"The Unconsoled" by Kazuo Ishiguro

This novel, which was published thirty years ago this spring, has a Kafkaesque quality about it, although the stakes are nothing like so high. It concerns a concert pianist called Ryder, who arrives in an unnamed eastern European city to perform a recital. He is there for three days, during which time he gets caught up in the lives of a range of different characters, in most cases unwillingly and out of politeness. That is the premise, but the manner in which the story is told is mighty strange and dreamlike. The narrative has a seriously surreal character in respect of the way it deals with passing time and the unexplained presence in this city of various people from England who Ryder knew in the past. There is also a bizarre juxtaposition of a parallel story concerning Ryder's son and former girlfriend who live in the city and apparently did so with him at some point in the past. He is thus both a visitor to the city who is unfamiliar with its geography, and at the same time a former resident. The narrative switches back and forth between these two back stories continually. It is confusing and it jars, but somehow it works. The novel is over five hundred pages long and could not be more different from his much-loved previous novel 'The Remains of the Day' which had been published in 1989, went on to win the Booker Prize and subsequently to be turned into a film which garnered eight Oscar nominations.

Critics were very divided about the quality of 'The Unconsoled' when it was first published. Some loved it, while others really did not. I was also very much in two minds when I started reading it, but Ishiguro completely won me round by the end. On about page 230 I began to see the connection to atonal music, fictional examples of which are played by Ryder and other characters as the story proceeds. The book is in four parts that kind of mirror the four movements of an orchestral symphony and there are recurring themes and motifs that are reminiscent of an ambitious, modern orchestral composition. Is this book thus intended to be a critique of or a celebration of modernism across different art forms? Is he looking, in part, to fulfil some of the strictures set out in The Surrealist Manifesto, blending real life with the lives we experience in our sleep when dreaming? It is all very clever under the surface. The novel is also very funny in parts with a host of rather self-centred characters who suffer from inadequate consolation in various ways. As a reader, you just have to go with the weirdness and enjoy the ride. It is highly original, a major literary accomplishment by any standards and presumably made a contribution to Ishiguro winning the Nobel in 2017. It is not a crowd-pleaser in the manner of 'The Remains of the Day', 'Never Let Me Go' and 'Klara and the Sun', but I enjoyed reading it a lot once I got into it and would certainly recommend it.