrote the screenplay.
Those first three novels shared beauty, intelligence, melancholy and elegant understatement. Just when you felt you had some grasp of his gifts Ishiguro shifted his stance by pulling the tablecloth deftly out from under the dishes to concoct a weird and wonderful surrealist narrative, The Unconsoled(1995) in which Ryder, a concert pianist suffering a loss of memory was set adrift somewhere in Central Europe. It is a Kafkaesque Rubik's cube of a book, initially as irritating as hell until it reveals its layers. The bizarre genius of that novel is such that if you first read it and hate it, it slowly succeeds in establishing itself as a cult work to return to. Ishiguro has mastered the dead pan and the offbeat without losing his consummate sophistication.
To date the only time he has disappointed was with his fourth book When We Were Orphans(2000), a wartime story that never quite convinced; its failure was unsettling such is the allure of Kazuo Ishiguro. For once his laconic understated tone became merely flat. That disappointment was conclusively erased in 2005 with the publication of a remarkable novel, the chilling Never Let Me Go. The story with its plaintive title slowly creeps up on the reader as it becomes clear that society has become a place in which some are bred for cloning while others, such as the narrator, are intended as merely carers. It is an astonishing, subtle and cautionary tale. Never Let Me Gowas the only novel capable of threatening John Banville's The Sea in the quest for the Booker Prize. Banville won, while Ishiguro had entered new territory. Never Let Me Gois a novel for our times, much as JG Ballard's fiction has inevitably spoken beyond storytelling.
IT'S HARDLY surprising that the arrival of a new Ishiguro book makes a reader eager to pounce on it. Nocturnessubtitled " Five Stories of Music and Nightfall"is his least characteristic work to date, not only because it takes the form of five short narratives. That said, all the intelligence, irony and wry humour are present, but the narrative shift is different. Here is a fine writer having fun but there is nothing self-indulgent about it. If Ishiguro has decided to do something that bit off his usual territory, he has remained disciplined. The five stories thematically linked by music are independent and self-contained. For Ishiguro they are exercises in voice, the quintet consists of first person narratives and each one is likeable, original and succeed in sustaining the reader to the final word. The narrators themselves are slightly left of centre, all unfulfilled to varying extents from the moderate to the extreme. The opening tale is probably the weakest, not that it is poor – it simply is that the others are better and funnier. Whereas Ishiguro's fiction has always had a wry edge to it, there is a brilliantly comic flourish to the second story, Come Rain or Shine. In it, Raymond, the narrator, a hopeless mess by his own admission, recalls a platonic college friendship he had with a girl. "Like me, Emily loved old American Broadway songs." From the opening sentence, Ishiguro strikes the right tone, one of memory recalled at leisure, not in a mood of regret. So the story appears to be heading down memory lane; Emily went on to marry Charlie, the narrator's best friend.
“Charlie and I have remained friends through the years. We may not see each other as much as we once did but that’s simply down to distance.” When Charlie does visit them, the happy couple are not doing that well. Charlie explains. He needs help in saving his marriage. A hilarious sequence of events sees the narrator having to ransack the couple’s apartment and make it look as if the damage has been done by a dog.
Nowhere has Ishiguro made better use of his deadpan delivery: “So I got down on all fours, and lowering my head towards the same magazine, sank my teeth into the pages. The taste was perfumy, and not all unpleasant. I opened a second fallen magazine near its centre and began to repeat the procedure. The ideal technique, I began to gather, was not unlike the one needed in those fairground games when you try to bite apples bobbing in water without using your hands. What worked best was a light, chewing motion, the jaws moving flexibly all the time: this would cause the pages to ruffle up and crease nicely. Too focused a bite, on the other hand simply ‘stapled’ pages together . . . ”
Raymond is so interested in discovering how best to replicate destruction from a canine approach that he fails to notice Emily's arrival. "Perhaps that was why my first visible response," he reports, "was simply to give a weary sigh without making any attempt to abandon my all-fours posture." As a portrait of a marriage under stress this is certainly different, as a study of an old friendship, it is oddly moving. Emily sees her old friend as troubled. Ishiguro is odd; detached, formal yet always connected to feelings that are real and believable. Somehow he manages to say a great deal about the business of being alive. After all it was Ishiguro who created Stevens the emotionally repressed butler in The Remains of the Day.
The Malvern Hillsoffers a narrator who is obviously self- absorbed and into his music. Life isn't going so well in the city, so he sets off to Elgar country where his sister and her husband run a country cafe of sorts. The story takes an interesting turn when a Swiss couple on holiday appear. The story is well described; the narrator suddenly stops thinking about himself and becomes vaguely interested in the visitors, fellow musicians. The man is jolly, the woman is angry and lost. It is all very open ended. Ishiguro knows when to end a story.
Each piece settles into its own world. Nocturne resounds with punchy comedy. The narrator is a jazz musician who though talented is not good looking enough, in fact too ugly, to make it big. His wife leaves him for another man but she remains fond of him and helps convince him why he should consider plastic surgery. The “I kid you not” narrative tone is well handled by a narrator whose own disbelief at what he is telling the reader is one of the strengths of the story.
UNUSUALLY FOR a volume of stories, it is easy to settle into this quality mixed bag. Cellists the fifth and final piece is probably the finest. Yet again, an Ishiguro narrator is ready to take up the pieces and begin to make sense of them. While performing for the lunchtime customers, he is understandably bored. “It was our third time playing the Godfather theme,” he begins. Across the piazza, he notices a face he recognises.
And so begins the account of Tibor, a then young Hungarian cellist who had played in the narrator’s little orchestra seven years earlier. Tibor had promise and quickly attracted an interested older woman who introduced herself as the owner of a name a musician should have recognised. This is a terrific story, capable of going in any one of several directions. There are echoes of Somerset Maugham. But Ishiguro, the most literary of writers, is seldom derivative. Tibor and his mentor share the secrets of music. The sting when it comes may not be entirely unexpected but it is consummately choreographed by a canny writer who is cool, poised and well capable of shifting directions and shaping surprises.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times