The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (review)

Though set shortly after Arthur’s death, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant is rightly considered an Arthurian novel. Among the characters are an errant Gawain, who remains alive after Arthur’s passing, and a farmer named Axl, who was once a member of Arthur’s retinue, a fact that comes to light only gradually and piecemeal—which is the way the characters and the readers learn much of what is important in the novel. Arthur’s establishing peace between Britons and Saxons is a key plot element, as is a rather impressive spell cast in the recent past by Merlin, who does not appear in the novel.

The Buried Giant also involves a quest and a great love, but both of these are different from the quests and courtly love affairs of medieval Arthurian romance. The quest is that of Axl and Beatrice, the central characters, to reach the village of their son; the great love is that between the inseparable and devoted couple. Some of the scenes showing their concern for each other are quite moving. And yet it is revealed at the end of the book that there is something that haunts even their love. The memory of this event is obscured, as are the memories of much else, by a mist that hangs over the land—a mist that is actually the breath of the dragon Querig, enchanted by Merlin intentionally to repress memory.

When he was in Arthur’s service, Axl had gained the title of the Knight of Peace because he had brokered a treaty between Britons and Saxons that forbade the slaughter of innocents. On the day of Arthur’s great victory, presumably the Battle of Mount Badon (though it is not named in the novel), Arthur broke that treaty and slaughtered Saxon ‘women, children and elderly’ (212). The memory of this slaughter would have prevented the peace that Arthur sought for Britain; and so Merlin cast the spell that caused the dragon’s breath to erase memory. Gawain, who says that he had been tasked by Arthur to slay Querig, actually protects the dragon and thus the peace.

Another of the main characters of the novel is an Anglo-Saxon warrior named Wistan, who, in a clear allusion to Beowulf, kills an ogre and brings his ‘shoulder and upper arm’ (67) as a trophy and as proof of his exploit. He is also on a mission to slay the dragon Querig, which he ultimately does. This allusion to Beowulf underscores the fact that, in the novel, the Anglo-Saxon world of Wistan and the British world of Arthur come into conflict. Wistan, who is somehow immune to the memory loss caused by the dragon’s breath, slays the dragon so that all will remember the massacre of innocent Saxons.

Memories, which have been buried, are like the giant of the title, who though ‘once well buried, now stirs’ and will ‘surely’ rise again (297). Ishiguro suggests that memories, especially painful memories, must resurface. Wistan slays Querig, but even if he had failed to do so, the aging dragon’s breath would have ended soon and the memory of the slaughter would have reemerged. Even Gawain, as he defends the dragon, realizes that she would last just ‘another season or two’; but he has the illusory hope that that ‘may be long enough for old wounds to heal forever, and an eternal peace to hold among us’ (286). Yet Ishiguro seems to imply that it is a futile wish that the past can be forgotten or that the past can be healed by time without being confronted. The future of Britain is represented by Edwin, a young boy who was saved by Wistan and befriended by Beatrice and Axl. The couple hope that Edwin will remember their friendship, but the Saxon warrior elicits from Edwin a promise to hate all Britons, even those who have shown him kindness.

For Ishiguro, this view of painful memories of the past affects...