Kazuo Ishiguro, a Nobel laureate for these muddled times

WHEN Kazuo Ishiguro started to write fiction, he wasn’t steeped in literature. He said that he had not read very much at all. His distinctive style grew out of a desire to write the cleanest sentence possible, line by line; he has spoken of a wish simply for readers to understand his work. The Nobel committee, awarding him the prize for literature on October 5th, rightly praised him as an author “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.

It is the layers of understanding available to his audience which marks him out as the most remarkable writer of his generation. From his very first novel, “A Pale View of Hills”, published in 1982, he explored the conflict between experience and recollection. His narrators cannot simply be called “unreliable”, for it is not that they set out to delude or trick the reader: rather, they tell us the stories they themselves want to hear.

This is perhaps most evident in his most famous book, “The Remains of the Day”, published in 1989 and winner of the Booker prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, that year. Its narrator, Stevens, a butler, hews so closely to his idea of duty that he is blind to larger questions of moral obligation. In “Never Let Me Go”, published in 2005, the narrative functions almost as a mystery: a seemingly idyllic home for teenagers is not what it appears to be. The fragmentation of story and understanding is clearly visible in “The Unconsoled”, published in 1995. Its narrator, Ryder, is a pianist who arrives in a central European city to play a concert, but the novel fractures almost immediately into a Kafkaesque world of appearance and illusion. Widely derided at the time of its publication, it is now generally regarded as one of Mr Ishiguro’s finest works.

He is a novelist distinguished by his boldness and by his meticulousness. Although themes of memory and self-delusion run throughout his work, he ranges widely in form. “Never Let Me Go” has been described as science fiction; his most recent novel, “The Buried Giant”, as fantasy (both descriptions came as a surprise to the author himself). And his influences come from many sources: he is a serious cinephile and an accomplished musician. He describes himself as a great admirer of Bob Dylan, last year’s Nobel laureate.

Above all, Mr Ishiguro is a writer of deceptive simplicity. The language he uses seems clear as water, and yet what marks out his work is his ability to evoke the disturbing depths of human experience, our fallibility and willingness to deceive ourselves with stories. In a world where “fake news” and “alternative facts” have dangerous currency, Mr Ishiguro’s ability to see beneath the surface makes him a Nobel winner perfectly suited to these shifting and treacherous times.