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PARTISAN REVIEW
he meets, with his perfect manners, his well-cut suit and his posh address ,
as a gentleman himself. Yet it is one of the sad ironies of his sheltered life
that he never fails to be disarmed, even intimidated, by the very people
who look up to him; Stevens is never more moving - or more Japanese
- than when he earnestly meditates on the virtues of "bantering" and
realizes, to his sorrow, that he will never be able to speak the language
of the world.
For while Ishiguro can create an utterly convincing Japanese from
the inside out, he is also far enough away from Japan to be able to
count the cost in fashioning so limited a self; and to see that meticulously
sticking to decorum is a way of staying at a safe distance from warmth or
wit or risk. Not for Stevens the bold inspirations ofJeeves - he is a man
who lives entirely by the book, permitting himself neither opinions, nor
curiosity, nor even, really, self. And in the end, it is his very virtues - his
loyalty, diplomacy and his self-restraint - that leave him high and dry . His
unquestioning fidelity to his master's voice leads him to defend a man
who fraternizes with Nazis and dismisses two housemaids on the grounds
of being Jewish. And his insistence on self-control at any cost, and in any
context, prevents him from admitting, even to himself, any softer feelings
to sustain him - such as love, perhaps, or hope. For all his command of
subtleties, Stevens is, in some ways, emotionally deaf, trying with reason
to fathom the logic of the heart. "Why, why, why do you always have
to
pretend?"
the woman who loves him finally cries out; to that, he can
answer only that it is his duty, his self. The dying light that casts a vale–
dictory glow on all the fading houses of his world finally includes the
protagonist himself.
The great skill of Ishiguro's book - the grace of his position, per–
haps - is that he lets us sympathize with both the lover's impatient cry,
and the butler's perfectly dignified response. In that sense, he shows us
how unreasonable it is for us to expect those trained - or even hired -
to be self-annulling, to act otherwise; and how unreasonable, for them,
to expect us to renounce impulse or emotion. In the process, he begins
to explain how the Japanese can be highly sophisticated, yet innocent as
toddlers; refined, yet seemingly by reflex; extraordinarily considerate and
in spite - indeed
because
-
of that, apparently unfeeling. Translating the
most Japanese of virtues into terms we recognize as our own, he brings
their foreign features home to us.
Without a doubt, the thirty-five year-old author owes a great deal
to his background. The atmosphere of all his books is set by the title of
the first,
A Pale View of Hills,
and all three of his novels have that same
ink-wash elusiveness, an ellipticism almost violent in its reticence; all
three, moreover, are exquisitely fashioned miniatures, miracles of work–
manship and tact that suggest everything through absence and retreat. His
