Reading Ishiguro at the right age
The Remains of the Day, and what it tells you about looking back
Most novels you can read at any age. The Remains of the Day is not one of them. I read it for the first time this year, at sixty-one, thirty-seven years after it won the Booker. I read it on my eldest son’s advice. He is a better reader than I am.
The book opens in July 1956. Stevens is the butler at Darlington Hall, an old English country house now owned by Mr Farraday, an American. Farraday suggests he take a short holiday and lends him the Ford. Stevens drives west for six days to meet his former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, now Mrs Benn, with the half-acknowledged hope that she might return to Darlington Hall. The trip frames the book. His mind keeps going back to the 1920s and 1930s, the Lord Darlington years, the years that mattered.
What Lord Darlington was
Lord Darlington was an English aristocrat who, in the years between the wars, believed the punishment imposed on Germany at Versailles was too harsh and that another war could be prevented through quiet diplomacy and personal relationships with influential Germans. He hosted secret conferences at Darlington Hall in 1923 and again in 1936. By the late 1930s, those conferences had become indistinguishable from appeasement; by 1940, from collaboration. After the war, Darlington was disgraced. He died alone in 1956, the same year as the trip, his name attached to a libel suit he had lost.
Stevens served Darlington devotedly throughout. His definition of *dignity* required him to suspend his own judgment in favor of professional service. When his employer dismissed two Jewish housemaids in 1935 at the request of a German guest, Stevens carried out the dismissals. When Miss Kenton confronted him in the kitchen, he gave her the answer the butler-version of himself was supposed to give.
The pier
On the sixth day of the trip, in Weymouth, Stevens sits on a pier at dusk. Miss Kenton is gone, definitively. She has decided to stay with her husband. A stranger on the bench beside him asks how he is doing. Stevens cries briefly. He says, almost to himself, that he gave his best years to Lord Darlington, that he cannot even claim the dignity of having made his own mistakes. Darlington made them, and Stevens served the consequences.
Then the stranger says something practical. The evening is the best part of the day; Stevens should make the most of what remains rather than mourn what is already behind him. Stevens decides, sitting there, to learn the American art of *bantering*, so that he can serve Mr Farraday properly in the years that are left. The book ends on that decision.
It is a small decision. It is a devastating ending.
Why it lands different after sixty
At forty, I would have read Stevens as a foolish man who wasted his life. At sixty-one, I read him as a recognizable one. The difference is not sympathy. It is calibration. By sixty, you have made enough of your own version of the dignity-trade to know the moments you let your institution do your thinking, the corners you turned away from because the alternative would have cost too much.
Ishiguro gets the timing right. Stevens does not realize he has been lying to himself in his thirties and corrects course. He realizes in his fifties and changes very little. He realizes fully, on the Weymouth pier, in his sixties, and what he can do with the realization is small. Learn to banter. Be a better butler to the right employer, in the time that remains.
That is what the rest of the day looks like.
This is also why so many people misremember the book as melancholy. Stevens decides to keep working. The work is smaller now, and the employer is worth serving. He has the evening, and he has something to learn during it. That is what Ishiguro is actually saying.
The small thing
If you have not read The Remains of the Day, read it. Faber and Faber’s paperback is cheap and small. If you read it in your twenties or thirties, read it again now. The book does not change. You do, and the same sentences mean different things.
The title of this publication is no accident.
– John-Paul