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read in June, 2009
Benjy said:
"The Unconsoled is an astonishing, compelling, yet frustrating masterpiece. One that the reader will continue to think about long after putting down the final chapter.
In it, Ishiguro melds the self-important, obsessive yet ultimately impot...more
The Unconsoled is an astonishing, compelling, yet frustrating masterpiece. One that the reader will continue to think about long after putting down the final chapter.
In it, Ishiguro melds the self-important, obsessive yet ultimately impotent first-person narrative of several of his novels, notably The Remains of the Day, with a high dose of the surrealism only hinted at in his later novel When We Were Orphans, to create a highly readable yet sometimes infuriating book.
Mr. Ryder, a world-famous pianist, arrives in an anonymous Central European town. The townspeople grovel over his celebrity, constantly referring to the mysterious cultural crisis he is there to solve. Ryder is ever eager to please the locals, yet he has little grasp of why he's visiting their town and shows no ability to control his own destiny.
Events move beyond Ryder's control as he is dragged through a serious of maddening diversions. Ryder, and the rest of the townspeople, accept their dream-like, surreal world as completely normal: a door in a cafe far out in the woods opens back into the center of town, miles away; A two-floor elevator ride accommodates a ten minute conversation with a hotel porter; Ryder is able to perceive events and conversations that he has never witnessed.
Significantly, Ryder shows no surprise that people and objects from his childhood in England keep appearing, or that a woman he's just met acts as if she's his wife, stirring up maddeningly vague intuitions of a past and present relationship that he nonetheless goes along with.
Like in an anxious dream, every attempt to complete one errand creates a new diversion that takes Ryder further away from his goal. At first he takes these frustrations in his stride, while each new twist provides tantalizing hints about his past and his troubled childhood and early life. Yet tension increases as Ryder's performance nears, his ultimate purpose still unclear to him, although apparently not to the inscrutable townsfolk.
Ryder blunders through the town as an unreliable narrator, knowing less about his reality than the characters he interacts with, yet willing to go along with their explanations and excuses, incorporating them into his experiences and recycling them as his own. As in his other novels, Ishiguro seems here to be discussing how memories of the past, fragmented and unreliable as they may be, inform the present and give it meaning.
A common theme binding all Ryder's experiences and memories seems to be the flawed nature of human relationships, particularly those of parents and children. All the characters he interacts with have somehow harmed or disappointed their parents, their friends, their partners or their children. All are chasing around for some way to right the past, to find consolation in reconciliation, to regain their pride. All require Ryder's help to put their relationships right, much as the town itself needs him to help fix the murky crisis and return the city to its golden days of cultural ascendancy.
All these other characters' conflicts seem to mirror aspects of Ryder himself. The book keeps returning to the nature of his relationship with his own parents, yet this relationship is never explained, only hinted at. The final chapters of the book are a heartbreaking deflation of Ryder's own hopes regarding his parents and a yearning for the simple need for meaningful human contact, while remaining as cryptic as ever.
One way to examine familiar things in a new way is to change your viewpoint. Another, more fragile way, is to alter the background against which you examine them. Do so too prominently and you end up in the realms of science fiction. Do so subtly and you get a work as nuanced, strange yet moving as The Unconsoled. The book pits familiar human emotions and foibles against a world uncannily similar to ours, yet also eerie and disturbing. It is precisely this unusual backdrop that allows us to experience those emotions, fascinatingly, in a new way.
The Unconsoled challenges the reader to find a frame of reference against which to inspect it. At first, our sense of realism holds out hope that future chapters will explain away the surrealism through some mundane device. But Ishiguro is too skilled to allow such a clumsy resolution. If it's a dream, then there is no waking. If it's an allegory, then there is no moral. The novel ends without a big reveal. And while accepting the surrealism of its world, without being able to rectify it against the linearity of ours, is infuriating, what meaning is to be found in this strange and beautiful story we must find ourselves.
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