The Remains of the Day

A narrator who explains everything except the one thing that matters.

Stevens, the butler at the centre of Ishiguro’s novel, is one of the most careful narrators I have ever read. He explains his duties, his views on banter, the correct way to polish silver. He explains nearly everything. What he cannot explain, or will not, is his own life.

The whole book works because the reader slowly learns to hear what he does not say. Early on you take him at his word. By the middle you are reading around him, noticing the moments he hurries past, the conversations he summarises a little too briskly. By the end the gap between what he tells you and what you understand has become almost unbearable.

I read it on a train, which turned out to be right. The novel is structured as a short motoring trip, and there is something about watching the countryside go by while a man in a borrowed car reconsiders his past that feels exactly correct.

It is a short book and it does not waste a word. If you have only seen the film, the novel is quieter and, I think, sadder, because the film can show you faces and the book can only show you the careful sentences a man uses to avoid looking at his own.