This may seem like an obscure and technical distinction, but it makes all the difference between savoring the riches of this peculiar book and being blindly flummoxed by what it lacks. ![]() “The Buried Giant” reverses that formula, using the structure of a medieval romance to explore the moral and psychological themes we’re used to seeing addressed by the realistic novel. It has very little of substance in common with “Game of Thrones” or “The Lord of the Rings.” Yes, creatures like ogres and dragons stalk its landscapes and some of the characters knew King Arthur personally, but “fantasy” is a contemporary genre that uses the form of the novel to deal with the material of pre-novelistic storytelling. Set sometime in the Dark Ages, after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire from the island and before the rise of the seven kingdoms known as the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, “The Buried Giant” is historical in the way that history is preserved by people who cannot write: as legend, story, rumor and myth.ĭespite what you might read elsewhere, however, this is not a fantasy novel. ![]() Unlike his two best-known works, “The Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go,” this book takes place not in a recognizably modern world, but in a quasi-historical Britain, a rugged, harsh landscape where villagers dig their primitive homes out of hillsides and regard a nighttime candle as a luxury. To understand why Kazuo Ishiguro’s ambitious new novel, “The Buried Giant,” doesn’t quite work, it helps to understand what it’s trying to do.
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