The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro

The criticisms of this book seem overstated. Big set-piece reveals are one way of brining shock and awe to a reader. But the expectation of astonishment is another. Ishiguro does break his own rules, but the rules are vague and magical, so I'm not so worried about that either. Judging a book by standards it has not set out to meet is not useful.

On the other hand, I only read it because I wanted to read some of Ishiguro's more recent work and it was in a charity shop. Its semi-mythical setting was less effective than it might have been. King Lear is set in a similar non-exact time but doesn't try to recreate that period quite so much. The broad allegory of politics and national memory was not as interesting or effective as the personal stories. Remains of the Day is far more generally applicable because it is about such a specific set of political circumstances.

Tyler Cowen gave up with this book after 120 pages because he didn't care enough. I didn't give it up and thought the ending was good (terribly sad, but good) and met the criteria of the expectation of astonishment, and had a bit of a twist. Critics always want a pattern in the carpet or a neatness of the plot where you might get benefit from different techniques. I'm not sure Ishiguro did get that benefit all the time, but that's a separate question.

It's always difficult reading another book by an author when you have just read one of their masterpieces, but this is worth reading if you are an Ishiguro fan. I will now go back to my general lack of interest in novels with dragons in them, noting although that I am somewhat more interested in reading excellent fantasy fiction than I was before, I think speculative fiction probably has more scope for the sort of thing Ishiguro wanted to do here.

Why not just read The Handmaid's Tale?