The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

This post contains spoilers – please do not read if you want to read the book in the future!

I finally got round to reading The Buried Giant by newly crowned Kazuo Ishiguro. Although aware of his work, it was my first novel of his that I’d read and I have to say I found it compelling and interesting. And after being slightly bemused by where the story was headed, and I have to say, I didn’t like many of the characters at times, it came to a great conclusion which left many questions unanswered. It’s readable, addictive, with a gentle prose like delivery.

The story is set in the early Dark Ages, that is, shortly after the fall of the Roman influence (around 400 – 600AD), and from a historical context, it would be true to say that little documentation remains from that era, or was written centuries after the events that allegedly took place.

What we do know is that the Christian (Romano) Britons and the newly arrived pagan Saxons (who would become the modern day English), live together side by side. Ishiguro captures this well, and adds the omnipresent weight of the understanding that more and more Saxons were arriving on the eastern shores of Britain and spreading west, squeezing the Britons into smaller and smaller territories.

However, this is an alternate, fantastical Britain being depicted, drawing heavily on the myth and legend of these islands. Fierce and stupid Ogres roam the land, sometimes stealing children. Pixies hide in forests and rivers, beguiling travellers. Boatmen adopt a Charon like role, ferrying passengers to an idyllic island where they will live in happiness but may not necessarily see another person. Although not common, sorcery is respected and feared. Monks allow crows to shred their flesh to absolve themselves of sin, carrying the guilt of people. And an old dragon spews a mist over all the surrounding lands which has a strange calming effect on the residents, both Christian and Pagan, making them struggle to remember their pasts and memories. Although this magic relating to the dragon’s breath isn’t revealed until later in the book.

Ishiguro also draws from the chivalrous romances of Arthurian legend too, and in the Buried Giant the Romano-British King Arthur has died some years, possibly decades, before. This was after leading a great victory against the Saxons and an uneasy peace treaty is in place between the Britons and the Saxon invaders/settlers. This combination of history, fantasy, myth, legend and romance was also successfully blended in the underrated film Excalibur by John Boorman and there were many times reading the book, where I was reminded of that movie.

So that’s the backdrop, what about the story?

The story revolves around two characters, a husband and wife Axl and Beatrice. They are old, they are tired, but they are devoted to each other and in love. They live on the outskirts of a warren like village community in the countryside, where everyone contributes to the good of all. Seemingly, because they are old and less important than the stronger villagers, they live further away from the central fires of the warren and are not allowed to keep candles due to some unspoken or unremembered accident which nearly led to a fire. Thus when their communal duties are complete, their evenings are spent in solemn darkness which adds to the melancholy.

They both have little reveries and flashbacks, but their memory is impaired by this mist. They both do agree though that they have a son, who lives in a nearby village, a couple of days walk from them. And thus they seek permission from the village leaders to find him.

Their adventure leads them, in both their trek and in the fragments of recovered memories, to meet sinister monks, witches, the aforementioned boatman, soldiers, an ancient survivor of Arthur’s court and the old King’s nephew (Sir Gawain), an exiled orphan boy Edwin who was bitten by a dragon and thus cursed and finally an accomplished warrior called Wistan, a Saxon, who was tasked with the mission to kill the dragon.

These latter three, Sir Gawain, Edwin and Wistan band together with Axl and Beatrice, and the final scenes culminate with an ascent up to meet the Dragon, Querig.

Throughout the book, little by little, more memories are whispered to Axl and Beatrice. Axl is recognised by both Gawain and Wistan as someone from many decades before. And these memories trickle back to the old couple, such that they end up fearing what they might remember of each other, who they were, what secrets they’d suppressed and might end up hating each other because of it. It’s searingly sad, because they love each other and memories may make that love perish. Their anxiety burns through the pages.

The overall theme though is one of guilt, the power of memory, revenge and war. The eradication of an enemy, the genocide of a perceived enemy is a modern as well as an ancient theme and this unsettles. Sir Gawain is noble, but he carries the burden of the great massacre, a murder of the innocents in the Saxon communities at the end of the war Arthur sanctioned. Although he did not personally take part in killing civilians, he was complicit and didn’t condemn his King. Thus, immune to the effects of the mist, he has adopted the role of Querig’s protector, to keep the dragon’s breath rolling over the land and to keep the memories of hatred suppressed, to ultimately keep the peace. At times his character appeared slightly unhinged, it wasn’t clear if Ishiguro wanted to portray some ambiguity in that, with the secrets he carried and his venerable age contributing to some form of dementia or madness. In other ways he may have adopted this persona as an affectation, to maintain the charade that his mission was actually to topple Querig and not protect her, and thus the populace saw him as a doddery old fool on a fool’s quest.

Axl also finds memories which hurt his heart, he was an important knight himself, “the knight of peace” and ultimately he was betrayed in this massacre, retiring into ignorant obscurity and hard work.

Wistan also carried a burden. He grew up with Briton’s as a child, trained with them, but he was a Saxon. And his Saxon king wanted the dragon dead, so the memories of anger would come to the fore, and thus it would lead to an uprising where the Saxons would deliver brutal revenge upon the Britons. Wistan is also immune to the Dragon magic and was the perfect choice to kill the dragon, his head would be clear, he would not forget. He wanted to hate the Britons, but he saw Gawain and the old gentle couple as decent folk. And thus, once he would kill the Dragon, he would train Edwin, the boy with the dragon bite, to be his protégé.

I won’t spoil the ending if you’ve read this far, I won’t say whether Axl and Beatrice find their son, or whether the dragon gets killed. But it is tragic and heart wrenchingly sad. It’s not a fantasy book. It’s a book about people, about love, regret and the aftermath of war, set in a fantasy setting. A boatman narrates the final chapter, where the ailing couple look to end their journey over a body of water. It’s left open to make your own assumption about what happens to them, or whether they, or their love survives.

But I definitely recommend reading it.

Reiko Watanabe, Hiroshima

 

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the nuclear bomb falling on Hiroshima. It’s often the story of the individual which hits home when contemplating the horrors of war and the associated loss of life. In Reiko Watanabe’s case, it’s her lack of a story, the hole left, the emptiness of a future taken from her, the life she could have led, which really hit home for me. She was only 15 when the bomb dropped, helping with fire prevention work with her fellow students. She might be alive today, a grandmother, or great grandmother. We can only imagine the dreams and ambitions she concocted in her youth. The war raged around her, but she had a future.

Her body was never found, she was working by a mud wall, and later, her lunch box was discovered, melted, but still distinguishable and full of the rice and peas her mother had prepared for her that morning. It was all carbonised of course, but it was a tiny glimpse to show she was loved. And missed.

The photo below is by Hiromi Tsuchida, it is Reiko’s lunchbox. I first saw this photo in an exhibition at the Tate Modern, Conflict, Time, Photography and I was both chilled to the core at the power of the weapons we’ve made to destroy each other and moved by the humanity of the portrait of this last memento of a young girl’s life.

I wrote these words for her.

 

Reiko

By the low wall, Reiko diligently performed the fire drill

she briefly saw the white light, In an eerie silence,

Before it blinded her,

moments later the force, hit her,

Vapourised her, leaving the girl,

In the the spring of her youth,

Just a memory to those who loved her,

 

Her future dreams, caught in the shock wave,

scattered, as single words,

Sewn seeds, in the poisoned fields,

The wall she worked by, it fell,

so that even her shadow,

was lost,

 

But her lunch box,

Buckled by the heat, survived,

A memento, a tribute to the love,

of her proud mother, who sent her out,

with precious rice and peas,

to help.

 

Poem © Mel Melis (photograph by Hiromi Tsuchida)

Don McCullin, Shaped by War – Imperial War Museum

As part of my birthday we spent yesterday morning at the Imperial War Museum, where we’d bought tickets to see the Don McCullin Photography Exhibition, Shaped by War. It’s a major chronological retrospective covering his social history/poverty and commissioned photography work in the UK and in various war zones around the world.

I have to admit I only knew a little of McCullin’s work (and photography in general) prior to visiting, but I’ve always admired the starkness of human suffering captured in that shutter moment and I always think of the subject and photographer when I see an image which drags out an emotional response. What they were feeling? Whether they survived? Where are they now? Are they happy?

But not knowing much made the experience more forceful, more hard hitting. The first thing to say about McCullin is he’s in his late seventies, he lived through the war years, through poverty and rationing, through evacuation from Finsbury Park, North London. He has felt that hunger in his belly which many of us born in later years will have no concept of.

People from villages and small towns often say that they are proud of the sons and daughters of their region, when they go on to make a success of themselves. Although London is a big city, there still exists some sense of connection and community to an area within it, it may be a nostalgic or romantic vision of it (McCullin himself describes the area as tribal and violent when he was a young adult), but I still cling to some connection and love to where I’m from. Hence, having grown up in the area myself, I felt a sense of pride for Don. Here was a local working class lad who’d contributed so much to photo-journalism and to the world.

It all could have gone wrong for him though, he may have dumped photography, he pawned his camera, but his mother sensibly got it back for him.

In the thirty minute film which is shown as part of the exhibition (see extract below), McCullin comes across as being haunted by the sense of making a living through tragedy. The first tragedy which got him into a career in photography was the murder of a policeman by a north London gang. As he was an associate of a gang himself, he took photos of his friends, he sent them to the Observer and they published them. A window into this (probably) hidden working class world of 1950s urban violence must have fascinated the broadsheet buying public. And that kick started his career.

He doesn’t claim he’s a good guy, and in no way is he a bad guy… there are times when he personally performs great feats of courage or dignity (carrying a wounded G.I in vietnam), there are other times when he says (I paraphrase) he feels repulsed by his feelings towards war, needing it and being enthused by it. It’s an uneasy and unsettling ambivalence, balanced between revulsion and guilt and the absolute conviction of making sure people had a voice in the world, that tragedies would be brought to the public attention.

In addition, he has a deep sense of value for his work, he sheds this peculiar British notion of self effacement, denying or putting down value in your own work. He positively knows his work is excellent, he has invested so much in it, so much skill and feeling, but in no way does it come across as an arrogance, or a blind spot to some hidden weakness. He puts everything into it, he wants us to feel, to become involved. His weakness is one which he is painfully aware of, the guilt he carries for what he has seen and photographed. I suspect he feels this pain every day of his life.

His mistrust of humanity stems from what he has seen. As he states in the interview, he keeps his loved ones close of course, but witnessing such unimaginable horror has made him suspicious to the point of avoiding human contact it seems. In recent, non war related work, he seeks solitude through the photography of landscapes, in what he describes as healing. He wants people to fall in love with these photographs. And in the exhibition, after the harrowing images of war, there are some beautiful landscape images which appear gently at the end, a kind of reflection, a small balm, a little reminder that there is beauty in the world.

But, what one man can inflict on another without any mercy or compassion has forged him. His story of his experience in Vietnam sounds like hell on earth. Being surrounded by corpses, sleeping and waking up finding you’d inadvertently slept beside a corpse, jumping into a hole to hind only to find you are sitting on the belly of another corpse, but still maintaining an ability to take photos. It shook him, drove him to battle fatigue, it would have tipped most people over the edge, whether they were fighting men or not. His image of an American solider, having been badly wounded in both legs is one he describes as reminiscent of one of the most iconic images in the western world. That of Christ being brought down from the cross by his loved ones.

McCullin’s has been quoted as saying : “I am a professed atheist, until I find myself in serious circumstances. Then I quickly fall on my knees, in my mind if not literally, and I say : Please God, save me from this”

And it’s not hard to imagine investing frightened prayers for salvation when faced with such chaos and murder all around.

Pic I took of McCullin’s camera which copped a bullet for him. And it still works!

I have to say, going to this exhibition, you cannot be anything other than emotionally involved with the suffering and sadness he has captured. Not just because of images of fighting, but because of images of the victims of war. The hollow shell of the fragile oprhan albino boy from Biafra, not only starving, but shunned because of his condition, dressed in rags.

Or, the picture of the abandoned child in Bangladesh in 1971. This child would be about the same age as me. I haven’t stopped thinking about him or her since looking at this photograph.

(photo of this photo from thedrum.co.uk)

Finally, the final part of the film “The Darkness in Me” where Don McCullin talks of his later years and finding peace. It contains some disturbing, but also beautiful images as he talks about overcoming or at least controlling the darkness in him. The other three parts are also on youtube.

Shaped by War is on until the 15th April.

PJ Harvey, Royal Albert Hall, October 30th 2011

After a few days to soak it up and let it sink in, I have to say this was one of the best gigs I’ve been to. Out of all Peej’s albums, her current one (Let England Shake) ranks as high as her debut “Dry” (1992) and the beautifully polished “Stories from the city, stories from the sea” (2000).
Why was it one of the best gigs I’ve been to? Well, it was at the Royal Albert Hall, truly a magnificent venue for music. But also the quality of the delivery of all the songs played, the new album in it’s entirety plus more and a near two hour set.
The songs from the new album evoke war and the experience of war told through the eyes of combatants and civilians. Also it poignantly digs into the spirit of a pastoral England, an urban England. The beauty and hardships, the wonder and sadness.  Warts and all. It’s achingly beautiful, uplifting and melancholic. Lyrically it’s just breathtaking.


The Last Living Rose
Goddamn Europeans!
Take me back to beautiful England
And the grey damp filthiness of ages
And battered books
And fog rolling down behind the mountains
On the graveyards and dead sea-captains.
Let me walk through the stinking alleys
To the music of drunken beatings
Past the Thames river glistening
Like gold, hastily sold
For nothing
Let me watch night fall on the river
The moon rise up and turn to silver
The sky move
The ocean shimmer
The hedge shake
The last living rose, quiver.


And this song, the suffering and loneliness of the dying soldier


Hanging in the Wire.
Walker sees the mist rise
Over no man's land
He sees in front of him
A smashed up waste ground
There are no fields or trees
No blades of grass
Just unhurried ghosts are there
Hanging in the wire
Walker's in the wire
Limbs point upwards
There are no birds singing
The white cliffs of Dover
There are no trees to sing from
Walker cannot hear the wind
Far off symphony
To hear the guns beginning
Walker's in the mist
Rising over no man's land
In the battered waste ground
Hear the guns firing
Incredibly, there is a video for every single song on the album. Each one is compelling. All made by a filmmaker called Seamus Murphy. Here is the vid for Hanging in the Wire.

It makes me think of Paul Nash’s sensitive and harrowing World War 1 painting “We are making a new world” (Imperial War Museum). The tender and fragile tendrils of the suns rays tentatively touching the scene of devastation.

As for the gig, Polly Harvey was dressed in a black long dress, adorned with a crow feather headdress.
Here she is pictured with Mick Harvey (no relation) strumming away at her auto-harp.

It was interesting that the three lads in the band and her played some distance apart.


Ghostly Polly plays Autoharp

With guitar

Managed to get all band members in one shot! (Harvey, Harvey, Parrish, Butty, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grubb) – and if you understood that joke, it makes you old like me… shhhh…

Even the massive Royal Albert Hall organ got tooted.

Thankyou and goodnight!

And the night was topped off by John from work giving me a lift to Turnpike Lane, so I didn’t have to queue up with all the (other) morlocks at South Kensington station. Although he does need to sort his satnav, kept trying to direct him to the nearest chiropracter / police station for some reason!