. Spinning .

There’s something that Ishiguro does in this novel that’s either brilliant or terribly annoying. While it likely comes under the category of changing point of view–to first person omniscient no less–it is in keeping with the surreal plotting of events that this book is based upon. In other words, it’s in keeping with the dream-like quality of the story rather than following reality to any degree.

Here’s an example:

I could hear Pedro struggling to gain a few paces. Then I heard him shout:

‘I said, we seem to have got the shit convinced. I think he’s going to go along with it.’

‘Well,’ the journalist shouted back, ‘he’s co-operated so far, but you can never take these types for granted. So keep up the flattery. He’s come this far up and he seems quite happy about it. But then I don’t think the fool even knows the significance of the building.’   (p. 180)

The ‘fool’ they’re speaking of, of course, is Mr. Ryder, our narrator who’s going with the journalist and photographer for a quick interview.  The funniest part is that the narrator, in relating this, remains oblivious to the fact of his hearing this private conversation.

Now the first time it was kind of fun and wow and all that; coming up again it’s admittedly tiring, particularly since we don’t know what purpose this serves, whether it is to reiterate the fact that Ishiguro is not sticking to reality of time and place (and that’s unnecessary since we already know something’s different about this story) or to flaunt the elements of style and tradition or for some other reason. And it’s that ’some other reason’ that probably irks me more than anything. Throughout this story I’ve had the feeling that I’m missing the point, or missing a page or whatever that keeps me outside of the story.

The characters are not sympathetic–or rather, I am not sympathetic to them since they too become unreal and besides, they’re all doing such strange stuff. Ryder has just walked off and left his young son in a cafe somewhere, promising to get right back to him and then all these other people show up and he willingly goes off in other directions.

Something else weird too; and again, it bothers me more because there may or may not be a good reason for it: the single quotation mark rather than normal quotes for dialogue. Is that just an artistic quirk or is it more proper than any other first person novel in that it is indeed, a retelling of story by the narrator.  — okay, I just checked the first page and if the latter were the case, then the double quotes should be at the opening sentence and it’s not.

Haven’t given up on this book, but it’s clearly not a favorite. There seems to be “much ado about nothing” and yet I’m sure that if I could just reach that level of understanding the story would be more meaningful to me. However, there is a bright bit of humor that I’m glad to have stumbled into.

At one of the great dinner parties held for the resurrected and carefully tended pianist Brodsky, there is our narrator in his bathrobe (typical dream scenario) while everyone is carefully adjusting themselves to Brodsky’s assumed mood in view of his grief over his beloved pet, Bruno, that day. As one by one the speakers express their sympathy and some strange overly solicitious memories of the dog, they build up to erecting a statue to commemorate the animal. Brodsky remains silent throughout the testimonials and at one point Ryder gets up to speak but quickly sits back down when he realizes that his bathrobe is open and he is exposed. Just as he is about to get up again, Brodsky pushes himself upright at his table and addresses the crowd:

For a second I thought Brodsky would crash across the table. But he maintained his balance, surveying the room for a moment. When he spoke his voice had a gentle huskiness about it.

“Look, what is this?” he said. “you think that dog was so important to me? He’s dead and that’s it. I want a woman. It gets lonely sometimes. I want a woman.”  (p. 144)

That’s enough to keep me at this for a while longer.

It’s really embarrassing to me how slow I’m reading this book. While I’ve been involved in hypertext writing and coding for same, that’s really not an excuse for not allowing some reading time, and this story just hasn’t kept me coming back at a regular rate or impel me to read more than a couple pages at a time.

First there’s the language. Now the writing is indeed clean but even from one who’s writing had once been called Byzantine Ishiguro’s prose is a tad stilted and old fashioned:

Naturally I too had been taking the opportunity to observe Brodsky quite carefully. He had been placed at the table a little larger than the rest. Hoffman was to one side of him, the Countess on the other. The rest of his company comprised a ring of solemn grey-haired men. The way these latter seemed continuously to be conferring under their breaths gave the table a conspiratorial air hardly helpful to the general atmosphere. (p. 138)

The only thing I can get excited about is that I, like Ishiguro, prefer to spell ‘grey’ with an ‘e’.

The pace is not exactly flying as we are still building up to this event and yet do not quite know why the whole town is molding Brodsky as their hometown ‘celebrity’ nor what Ryder’s role is in this scenario. I was flicking with the idea that all are metaphors but in trying to pin down that meaning, I’ve lost interest in the story.

But I’ve passed the 50-page rule, so I shall slog onward.

This is sort of Twilight Zone-ish in that something’s going on that the town all knows about and is plotting for while the narrator is rather oblvious to the situation.

Even before Jakob Kanitz had finished speaking, a low assenting murmur had started up and more than one person had pushed reproachfully the shoulder of the young councillor–by this point shamefacedly shuffly his feet. Jakob Kanitz’s departure from the stage had been followed by a few seconds of awkward silence. Then, steadily, conversation had broken out around the room, with everywhere people discussing in serious but calm tones what should be done once Brodsky arrived. (p 129)

The reader is by now aware that the town’s life more than livelihood is, by tradition, dependent upon a singularly exceptional musician. Evidently they have made mistakes in some of their choices, and all must be replaced eventually by nature’s own course. These people are wined and dined and fine-tuned by at least a contingent of officials during their period of reign.

Yeah, that’s Twilight Zone if not Stephen King and the Corn Queen.

From dreamlike we go into surreal, as Ryder accompanies the hotel manager Hoffman into a dinner party dressed in his jammies. No one bats an eye. Well folks, this isn’t realism here even by Hollywood standards.

We are given clues all along, in this case, the hostess taking Mr. Ryder through the room where everyone is supposedly anxious to meet him and yet, “Certainly no one broke off a conversation on account of my passing by.” (p. 125) And this: “I had assumed she was leading me either to a particular spot in the room or to a particular person, but after a while I got the distinct impression we were walking around in slow circles. In fact several times I felt certain we had alrady been in a part of the room at least twice before.” (p. 125)

All this perhaps explains the out of touch (but lovely) language of the narrator: “Then, as I continued to cast my gaze about me, I began steadily to realise just what had taken place before our arrival.” (p. 126) It would seem to suit the formal, vague atmosphere of the story, almost a slow-motion effect if presented onscreen.

Then a bit of dramatic action occurs, a fight breaks out between a guest and a veterinarian over the doctor’s care of Brodsky’s dog which has just died and is the cause of great alarm that Brodsky cannot perform Thursday night. I do love this line though: “What about the Breuers’ kittens? You spend all your time playing bridge, you let those kittens die one by one…” (p. 127)

And from there, the group grows louder with absurd complaints against the vet; stuff of which dreams are made.

The differences in time as judged by the narrator versus the actual time as placed by the other characters  was touched upon very lightly by Ishiguro, explainable by a longer than expected nap or some such detail, but it is also made very subtly important by him as well.

After one such attempt at a nap by the narrator, he is called down to the lobby and decides to prove his point about the late hour by going down in his ‘dressing gown.’ Wherein the hotel manager hustles them out to an appointment. This is a rather common happening in dreams, where one finds oneself improperly dressed or worse, completely naked, in their surroundings. The conflicting awareness of each other would also fit in with dreamlike qualities, as well as the long dark alleyways, and the easy acceptance of the narrator of his lack of memory.

But dreams as a means of getting information into a narrative are cliche, worse if they’re used to bridge gaps or mask facts. Ishiguro isn’t doing that here though. He’s not really allowing us to think this is all a dream but rather, that life itself follows the patterns and foibles of dreams and makes it that much more interesting.

At last, a slightly more accurate pinpointing of the time setting of this novel:

When the main feature finally started we had been seated for at least half an hour, and I saw with some relief it was to be the science fiction classic 2001: A Space Odyssey — a favourite of mine which I never tired of seeing. (p. 93)

Well neat. That places it somewhere after 1968 and while the language of the book is still a bit dated and formal, it settles me into the storyworld a bit more comfortably. As the movie is referred to by the narrator as a classic, I would assume the time period stands somewhere between 1975 – 1995 when the book was published. Then I am jerked out of my comfort zone with this:

As soon as those impressive opening shots of a prehistoric world appeared on the screen, I could feel myself relaxing, and I was soon comfortably absorbed in the film. We were well into the central section of the narrative — with Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner on board the spaceship bound for Jupiter — when I heard… (p. 94)

Huh? Dirty Harry and the King of Siam weren’t in this flick; what’s going on here?

Then it hits me; I must open my mind to the story and accept it as it is given to me. Fiction, after all, is exactly that.

There has to be something I simply haven’t caught onto yet in this novel, as the inconsistencies mount and are far beneath a prizewinning author unless they are planned and point to a reasonable cause.

Sophie grasped my arm. ‘If you want, I’ll make a completely clean breast of it. I’ll tell you everything. Everything you want to know about…’

‘Look, how many more times do I have to say this? I’m not in the least interested. All I want just now is to unwind. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on me over these next few days.’

She continued to hold my arm and for a while we walked together in silence. Then she said quietly: ‘It’s so good of you. To be so understanding.’  (p. 89)

Uh, that just doesn’t compute. In his state of mind why wouldn’t he want to find out what Sophie has to tell him? Surely her words are intrigueing and I don’t get his rebuff. And then, when he’s told us several times that he hasn’t a clue about his schedule and seems to plan on winging it instead of breaking down and asking someone, he now tells us that “there’s going to be a lot of pressure on me over these next few days.”

How weird is that?

I doubt that Ishiguro has flubbed it; I may have missed something or I may simply need to be patient or a bit quicker of mind.

To quote Elmer Fudd, ” There’s something vewwy scwewwy going on awound here.”

While I realize that my reading in spurts of this novel (busy on other stuff like writing and learning web setups) is partly to blame for my lack of ‘getting it’ so far, there’s still an obvious manipulation on Ishiguro’s part of the narrative. While it seems fairly straightforward in a linear timeline, there are the quirks of the interplay between characters that don’t follow normal processing.

It appears that while Mr. Ryder’s confusion about what he’s doing in this hotel, in this city, seems to upon occasion clear up, the dialogue doesn’t jive with the facts as we learn them. For example, he meets an elderly porter at the hotel who talks him into going to see his daughter and grandson and Ryder, upon meeting them, realizes that it is his wife and son. She doesn’t ask why he’s staying in a hotel but leads him on a merry chase through the back alleys of the city until he ends up losing her, going back to the hotel, only he has her child–his son–with him. He proceeds to dump the kid off on his grandfather without any acknowledgement of who he is (and why doesn’t he seem to know his father-in-law anyway?) and goes out to meet with Sophie–his (maybe) wife.

Therefore, I’m strongly of the opinion that Ryder is not a person at all, but a representation of man’s memory or conscience. It seems that the people he meets are those that he has either been in contact with at some point (Sophie, his son, his old schoolmate) or someone who he doesn’t appear to know but who prevails upon him to right a wrong that’s been done in their own childhood or something they’ve done to a child (the hotel manager’s son, the old porter).

There is a theme of childhood emotional abuse and Ryder may be this baggage that these other characters are harboring. Interesting concept. Sort of Jacob Marley-esque.

I’m beginning to get a sense that the main character of Mr. Ryder is a metaphor for a part of our minds, whether it be memory or regret or conscience or such.

In another small episode, we get the inner thoughts of two different characters, and this, from the absent first person narrator. Since the other characters seem to be very familiar with Mr. Ryder and his memory goes from complete ignorance of an event to detailed memory, this seems to me a plausible explanation.

Relevant to my prior post about ’something funny going on’ here, Ishiguro is slowly unraveling his world and evidently, the characters understand the rules.

The rain continued to fall steadily as we travelled through the night-time streets. The young man remained silent for a long time and I wondered if he had become angry with me. But then I caught sight of his profile in the changing light and realised he was turning over in his mind a particular incident from several years ago. (p. 65)

So is Ryder able to read people’s thoughts? Nope, nothing that simple, as after we get the scene played out for us that Ryder refers to, Stephan evidently understands that Ryder is now aware of it.

“I realise it’s none of my business, and I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but I do think you’ve been treated rather unfairly by your parents over the matter of your piano playing. (…)”

The young man considered this for several moments.  Then he said: ” I’m grateful to you, Mr. Ryder, for giving my position thought and all that.  (…)”(p. 71)

Which all means that it’s just me who doesn’t quite get what’s going on.  This is, then, a different world.

I’m beginning to suspect that the dreamlike events and particularly the protagonist’s somewhat unusual reaction to them may be a bit of unreality thrown into the reality, or perhaps a play on time. While Ryder appears to slowly remember Boris being his son and some conversations with Sophie and other tidbits, there is no corresponding acknowledgement on the part of the characters to his behavior to conclude a case of amnesia.

There are other things that Ishiguro pulls on his readers here, and while I’m the first one to cheer on the rulebreaker spirit, this is both one of the biggest no-nos  in writing as well as a confusing factor that appears more like poor writing than careful planning:

I watched her lead Stephan through a small and tidy front parlour, through a second doorway and down a shadowy corridor decorated on either side with little framed water-colours. The corridor ended at miss Collins’s drawing-room–a large L-shaped affair at the back of the building. The light here was low and cosy, and at first glance the room looked expensively elegant in an old-fashioned way. On closer inspection, however, I could see much of the furniture was extremely worn… (p. 56)

What’s wrong with this ? Well, the protagonist, this first person narrator, has been left sitting in the car. After this, we are allowed to witness the entire scene and dialogue between Stephan and Miss Collins, even as Stephan has confirmed his passengers waiting outside. And this:

While Stephan had been speaking, Miss Collins had risen from her seat and moved slowly over to her fireplace. She now remained standing quite still for several seconds, one hand resting on the mantelpiece as though to steady herself. When eventually she turned to Stephan again, I saw that her eyes had become moist. (p. 61)

So this is not merely the narrator’s retelling of the scenario as was perhaps told to him by Stephan, but he claims to see it as it is happening. In the very next paragraph, we are assured that yes, we’ve read it right and not missed something:

Miss Collins sipped her sherry thoughtfully. She seemed about to reply, but just at this point I heard Boris shift behind me in the back of the car. (p. 61)

Yes, there’s some funny stuff going on here and it’s not just about a man who has forgotten a few things about his life. Previously, as he walked through the alleyways following Sophie to her apartment, he ran into and spent some time walking with an old school-chum who just happened to be walking these same narrow alleys.

There is metaphor and symbolism though I haven’t gotten yet the clear meanings. The metaphor, I feel, is in the actions and characters and their plights. The symbolism is in the setting, the hotel, the emphasis on Old Town, the courtyard diner, and the alleyways are all so pointedly described. Ishiguro has even in the scenario described above, made the setting of the apartment with it’s L-shape and location at the back of the house an important part of the event.

Close reading here is vital, or useless. One or the other.

Now I can accept life on Mars and apocalypse on Earth in fiction. I can see The Invisible Man and believe that kryptonite can kill Superman. It’s getting hard however to swallow Ishiguro’s Mr. Ryder’s reaction to his circumstances in this novel.

Ishiguro does the right thing by not telling us how the protagonist ‘feels’ but there should be some jaw-dropping, wariness in speech, something going on when Ryder meets the porter’s daughter and she intimates by her conversation that’s he’s very involved with her and her son. For heaven’s sake, she seems to feel that he would prefer the new house she’s looking to move into–maybe even with him, and the man doesn’t even bat an eye?

Why is he staying at the hotel? Why doesn’t anybody notice that he may seem confused (maybe because Ishiguro won’t let him appear so?). Why, oh why, doesn’t Ryder ask somebody what the hell’s going on?

Yes, the mystery is intriguing but I’m getting pretty disgusted enough with the utter dopiness of the main character to care.

As the narrator, Mr. Ryder, settles into his surroundings at the hotel, we see a recurring theme of a near adulation from the hotel employees. Yet each finds a way to spend enough time with him in order to seek a favor. While on the surface there is emphasis on making his stay as comfortable as possible, his schedule is also supposedly a busy one, and it seems strange that they would add to that by taking up his time.

It seems odd to me that they would impose on any guest. The porter has even suggested that Ryder take a walk to Old Town, then intimates that since he’s there, he might meet the porter’s daughter and find out what’s troubling her.

I suspect that this slow pace and the building of hotel employee characters has a purpose in Ishiguro’s novel, but it is an unusual manner of laying story around an unsuspecting first person protagonist.

Old-fashioned and slow.

But that’s harsh, since the writing style is indeed wonderfully proper prose and as the story opens with a first person narrator, a concert pianist named Mr. Ryder, arriving at a hotel and being somewhat taken aback at the reaction he receives along with the news that he will be following a very strict and busy schedule during his stay. He seems to have a lapse of memory and is unable to voice his confusion to any of the hotel staff. We’re up to 30 pages so far and not much else has happened.

That’s fine; I’m not one who insists upon drama and action to fulfill my reading needs. There would seem to be however a perfect time here to broaden the character, and yet we get more information about the elevator operator’s daughter and grandson than we get from (or rather out of, since he is first person) Ryder himself. Particularly since it would appear that there is something odd going on and he doesn’t know what it is and won’t ask.

So much for pace. The writing style and voice had me looking several times for the date of publishing. The language is formal, perfect, but reminiscent of a style of novels of the late 18th, early 19th century:

I emerged from the elevator to find the lobby far livelier than before. All around me, guests were lounging in armchairs, leafing through newspapers or chatting together over cups of coffee.  Near the reception desk several Japanese people were greeting one another with much jollity.  I was slightly bemused by this transformation and did not notice the hotel manager until he had come right up to me.  (p. 19)

The words to me seem outdated: livelier, bemused, and jollity? With this out-of-time manner of relating the story, and the out-of-time attention given to small events that would seem unrelated to the here and now of Mr. Ryder’s plight, I might say that I am a tad disappointed with the narrative thus far.

(See, Ishiguro’s novel reads much like my own stilted manner of posting.)