The Remains Of The Day centres on the butler of Darlington Hall, Mr Stevens, who in the summer of 1956 is practically forced to take a holiday by his new employer.
I’m loathe to say this but it’s, quite possibly, the best book I’ve ever read. I’ve never read anything else by Ishiguro that even comes close to this book, and I’ve read few novels by any other author that can touch the pedestal this book sits on in my mind.
It showed me, more than anything I’d read up until that moment, exactly what the right story could do in the hands of the right author. It was an odd choice of book for a thirteen-year-old to pick up, but pick it up I did, and it blew my mind. The Remains Of The Day, Ishiguro’s Booker Prize winning novel, first published in 1989, is a book that personally changed everything for me. I’m talking, of course, about Stevens, the faithful butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day. Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is the only one of her books that has stayed with me, because of the narrator Faraday and how completely untrustworthy I found his account to be.īut there’s one unreliable narrator who stands head and shoulders above the rest for me, not least because his story is steeped in tragedy – and I love tragedy almost as much as I love the narrator I can’t trust. Agatha Christie’s The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, with that unforgettable twist ending, is one example of this I don’t recall many of the Christies I’ve read in detail, but I’ve definitely never forgotten that one. The second example is harder for an author to execute without explicitly misleading the reader, but it’s been done well plenty of times.Ī really good story, with a really good unreliable narrator, stays with a reader long after you’ve closed the book. But I also love how some authors keep it all hidden until the moment of the final reveal, pulling away the curtain, and laying the story out in front of me. There is little I love more in fiction than an unreliable narrator, how some authors want you to realise their narrator isn’t telling you everything, and lay out a trail of breadcrumbs for us, the readers, to follow.
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