Review: The Body of Jonah Boyd by David Leavitt, Charlotte Observer

Bringer of Monsters


Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn. Vintage. 256 pages. $13

Goya by Robert Hughes. Knopf. 429 pages. $45.00.

Francisco Goya: A Life by Evan S. Connell. Counterpoint Press. 272 pages. $26.00

In the Abu Ghraibs of 200 years ago, they didn't have digital cameras; they had Francisco Goya. In "Disasters of War," the great series of etchings that wouldn't be published until 40 years after his death, the 19th Century Spanish master chronicled his own country's war with Napoleonic France with the kind of unstinting realism that skirts the unreal; these pictures of piled corpses, orphaned children, people either impaled on trees or with their dismembered parts swinging from them, are so bloody as to seem hallucinatory. "The sleep of reason brings forth monsters" reads the caption of his most famous etching, in which a slumbering artist is bedeviled by bats and owls, and the words are as true for Goya as they are for the age he lived in. The world we see in his paintings -- particularly those he created following a mysterious mid-life illness that left him permanently deaf -- is one where madness and cruelty are very much the normal order of business.

Aside from his war reportage (which may well have been entirely imaginary) Goya had a genius for nightmares in general, due in no small way to the tumultuous public and private worlds he lived in. Besides the war, the tortures of the Inquisition were still dragging on after centuries, and the painter's deafness seemed to unleash a raw and enigmatic imagination that had only been hinted at before.

"Goya is throbbing in everything around me," a young Eugene Delacroix wrote in his famous journals, and he isn't alone; Goya's art seems to affect people personally. His latest crop of biographers often seem to regard Goya the way Goya regarded his work: like a fever dream to be exorcised.

For her Old Man Goya, occasioned by the impending death of the author's artist mother, Julia Blackburn actually goes to the effort of plugging her ears with wax to approximate Goya's deafness. In the introduction to his own book on Goya, the art critic Robert Hughes says an auto accident forced him into facing his subject, who in turn served as a kind of impish muse. Laid up in the hospital with a prosthetic brace screwed into his leg, Hughes would dream of Goya mocking him: "Not only could I not do the job; my subject knew it and found my inability hysterically funny."

This kind of personal attachment between biographer and subject doesn't come highly recommended, as there is always the chance of a narrow or biased approach. On the other hand, there is the example of a third recent biography, by the novelist Evan S. Connell; sane, detached, pristine and, compared to the other two, pretty thin gruel.

Blackburn tries to see Goya, tries to feel his spirit at a bullfight, to hear him in the enigmatic captions to the etchings – which are "a way of talking to himself and anyone else who wanted to hear what an old deaf man had to say." As other critics have, she senses his deafness in compositional terms, noticing the thickness of the walls, the sheer sense of brutal silence that the paintings communicate to a viewer, as well as the noise: "a great hollow booming reverberation like a mixture of thunder and human voices."

Her book is a captivating, intimate and sometimes overreaching account of one artist trying – through research, travel, and force of imagination – to immerse herself into the life of another. Hughes' book, on the other hand, is an education in itself; whatever tricks Goya's emissary from beyond might have played on him, he didn't keep him from delivering one of the liveliest and immensely entertaining portraits of an artist I've ever read.

Written with the same conversational elegance he brought to his great PBS series of a few years ago, "American Visions," Hughes explains in captivating detail both the political, social and historic milieu of Goya’s world, and the particulars of his craft. He richly and often hilariously recreates the Bourbon world of Goya's employers, the revolving door of one dunderheaded Carlos after the next, and his fascinating description of all the hard work that goes into etching makes the results that much more stunning.

More than all this, Hughes is a great viewer. Looking at Goya's "Picnic on the Bank of the Manzanares," he writes of how the fetching orange-seller "is pointing offstage in a fairly unmistakable gesture of invitation: buy my oranges, says this maja, and you get something else to peel, though not necessarily for free." In another famous portrait, where the pretty little son of a duke has a bird on a string while a pair of cats watch nearby, Hughes sees a sly comment on the class system: "The price of privilege is unremitting tension, for birds as well as people." He points out how in Goya’s famous etching of "Sleep of Reason" an owl becomes a symbol not of wisdom but of stupidity, offering the sleeping painter "an artist’s chalk in a holder -- the better to draw incorrect and misleading interpretations with." With "Bandit Stripping a Woman,'' the averted face of a rape victim denotes the complicity of the viewer: "And from whom is her face hidden? You. Whose gaze does she fear? Yours. She does not want you to see. She is stricken by shame at your gaze." Goya's "Dead Turkey" is for Hughes a still life that is truly still: "Perhaps the world is full of dead turkeys, but not one of them could be deader than Goya’s. It may not stimulate appetite, but there is no doubt that it promotes as much sympathy as any other corpse in art." Goya is similarly attuned to the vulnerability of the body, and Hughes is right there with him. Hughes' own damaged leg can't be far from his thoughts when he's looking at Goya's depiction of a matador gored through the thigh: "A horn that pierces the inner thigh, angling upwards and exiting through the lower buttock, is almost certain to sever the deep femoral artery, causing a fatal loss of blood that no tourniquet can stem."

Connell's book, which actually goes into the personal life of Goya perhaps the best of these three books He fills in the picture some more, and capably explores the lasting mystery of whether Goya did or didn't have a fling with the subject of his famous Naked Maja. He also spends rather more time with Goya's family life than Hughes and raises -- and just as quickly retracts -- the possibility that Goya was bisexual. But where Hughes is so riveting on the art and so richly detailed and alive regarding all the complex personalities involved in Goya's world, Connell is either patchy or bland, and his writing lacks fire. He seems to fear getting too close to his subject, whereas for Hughes there's no choice in the matter. Hughes tears through Goya's life and art like a ball of fire: a great teacher delivering a world-class course on a great artist.

Eventide by Kent Haruf. Alfred A. Knopf. 320 pages. $24.95

Depending on your point of view, Kent Haruf's 1999 Plainsong was either a majestic triumph of rural realism or just one more cornball saga of people in small-town America struggling to get by.

Set in Haruf's fictional terrain of Holt, Colorado, the book's main two interlinking stories were about abandonment and protection, with solid, decent men in both cases taking care of the weak and the vulnerable. Tom Guthrie, a high school teacher and farmer, tries to raise the two sons left to his care by their slack and selfish mother. The McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, a couple of aging, salt-of-the-earth cattle ranchers, find themselves taking in a new tenant, the pregnant high school waif Victoria Roubideaux.

Truly, all this had the makings of very sappy stuff, and the Guthrie story even carried with it a strong whiff of To Kill a Mockingbird, as Guthrie's ethical refusal to give a passing grade to the star athlete in his American History class puts his own children at risk. But Haruf followed very much of an it's-the-story-stupid approach; he kept events pared to the essentials, and he took real no chances with the narrative, as if to explore this land with any psychological depth might lead to the slough of sentimentality. The closest Haruf ever got to any kind of a metaphor is in the close attention to the birth of cattle, mainly to underscore the vulnerability of new life in a hard world, for both people and animals.

We return to that scene -- "every living thing in this world gets weaned eventually," Guthrie will point out to his sons -- and a lot else in this sequel, where the plain folk of Holt continue to tough it out against the elements, both natural and social. Death strikes early; as Harold and Raymond struggle to contain an enraged bull, Harold loses his life and Raymond gets seriously injured. Victoria, who had moved with her baby, Katie, to Denver to attend college, drops everything to come home and nurse Raymond back to health. Raymond, facing the prospect of life alone, develops an interest in Linda May, his hospital nurse. A life in the company of Harold and blackbaldy cattle have made him a little too slow on the uptake where women are concerned; it will take another love interest, the social worker Rose Tyler, to initiate the old boy -- or at least it looks like an initiation -- into the mysteries of sex.

At the end of Plainsong, Guthrie has a knock-down drag-out fight with the family of Russell Beckman, the star athlete who kidnaps and terrorizing his two boys, and the book ended with an indication that the two parties would see each other in court. It doesn't happen; Haruf has lost interest in the Beckmanns, if not in showing us small children getting kicked around by a vicious bully. This is the story of Joy Ray and Richie, luckless children of the pathetic Luther and Betty Wallace, who are living in a trailer when Betty's wastrel uncle Hoyt Raines decides to move in. Betty and Luther, besides being irresponsible, are completely spineless around Hoyt, who takes a sadistic pleasure in beating the two children within an inch of their lives.

Two other families of deserted or neglected children are brought into focus as well. There's the single mother Mary Wells, aimlessly raising a pair of girls, Emma and Dena, both of whom are mostly left to fend for themselves. The girls make friends with a neighbor boy, DJ Kephart, who is taking care of his sick and alcoholic grandfather, Walter.

Although the book is anchored by the story of Raymond's recovery, Haruf's interest is with the children of this world, the Joy Rays and Emmas and DJs who can only fend for themselves and may or may not make it. Their caretakers have long since resigned themselves to misery and the easy way out -- fates the children themselves may or may not escape.

This is not an ineffective book. But while Eventide has the same narrative pull as Plainsong, there's more stickiness in the details; there's something a little more condescending in Haruf's approach to these characters, and a number of the scenes seem lifted from movies. The story never runs out of steam, but it begins to seem manipulative and misty-eyed where Plainsong kept an agreeable distance. The material is a good deal more emotional and Haruf, like the Holt farmers, milks it for all its worth.

Review, Folly and Glory by Larry Mcmurtry, New York Times.

Animal Crackers review, Free Times

Review of The Dew Breaker, Charlotte Observer.

Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes (old review; I may have linked it before, but I couldn't find it and neither could someone else who was looking for it.)

Love Monkey review, Washington Post, March 21, 2004

Waterborne review, Charlotte Observer, March 14, 2004

Love by Toni Morrison

Charlotte Observer review of Still Holding by Bruce Wagner.

The Red Passport by Katherine Shonk Jan. 25, 2004, New York Times

Holidays in Hell

Platform by Michel Houellebecq, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00

Somewhere in the middle of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, an argument breaks out among visitors to a hardcore S&M club over whether torture and humiliation are normal aspects of human sexuality. "It’s completely disgusting," says one voyeur, an artist who has gained some fame for his own revolting exhibitions. "...But it’s precisely what is disgusting in the human animal that interests me."

Ditto the author. Like his previous novel, the 2000 The Elementary Particles, Platform is a shallow, contrary, moralistic, pornographic, and oddly powerful novel of ideas; a story of the pursuit of self-gratification that is also a sour reflection on freedom, and what amounts to a no-win battle between democracy and fundamentalism.

The protagonist, Michel Renault, presents himself as a middle-age bureaucrat with tastes and ambitions to match. A glum little man who works as an accountant for the French Ministry of Culture, his job is to finance contemporary art exhibits whose meanings elude him: "I maintain the disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager," he tells us. "Questions of aesthetics and politics are not my thing." For all his self-effacement, Michel is not the type of fictional character who parades his unexamined life for the reader’s smug enjoyment; he’s too smart and self-conscious for that. During a vacation, he looks at himself wearing jeans and a Radiohead T-shirt: "My anxious bureaucratic face clashed horribly with what I was wearing, and I looked exactly like what I was: a forty-something civil servant on vacation, trying to pretend he’s young; it was pretty demoralizing." The closest he ever gets to a human relationship is his daily visit to the local porn shop (“Watching pussy in motion cleared my head”) or, if need be, hiring a prostitute.

Michel is so jaded by his admittedly passionless existence that not even the murder of his estranged father -- at the hands of the jealous Muslim brother of his father’s girlfriend -- moves him beyond an initial blast of spite. His inheritance does, however, allow him to take a vacation to Thailand, which proves something of a revelation; everyone there, like him, basically wants sex. They see the usual sights and indulge in the exotic foods, but basically they all want to connect, however briefly, with another human -- whether a call girl, a stripper, a masseur or each other. As Michel well knows, sex becomes increasingly difficult to acquire as you age; luckily for him, there’s the young and beautiful fellow tourist Valerie, who hooks up with him after the trip is over and proves to be at least as devoted to the pleasure principle as he is.

Valerie, an executive with the travel firm that arranged the trip, has what Michel can’t seem to find in anyone else: the power to give pleasure unselfishly. When she moves from her up-and-coming firm to working at a major resort industry, Michel inspires her with the idea of setting up a worldwide business based entirely on sexual tourism -- resort hotels in poor or underdeveloped countries where local prostitution is allowed to flourish. As Michel explains it, it’s pure supply and demand: wealthy westerners with everything in life but a good lay meet poor people with nothing left to sell but their bodies. For neither Michel or Valerie is profit the sole motive; they want the world to have what they have -- as well, presumably, as the sheer stamina to blow, lick, wank, fondle or bang each other on every other page. As the resort idea proliferates, it eventually thrusts both of them into the line of fire against radical religious terrorism.

Here, of course, is the nub of the problem in the modern world – a freedom-loving progressive society at war with Dark Age theocracies who are only modern in their weaponry. Echoing both Machiavelli and the Marquis de Sade, Houellebecq’s novel-length suicide note suggests that the Western triumph over religious terrorism won’t be any victory at all. Chattering away at full trot as only a drunken Frenchman can, Houellebecq sees the freedom to pursue pleasure as a meaningless substitute for God -- even one you believe to be dead. Pleasure is so limited and people are so faceless as to be mere repetions of each other; any life, especially the good life, is basically just one agonizingly long dry hump. As Michel puts it, "Anything can happen in life, especially nothing."

Like its predecessor, Platform arrived in this country on the heels of considerable controversy in the author’s native France. Where the earlier novel alienated both liberals and conservatives with its weird stew of reactionary politics and sexual excess, the new one was cited in a case where the author was charged with slandering Islam -- which you can apparently do in France, of all places -- in some comments he made in an interview. As could perhaps be predicted, the only thing the case achieved was to make Houellebecq a cause celebre among the international literary community.

It also, to my mind anyway, raised some question as to what Houellebecq’s aggressors were thinking. It’s easy enough to spot the scattered lines that might give offense -- "Muslims on the whole aren’t worth much," Michel says at one point -- but it’s just as easy to respond to them: Michel is frankly a racist, and he hates Islam because, at either end of the book, Muslims kill people close to him. The things he says aren’t supposed to be taken as a true reflection of the author -- or are they? Are the concerns of the fictional Michel all that different, in essence, from the author Michel – who changed his given name after his mother converted to Islam? In a stirring defense last year in the London Guardian, Salman Rushdie rightly said that a novel has a right " to be considered on its own terms … If novelists can't depict Nazis or bigots without being accused of being Nazis or bigots, then they can't do their work properly." Still, it’s the kind of question you often find yourself asking with Houellebecq, who has no interest of coming down on the right, humane or conventionally correct side of anything.

Houellebecq’s nihilism isn’t the deep, rich, full-roast Nietzschean brew; it’s cranky, petulant, and so by-the-numbers bleak as to be almost quaint -- had the titles not already been taken, he could have just as well called the book Nausea, No Exit or The Fall. But despair for a world that edges ever closer to its own destruction never really goes completely out of style and Platform, like The Elementary Particles, is a book of and about its time. For all its sloppiness and pages of goopy sleaze, it has a power that’s hard to shake -- you sense a book that has its sweaty fingers on the pulse of the beast of the apocalypse. It’s easy to dislike, hard to dismiss, and impossible to put down.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Washington Post, short reviews.

Best Friends review

The Colour by Rose Tremain

Mortals by Norman Rush

Reporting Civil Rights

Byron

Shakey: Neil Young's Biography by Jimmy McDonough

Whoo-hoo!

One of many things I can't possibly bring myself to care about.

...and a reader's response.

Tartt review in April 9, 2003 Free-Times

Artist of the Missing World

An interview with Kazuo Ishiguro

Part II

Yemassee: I found When We Were Orphans both similar to your previous novel, The Unconsoled, and different. Both have protagonists who are faced with a kind of obstacle course toward reaching a goal, which only seems to recede further away. But Orphans is a good deal more earthbound. Was it a conscious move on your part, to do something where the surfaces are a little more solid?

Ishiguro: I guess so. The Unconsoled, I decided, would kind of take place in this dream-logic world. I didn't necessarily see the need to carry on setting all my books in that dream world. To some extent, I'd probably had enough of it. I spent about four years immersed in that dream world. A lot of people just couldn't make head or tail of The Unconsoled, though I'm gratified to see that over the years here in England people seem to be coming around to it, reading it again and so on. When my book came out here in April, a lot of the reviews spent a lot of the space talking about The Unconsoled, so a lot of people wanted to write about that book as well as the new book. It was a book that baffled a lot of people, frustrated a lot of people, made a lot of people angry. In a way, I wanted to talk about some similar themes through a completely different kind of technique, using a relatively fast-paced story.

Yemassee: When We Were Orphans struck me as quite cinematic. The action of the book was so exterior. It moved at a very rapid pace.

Ishiguro: I used plot in this book perhaps more than I've used it before. Even books like The Remains of the Day, which is a pretty accessible book, is not very plotty. This is the first time I had a go at a traditional plot, if you like, and there's a kind of traditional denouement at the end, when Uncle Philip appears at the end and says what happened. To some extent, it began as an idea to do a kind of pastiche of a certain kind of adventure story or detective story of that time. I didn't really have that much heart in terms of wanting to do a full-blown pastiche. That kind of faded away a little. But when I started the book I did have this notion that yes, it should actually contain a plot. That wouldn't be the most important thing about it, but there should be a kind of mystery, and it should actually have a proper resolution, you should actually find out what happened to people. It just came with the territory. It was this kind of book I was writing.

Yemassee: Do you find Christopher markedly different from your other characters? In this book, unlike some of your others, the evil is less inside the character than outside him, threatening to engulf him.

Ishiguro: He's in quite a different position from people like Stevens the butler [in The Remains of the Day] or the artist [in An Artist of the Floating World]. Those earlier characters are certainly people who are trying to come to terms with something. They're trying to come to terms with ideals that took them somewhere they didn't want to go, and they realize that perhaps it is too late now to redeem their lives. They've given the best they had to something they didn't want to support. It's all about their struggle to come to terms with what's happened. That's not really Christopher's battle.

That character who looks back and very painfully comes to terms with a less than flattering reflection of himself -- that was a character who did fascinate me in the earlier part of my writing career. But after The Remains of the Day I felt I had covered that fairly thoroughly. I finished The Remains of the Day in my thirties and somewhere in between my mid-thirties and the time I hit 40, I think there was something about the way I viewed life in general that that way of looking at life didn't appeal to me much anymore. In a way, it's kind of a young man's way of looking at life, that you set out with a set of principles, political views, whatever, and then you go out there on the playing field and you use these principles as a guide and at the end of the game you see whether you've done well or not.

In a way, books like The Remains of the Day were written with that assumption in mind, that you measured your life toward the end by how well you stuck to your ideals and you may well find, because you didn't know enough or the world was too complicated a place, you took a wrong turn here or there, but you can see a clear road down which you've come, and perhaps you can identify the wrong turnings. I think somewhere along the way, after I'd finished The Remains of the Day, that pattern of how one views one's life didn't really ring true for me anymore. I thought things were perhaps not as controlled as that. Laterally, I've become much more interested in the fact that a lot of what we do is beyond one's control. We're often motivated by completely irrational things, and we often choose our vocation, who we associate with, who we live our lives with, who we marry according to some crazy irrational scenario, of wanting to fix something that can never be fixed.

Rodney Welch's Top Movies List

Top Ten Records

Reporting Civil Rights

Bunuel's El (This Strange Passion)

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles

How to Be Alone: Essays by Jonathan Franzen

Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Sideman by Fred Wesley. Jr.

Doctor Glas by Hjalmer Soderberg

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

Yippee!

Selected Book Reviews: New and Old

Free-Times

2002

* Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley

* Paul Schrader's Screenplays

* Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro

* Hotel World by Ali Smith

* The Scarlet Professor by Barry Werth

* A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford

* Rapture by Susan Minot

* Dawn Powell's Novels

* The Times of Their Lives by by James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz

2001

* The Elusive Tolkien

* The 2001 O. Henry Awards

* Mona and Other Tales by Reinaldo Arenas

* Lost Classics edited by Michael Ondaatjie

* Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul

* The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

* Chaon, Schickler, Iribarne

* The New Sins by David Byrne

* American Exorcism by Michael Cuneo

* Anywhere and Anything by David Axe

* The Book of Evidence by John Banville

* Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

* The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy

* Yeats is Dead! by 15 Irish Writers

* The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen

* The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio by Terry Ryan

* Inheritance: Selections from the South Carolina Fiction Project edited by Janette Turner Hospital

* True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

* The Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt

* The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters With Extraordinary People by Susan Orlean

2000

* Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice

* The Oxford Dictionary of Slang by John Ayto

* The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

* Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey

* When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

* Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro -- a slightly longer version than appeared in Free Times or Yemassee. (I have got to stop milking this article!)

* Schmidt Delivered by Louis Begley

* The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson

* The Family Orchard by Nomi Eve

* Licks of Love by John Updike

* Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike

* Nabokov: Butterflies, Blues, and Boyd

* The Verificationist by Donald Antrim

* James Dickey: The World as a Lie by Henry Hart

-- Interview with Matthew Bruccoli on James Dickey

--Friends Recall James Dickey

* The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

* Bellow by James Atlas

* Six Figures by Fred Leebron

* Off Keck Road by Mona Simpson

* Joan of Arc by Mary Gordon

* A New World by Amit Chaudhuri

* The Atlantic Sound by Caryl Phillips

* Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

* American Rhapsody by Joe Eszterhas

* Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files by Jon Wiener

* In GloryÕs Shadow: Shannon Faulkner, The Citadel and a Changing America by Catherine S. Manegold

* The Day of the Bees by Thomas Sanchez

* Fay by Larry Brown

* America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s by Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin

* The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election by Zachary Karabell

1999

* Burr and Hamilton: The Feud Continues

* Mao Zedong by Jonathan Spence

* The Voyage by Philip Caputo

* James Joyce by Edna O'Brien

* Somewhere in France by John Rolfe Gardiner

* Jerry Garcia: An American Life by Blair Jackson

* Cruddy An Illustrated Novel by Lynda Barry

* Who I Was Supposed To Be by Susan Perabo

* An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry of Everyday Folk Edited by Robert Wolf

* A Dark Place in the Jungle: Science, Orangutans, and Human Nature by Linda Spalding

* A Pair of Thrillers: Good and Not

* The Star Rover by Jack London

* Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown


The Point

Nabokov's Short Stories

Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

The End of Alice by A.M. Homes

Jim Thompson

In the Cut by Susanna Moore

Everclear

Love

Eyes Wide Shut

Part I

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki and moved to England at the age of five -- facts that would considerably shape his writing career. He straddles two cultures, one steeped in guilt, one steeped in colonialism, both still coming to terms with the events of the past. The past, likewise, is never far from his first-person narrators, most of whom are living in denial of some sort, hoping to make sense of their lives or struggling to come to terms with their unacknowledged role in recent history.

From the beginning, Ishiguro proved a writer of extraordinary promise. In his somber and poetic first novel, A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko, a mother who has recently lost her eldest daughter to suicide, recalls her pregnancy in post-war Nagasaki. While Etsuko gives us fair warning that her memory is unreliable, it may not be until the end of this deceptive, elegantly simple book that we take in the full impact of her words, when a surprise ending forces the reader to re-examine the story.

Post-war Japan was also the setting for Ishiguro's next novel, An Artist of the Floating World, where the artist Masuji Ono faces a series of social complications in trying to marry off his youngest daughter. A once highly-regarded imaginative painter, Ono is forced to face up to the fact that he squandered his gifts to create propaganda for Imperialist Japan.

Ishiguro probed this kind of theme even further in The Remains of the Day, his best-known novel and a most impressive achievement. Ishiguro writes in the voice of an aging English butler in the late 1950s, and does so with compelling ease.

Stevens, the long-time head butler at Darlington Hall, has always prided himself on his position, on his ability to be of service to a "great
gentleman." As he reviews the past, he comes to consider that this devotion to duty has done no good for himself or the world -- he has missed any chance for love, and by doing the bidding of his Nazi-sympathizing employer, he has only been a cog in the century's great wheel of misfortune.

The Remains of the Day was Ishiguro's breakthrough novel; it won the 1989 Booker Prize and was later made into an Oscar-nominated Merchant-Ivory film. As if to throw off whatever the public had come to expect of him, Ishiguro's next novel, The Unconsoled, was a complete surprise: a dream novel in which a concert pianist arrives in some mystical European town for a recital he doesn't recall ever scheduling. With its sudden perceptive shifts, bends in space, and general illogic, the book brought to mind one of the late films of Luis Bunuel, where dream and reality change places so much as to be indistinguishable from each other. The book probably confused as many people as it enthralled, but read under the right circumstances (a long undistracted weekend, say) it's a hypnotic experience -- even if, as with most dreams, you're not sure just where you've been after it's over.

In September of 2000, Ishiguro released his fifth novel, While it was far more traditional than The Unconsoled, this story of a detective trying to find the key to an elusive mystery moved in a similarly dream-like way.

Born in turn of the century Shanghai's International Settlement, Christopher Banks has been raised in Edwardian England since the age of ten, following the sudden disappearance of his mother and father. Being orphaned at an early age has created a rupture that will not heal; Banks, who devotes his life to solving other people's mysteries, still nourishes the hope that he can solve his own, and that his parents, decades later, are still alive. While Banks reveals a lot about himself, he raises as many questions as he answers; he's a remote character in many ways, and the only people he seems capable of making any connection with -- however slim -- are other orphans, like the social butterfly Sarah whom he nearly marries, or his own adopted daughter Jenny.

The mystery of his life finally reaches closure when he returns to the war-torn Shanghai of 1937, when China is locked in battle against both Japan and Mao's Communists. As Banks stumbles through rubble and carnage, seeming like some absurd character out of Kafka or Beckett, he does manage to discover a terrible truth that alters the shape of his world, learning more about his own largely unexamined life than he ever wished.

Although Orphans would be nominated for a Booker Proize in England -- losing, ultimately, to Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin -- the critical reception was somewhat mixed. James Wood in The New Republic called it "a surreal allegory of the ways in which we are the prisoners of our childhoods, the criminals of our pasts, always guilty with memory." Pico Iyer in The New York Review of Books said it "may well be Ishiguro's most capacious book so far, in part because it stitches together his almost microscopic examination of self-delusion, as it plays out in lost men, with a much larger, often metaphorical look at complacency on a national scale."

The daily and Sunday New York Times reviewers, not atypically, were split. Michiko Kakutani found that while the book "gets off to a mesmerizing start, it soon devolves into an uneasy composite of his last two novels, costumed in the lurid clothes of thriller." Michael Gorra said that "Ishiguro has with each novel become a stranger and less predictable writer," and called Orphans his "fullest achievement yet." Paul Gray in Time said that while the author "is a master at evoking unsettling moods," his latest work is "a whodunit with no real who or it."

Ishiguro discussed the novel in some detail in a September phone call to his home outside London.

Yemassee: Let's start with the obvious. You were born in Nagasaki and moved to England as a child. The protagonist of your latest novel, Christopher Banks, is born in Shanghai and moves to England when he is 10. How personal is this book for you?

Ishiguro: It's not particularly personal in that sense. There's not a great deal of correlation between Christopher Banks' movements from Shanghai to England and mine. It's only in a more general sense, I guess; the themes about wondering what racial identity you have and so on might be a territory I'm familiar with, but there's very little similarity in the circumstances, emotional and physical, around Christopher's journey to England and mine.

Traditionally, I've never really written what you might call "thinly-disguised autobiographical fiction," not because I'm against it, I think there've been some very fine books that have been written on that basis, but it's never suited me. So when I started to write, I always used protagonists who at least, on the surface, are very different from myself. When I was a young man, I wrote from the point of a view of an old man, or a middle-aged woman, or something like that. And I always found that paradoxically easier.

But I think what happens after a number of years about this kind of a question is you become quite self-conscious about it as a writer. There's almost an element of my having put in certain things knowing that people would assume there's some autobiographical parallel. It was obvious to me, when I started to write this story, if it's about a child who moves from the Far East to England, in some sort of way people would assume it's autobiographical, and there's a kind of a little teasing thing you find yourself getting into by doing that, you think "Oh yes, we'll play a little bit of hide and seek with readers" and leave them speculating as to what extent this parallels my own journey; his memories, his nostalgia for his childhood and the Far East. But the book isn't really autobiographical in that sense at all.

Yemassee: How much of your own childhood did you draw from, as far as Christopher's relationship with his friend Japanese friend Akira? I'm thinking particularly of their fantasies of what the real world is like.

Ishiguro: Once again, I can't really think of anything that's directly referring to anything in my childhood. There's no game that's described there that's specifically like anything I played with any friend. Of course, when I came to England I had a lot of English friends, but I don't recall a friendship really exactly like that one of Christopher and Akira -- two boys who are really estranged from their cultural backgrounds.

The personal link with Shanghai and the International Settlement of that period goes through my father, and my grandfather [who are] both purely Japanese. My father was born in Shanghai, because my grandfather was an industrialist, and he was charged with setting up Toyoda in China in the Twenties and Thirties. Toyoda today is a car company, but in those days it was a textile company. That's why my grandfather was there, and he lived in one of those big houses in the International Settlement with other business entrepreneurs and industrialists from the west . My father was born there and indeed he lived there until the war broke out.

I don't really know many details of my grandfather and my father's life there. I grew up knowing that they had lived there, and the grandfather was the one I had lived with in the first five years of my life. We lived in my grandfather's house. So I knew there was this past life in this wild, strange place.

Yemassee: What was strange about it?

Ishiguro: Well, my early childhood had been in Nagasaki. When I say Nagasaki to a lot of people they might immediately think of the atomic bomb, but the Nagasaki I remember was a very tranquil place. Then I moved to Home Counties, England, a very quite, suburban existence. Then occasionally I would come across these big massive photo albums depicting this weird city where everyone's going around in these white tropical suits, carrying guns. They were dangerous times, in fact there were a lot of kidnappings for one reason or another. That was very common then. There was a lot of anti-Japanese activity on the part of the Chinese Communists, because in the early 1930s the Japanese had already invaded the northern areas of China. And the Chinese nationalists and the Chinese Communists were having an underground war, so people were killing each other. It was generally a wild place because there was no law and order, and there were huge amounts of money going through it. When you look at these photos, they do look like they're from some 1930s movie. I'd always imagined China to be a more picturesque, slightly more primitive place, but you look at photos of Shanghai during that period, you see these massive huge skyscrapers that look like colonial buildings. It does seem like more than a couple of worlds away.

Yemassee: In a less romantic way, it sounds like the movie Casablanca -- all these different cultures, an undertone of violence and the threat of war breaking out at any moment.

Ishiguro: Very much so. In fact I saw Casablanca again recently. There was a DVD release of it and I watched it for the first time in years. I was very impressed about it. You're right, there is that sense of all these people almost randomly thrown together from different backgrounds, but they're all waiting to get out. The premise there is that it's a stopping-off place.

The big difference is that the Shanghai people at that time didn't realize how temporary the whole thing was. You look at those buildings -- they've obviously been put up by people who thought they were there for good. There was a kind of false sense of solidity about that community. When I was researching it I read a lot of guidebooks written at the time. I have one that's 1936 or something, it's just a few years before the whole thing collapsed. When you actually read a guidebook, it's all in the present tense, and it's very clear that the people writing it don't have an inkling that it's all going to come down like a pack of cards. They assume that this is something very, very solid, and of course huge amounts of money went into it. The buildings were vast, and in their own way are very impressive. And they thought they were there forever. And of course it fell with the Japanese coming in and the Communist takeover.

Yemassee: Let's talk about the character of Christopher Banks a little bit. Blindness is a motif in the novel, and a key word that's used is disorientation. Christopher is always on the outside looking in, and never sees himself the way others do. It seems to be because he's still in that land of childhood, still fighting this very old battle, where other put people have either put their past behind them, or put it safely away. The past is something he can't ever avoid. I'm not sure that's it, though.

Ishiguro: No, I think that's very precise. That's almost the way I would see it. To me, much of the book is an attempt to write about that part of us that, although it's completely irrational, we don't let go. It's a child's logic. A child's view of the world. A logic that's kind of instilled at childhood about the way the world works, about why something has gone wrong. A lot of us carry some of that logic with us, right into adulthood. Actually, it continues to exert an influence on how we behave, although we would perhaps rationally reject this kind of child's logic.

In Christopher's case, yes, he still operates according to this logic of a child that, yes, the world fell apart because his parents disappeared, perhaps that was because he couldn't do anything to stop it, but if only he was a better detective he would have been able to stop it. So the answer is to become a better detective. He grows up to become what he thinks is a detective, so that he can somehow, maybe even now, put it all right. At some level, this is completely mad. But I see people around me all the time whose behavior is I think is influenced by some crazy bit of illogic like that.

That's kind of where Christopher's narration is coming from. It's not that I'm just mucking about with realism and non-realism. I'm trying to locate the narrative somewhere in an area between our unconscious motives and our conscious motives in doing things in life.

Yemassee: Christopher fears he is not English enough and Akira says he's not Japanese enough. There's a sense both have of not really belonging to their culture because they live apart from it. When Christopher brings this up to his Uncle Philip, he is told that one day conflicts will end "because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel. It's healthy." Is he right?

Ishiguro: He backtracks from that pretty rapidly. Christopher tells him things might fall apart if you did that and Philip thinks a minute and says "Yes, you're probably right."

People can't really function unless they feel they belong to a certain pack. This is the difficulty. It's a very contemporary question. It's put very crudely there by Uncle Philip, but that notion is one of the big hopes behind people who encourage or support the idea of a multicultural society: racial boundaries are breaking down, countries are becoming very multicultural, and that somehow this is healthy. Indeed, countries, too, through institutions like the United Nations or the European community or whatever, and on the business side through multinational corporations, these traditional borders are getting less and less, and we're mixing more. There is a kind of idealistic theme behind all this, that perhaps this would lead to less conflict. Certainly, that was one of the ideas behind the European community, after a century of Europeans butchering each other, there was this hope that if you could actually integrate things at the economic level there will be less chance of another European war. Of course, the United Nations came directly after the Second World War, explicitly to try and prevent another global war of this kind.

One suspects it's a much more complicated task than meets the eye at first. There is something in our natures that make us want to identify ourselves in groups or packs.

Yemassee: In his essay on Philip Larkin, your contemporary Martin Amis had this to say: "...everybody is `racist,' or has racial prejudices. This is because human beings tend to like the similar, the familiar, the familial."

Ishiguro: Well, that begs the question "What is familiar?" Traditionally, that might have been the case, because black people tended to live with black people, white people tended to live with white people.

What's very interesting in the latter part of the twentieth century is that people start to live in these mixed communities. It's interesting that when we talk about these things we very easily revert to color-coding, but there are many communities in which color is irrelevant. The divide -- and sometimes it is a very bitter divide -- is not along color lines, [as we see] in Northern Ireland or in the former Yugoslavia. Particularly people from the British backgrounds or the American background, because of peculiar histories of colonialism in Britain and slavery in America, we do tend automatically to think in terms of color. But you look at it from the point of view of many other people around the world: at the heart of Central Europe is the divide between the Jews and Catholics, for instance, [which] runs right through twentieth century history and accounts for a lot of things that have happened. Between Protestants and Catholics there's a very bitter divide as well. And of course in the Middle East we have the Israeli-Arab divide. I think it goes much deeper than color.

Martin may well be right in saying "Yes, we like the familiar" ... I think we're moving towards the point where people are not so unfamiliar with people of different colors, but nevertheless there are other cultures that people find very alienating. I think people find countries with very strong Islamic dogma very intimidating in the west. It's not to do with the color of the skins of people in those countries. That's become a new kind of fear. Not long ago, people in America looked at people who were Communists in that kind of way as well, as a threat.

Yemassee: Often, England seems to me a more multicultural place than America, as far as literature is concerned. England has writers representative of a lot of nationalities, people like you, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, and Ben Okri. I don't know that we have anything here that compares to that. We have white and black male and female writers, but England seems more of a melting pot. Is that a fair assessment?

Ishiguro: Well, it depends how you're defining melting-pot. From here, looking at America, America looks like a melting-pot, it's literary culture, but of a different sort. You have to remember that Britain has this history of colonialism, and that a lot of the empire basically came to an end in the 1950s and the 1960s, and so there's kind of a ready-made bunch of people who are educated in the English way, who are almost quasi-British, in a way, but not living in Britain, but in these old colonies. Hanif Kureishi's a bit of an exception, because he was actually born here in Britain to, I believe, a Pakistani father and an English mother, or perhaps it's the other way around. I don't know him very well.

But Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie, they went to school, respectively, in Nigeria and India, and I imagine they went to schools that were more British than the British schools because these were countries very much modeled along the colonial lines, seeing the British method as the best way. And then they came to this country to study further. Rushdie came when he was ten to go to public school here. I don't know when Ben Okri came. The point I'm making is that the recent history of Britain means that there is a ready made group of people all around the world who know other countries and who often write directly about the whole colonial or post-colonial experience. That's what they lived through, or are living through. To some extent, Nigeria claims Ben Okri, and I know that a lot of people in India regard Rushdie as an Indian writer.

Looking at America from here, it does strike me as a very multi-cultural literary society as well. You have, as you said, white male writers, black male and female writers, but your big writers are people like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, Alice Walker -- there's a whole lot of very distinguished black writers, of the top league. You have a lot of Jewish writers who are very overtly Jewish; they write about the Jewish-American experience. And more recently, lots of the books we hear of, from America, seem to be written by a younger generation of people who are writing about the multicultural experience -- Amy Tan, Jeffrey Eugenides, Oscar Hijuelos.

Yemassee: You mentioned that people often consider Rushdie an India writer. How are you regarded in your own native country? What response do your own books get in Japan?

Ishiguro: That I find quite difficult to assess, to be honest, partly because Japanese reviews tend to be very polite and enigmatic, and you have to kind of read between the lines.

Yemassee: Do they consider you one of their own?

Ishiguro: This is a very interesting question. No, I don't think they do. My first two books were actually set in Japan, and I think then I was invisible in Japan. My kind of gimmick, if you like, around the rest of the world, was here was a guy writing in English about Japan. That was my initial calling card. People thought, oh, he's kind of a Westerner, but he's also a Japanese. But in Japan, that was the one place where it didn't account for very much. They didn't know me at all. They just thought I was another Japanese writer, writing about these things from ages ago. That wasn't what they were interested in at the time. It's only when I wrote The Remains of the Day, a book set in England, that I was noticed in Japan, and then people started to wonder: "Oh, this is interesting -- he's Japanese, but he's written this book set in England. He seems to be a British writer."

I went to Japan the week after I won the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day in England; it was literally the following week I arrived in Japan. People were very interested in me there as a social phenomenon, rather than a literary figure. A lot of press greeted me, there was this big press conference, but there weren't questions about literature. It was all about racial identity. They were curious to look at me and figure out whether I was Japanese or English.

Japan is going through now what America went through at the beginning of the century, and what Britain went through in the 1950s. Japan remains a very racially homogeneous society, still today. It is still relatively rare to find foreigners in Japan. But recently, by which I mean the last 15 years, it has become more normal to encounter, particularly in the larger cities, people who aren't Japanese. And I think this whole question about how do you relate to people who live in Japan who have some right in Japan, but who are not Japanese, that's come into their orbit for the first time recently.

But the other thing that's affecting them is what happens to Japanese children of these people posted all around the world with these multinational corporations. It is a big worry for them, in some ways being this very homogeneous, enclosed island race. The fear that your child will lose his or her Japaneseness, because they've gone abroad, is a very big issue in Japan. And there's a whole problem of kids who've spent two or three years abroad, and come back, and they're ostracized at school. This is one of the biggest social problems in Japan, and they often have special schools and classes for what they call "returnees." A friend of mine used to actually just specialize in dealing with the returnee problem -- and they're bullied, and not accepted, rather in the way my character Akira is.

It seems to be a growing problem, because so many Japanese children are spending a year or two years out, because of the nature of the world now. Japan lives on international commerce and industry, and you can't do that unless Japanese are living all around the world, running these offices.

And so, the interest in me is I'm seen as a kind of prototype. I went a generation before the masses of kids went out there. They look at me to kind of figure out what can happen to Japanese children when they're brought up abroad. And I'm both their worst nightmare and a sign of hope, because they see they can make a career abroad, they can be accepted, particularly because I seem to have made a successful career with the English language, which seems to be a formidable barrier for a lot of Japanese people. They think, if someone can do that, then it's possible for them to do anything abroad. We don't have to worry, in that sense -- it's possible for a Japanese child to grow up abroad, be accepted in a foreign country, and overcome all these obstacles, and become a part of the establishment. So that's comforting.

On the other hand, they look at me and say "Oh look, he's lost all his Japaneseness, he doesn't know how to behave, his body language is all wrong. He can't read Japanese."

Yemassee: He's an Englishman.

Ishiguro: Yes -- he's turned into a freak. And so this troubles them. I might be doing a disservice to people who read me in Japan, but I think by and large, to the extent that people have heard of me in Japan, they've heard of me as this interesting case. And I think that probably goes before any consideration of my books.

Yemassee: You take a lot of time between books, three to four years to produce a novel, on average.

Ishiguro: Well, when I talk about this I'm always aware that this sounds like a very decadent complaint I have, but the nature of life for a writer today, who has any amount of success, or at least has publishers aspiring for success on behalf of you, is that you spend an enormous amount of time promoting. This is something that has grown and grown and grown -- even in the last, say, 12 years, it's grown out of all recognition.

I think the perception of a writer has subtly changed. He's gone from being a slightly anonymous figure, a printed name on the page, to a kind of figure that people want to know about, in the way that people always want to know about actors.

Yemassee: Does that bother you, that you can be seen less as a writer, and more as a celebrity?

Ishiguro: I feel ambivalent about this. This is fine if this is a supplement to the reading experience, but sometimes it's like the book is being cut out. You just make a direct line to the author by reading about the author in magazines, and you go along and hear the author talk, and ask the author questions, and then you've kind of somehow had that event -- and you don't really have to read the book. This is an exaggeration, but there's a tendency towards that. What was essentially a supporting act is becoming the act itself.

I think people will look back on this period and look at the actual literature that's produced and start to see that the way the industry has gone has had a profound influence on the nature of the actual writing, in one way or the other -- both in terms of how much has been written but also in terms of what has been written. This is the environment in which the writer writes now.

Yemassee: You think maybe Thomas Pynchon had the right idea? Just avoid it altogether, and that in itself makes its own publicity?

Ishiguro: I've had a lot of discussions about this. A lot of publishers have said to me that Thomas Pynchon would not be allowed to do that today. If he was publishing V, today, there is no way that any publisher would agree to publish a huge, difficult book like that, however good they thought it was, if the author said "I'm not doing any publicity. I'm not doing any interviews. I'm not going on tour." There is no way that book would get published, and if it did, nobody would read it. It would just disappear. We have a situation here where the whole book industry can't operate without the author participating, in some kind of way. That somehow inadvertently got built into the whole thing. I think the day when the Pynchons and Salingers could say "Here's the book, I'm hiding away," I don't think that's on anymore. It's interesting that Don DeLillo, who used to do that, finally had to go a big world tour.

Yemassee: What's a writing day like for you?

Ishiguro: When I'm writing I actually put a stop to all the promotional activities. I do it all in one block. I've said that after Christmas, I'm going to start writing. Between Christmas and August, I'm just going to write. Then I go into a completely different kind of rhythm, which on the surface is dull, and kind of routine, because my daughter's going to school, it has to necessarily revolve around the working day. I can't do anything eccentric, like write in the dead of night or anything like this. I usually like to start work around nine. I have an hour's break for lunch. I usually finish around six. But usually there's a bunch of phone calls to get through toward the end of the day, so I finish my actual writing around four, and then take care of some of the business. And then I'm through around six. I don't do anything in the evening. I spend that with my family.

Yemassee: Do you do a lot of reading?

Ishiguro: I find it difficult getting the reading in. When I'm writing, I tend to do very little reading, partly because of the time factor, but also because -- you've probably heard other writers say this -- somebody else's prose can affect you. Not so much their deeper techniques or ideas or themes, but I find their prose very catchy. It could just be to do with me, but some people just reflect other people's accents very easily. If I'm reading Conrad, I start to write in this rather turgid, kinda weird prose. It's very difficult to keep a particular voice in my head if I'm adopting another voice as a reader.

Yemassee: Who do you like reading, when you read?

Ishiguro: Increasingly, these days I'm trying to catch up on classics. I've suddenly started to panic; the possibility that I would not read some very famous books, because I would die first, suddenly struck me for the first time, because I always thought I had an infinite amount of time to read all these famous books. I'm not that well-read. I wasn't somebody who read a lot as a child or as a teenager. I wasn't particularly interested in books very much. So I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Now, I'd like to read Proust, for instance -- I've only read the first two volumes [of In Search of Lost Time.]

Yemassee: Do you like it?

Ishiguro: The "Overture" [from Swann's Way] I've read a number of times, and it had a profound influence on my writing. I read that quite early on in my writing career. And this kind of drifting in and out from one time to another -- I learned a lot from Proust. I've always meant to read the entire thing. It's been sitting around on the shelf for many years. It's not always the most readable thing, because what comes after the "Overture" I found very dull.

Part II 

Yemassee: I found When We Were Orphans both similar to your previous novel, The Unconsoled, and different. Both have protagonists who are faced with a kind of obstacle course toward reaching a goal, which only seems to recede further away. But Orphans is a good deal more earthbound. Was it a conscious move on your part, to do something where the surfaces are a little more solid?

Ishiguro: I guess so. The Unconsoled, I decided, would kind of take place in this dream-logic world. I didn't necessarily see the need to carry on setting all my books in that dream world. To some extent, I'd probably had enough of it. I spent about four years immersed in that dream world. A lot of people just couldn't make head or tail of The Unconsoled, though I'm gratified to see that over the years here in England people seem to be coming around to it, reading it again and so on. When my book came out here in April, a lot of the reviews spent a lot of the space talking about The Unconsoled, so a lot of people wanted to write about that book as well as the new book. It was a book that baffled a lot of people, frustrated a lot of people, made a lot of people angry. In a way, I wanted to talk about some similar themes through a completely different kind of technique, using a relatively fast-paced story.

Yemassee: When We Were Orphans struck me as quite cinematic. The action of the book was so exterior. It moved at a very rapid pace.

Ishiguro: I used plot in this book perhaps more than I've used it before. Even books like The Remains of the Day, which is a pretty accessible book, is not very plotty. This is the first time I had a go at a traditional plot, if you like, and there's a kind of traditional denouement at the end, when Uncle Philip appears at the end and says what happened. To some extent, it began as an idea to do a kind of pastiche of a certain kind of adventure story or detective story of that time. I didn't really have that much heart in terms of wanting to do a full-blown pastiche. That kind of faded away a little. But when I started the book I did have this notion that yes, it should actually contain a plot. That wouldn't be the most important thing about it, but there should be a kind of mystery, and it should actually have a proper resolution, you should actually find out what happened to people. It just came with the territory. It was this kind of book I was writing.

Yemassee: Do you find Christopher markedly different from your other characters? In this book, unlike some of your others, the evil is less inside the character than outside him, threatening to engulf him.

Ishiguro: He's in quite a different position from people like Stevens the butler [in The Remains of the Day] or the artist [in An Artist of the Floating World]. Those earlier characters are certainly people who are trying to come to terms with something. They're trying to come to terms with ideals that took them somewhere they didn't want to go, and they realize that perhaps it is too late now to redeem their lives. They've given the best they had to something they didn't want to support. It's all about their struggle to come to terms with what's happened. That's not really Christopher's battle.

That character who looks back and very painfully comes to terms with a less than flattering reflection of himself -- that was a character who did fascinate me in the earlier part of my writing career. But after The Remains of the Day I felt I had covered that fairly thoroughly. I finished The Remains of the Day in my thirties and somewhere in between my mid-thirties and the time I hit 40, I think there was something about the way I viewed life in general that that way of looking at life didn't appeal to me much anymore. In a way, it's kind of a young man's way of looking at life, that you set out with a set of principles, political views, whatever, and then you go out there on the playing field and you use these principles as a guide and at the end of the game you see whether you've done well or not.

In a way, books like The Remains of the Day were written with that assumption in mind, that you measured your life toward the end by how well you stuck to your ideals and you may well find, because you didn't know enough or the world was too complicated a place, you took a wrong turn here or there, but you can see a clear road down which you've come, and perhaps you can identify the wrong turnings. I think somewhere along the way, after I'd finished The Remains of the Day, that pattern of how one views one's life didn't really ring true for me anymore. I thought things were perhaps not as controlled as that. Laterally, I've become much more interested in the fact that a lot of what we do is beyond one's control. We're often motivated by completely irrational things, and we often choose our vocation, who we associate with, who we live our lives with, who we marry according to some crazy irrational scenario, of wanting to fix something that can never be fixed.