Awards

• Winner of Booker Prize for Fiction 1989
• Winner of Booker Prize for Fiction 1989.

Overview

In 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper. Ishiguro's dazzling novel is a sad and humorous love story, a meditation of the condition of modern man, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1989, The Remains of the Day was subsequently made into a successful film.

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9780571200733

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Reviews

Ishiguro is an Englishman of Japanese descent (he moved to England as a small child) whose two previous novels (A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World) featured Japanese characters; here, he breaks new ground with a slow-moving rumination on the world of the English country-house butler. For 35 years, Stevens was Lord Darlington's butler, giving faithful service. Now, in 1956, Darlington Hall has a new, American owner, and Stevens is taking a short break to drive to the West Country and visit Mrs. Benn, the housekeeper until she left the Hall to get married. The novel is predominantly flashbacks to the 20's and 30's, as Stevens evaluates his profession and concludes that dignity is the key to the best butlering; beyond that, a great butler devotes himself to serving a great gentleman - and through the latter, to serving humanity. He considers he came of age as a butler in 1923, when he successfully oversaw an international conference while his father, also a butler, lay dying upstairs. A second key test came in 1936, when the housekeeper announced her engagement (and departure) during another major powwow. Each time, Stevens felt triumphant - his mask of professional composure never slipped. Yet two things become clear as Stevens drives West. Lord Darlington, as a leading appeaser of Hitler, is now an utterly discredited figure; far from serving humanity, Stevens had misplaced his trust in an employer whose life was a sad waste. As for the housekeeper, she had always loved Stevens, but failed to penetrate his formidable reserve; and at their eventual, climactic meeting, which confirms that it's too late for both of them, he acknowledges to himself that the feeling was mutual. This novel has won high praise in England, and one can certainly respect the convincing voice and the carefully bleached prose; yet there is something doomed about Ishiguro's effort to enlist sympathy for such a self-censoring stuffed shirt, and in the end he can manage only a small measure of pathos for his disappointed servant. (Kirkus Reviews)

Booker Prize Winner 1989. An elderly butler's obsession with the dignity of his profession is shaken on a five day West Country motoring trip in the 1950s the climax of which is a meeting with his former housekeeper Miss Kenton. During the course of the narrative, he recalls in compelling and vivid detail his service in the 1930s, and the painful realization that the man he served and respected was a Nazi sympathizer. The unrealised love between Stevens and Miss Kenton underscores the novels atmosphere of chastening loss. Ishiguro's work captures this period of British history while painting a complex picture of a proud, ageing man. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 and came to Britain at the age of five. He attended the University of Kent and studied English Literature and Philosophy, and later enrolled in an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of the novels A Pale View of Hills (winner of the Winifred Holtby Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (winner of the 1986 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Premio Scanno, and shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (winner of the 1989 Booker Prize) and When We Were Orphans (shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize and Whitbread Novel of the Year).Kazuo Ishiguro's books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. The Remains of the Day became an international bestseller, with over a million copies sold in the English language alone, and was adapted into an award-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.In 1995 Ishig

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