The unconsoled Book

Thoughts on my second reading of The Unconsoled.

The novel's form is, I believe, a veiled commentary on the text's processes and progress. Structurally, it may be Ishiguro’s most daring novel so far. It must have been awfully hard to write; the prose is lighter than air. It strikes me as Ishiguro's most Kafkaesque novel, especially in its use of dissociative states. Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" especially springs to mind.

Its narrator, Mr Ryder, a pianist of international reputation, checks into a hotel in an unnamed (likely German) provincial city. He’s there to be part of a civic event-cum-concert that has been developed by the town graybeards to reverse a perceived decline, which is never really defined except as a certain amorphous sense of personal dissatisfaction. The people of the town, the unconsoled, want to recapture what they perceive as their past way of life. What's tragic is that they never can. As one says to Mr Ryder: Perhaps you’ll warn us of the hard work that lies ahead for each one of us if we’re ever to re-discover the happiness we once had. (p. 115)

Ryder is there to both counsel and perform for them, but mostly he glides over the surface of events as one does in dreams. He has no itinerary, never knows where he’s supposed to be, but drifts from encounter to encounter. He is seen as an outsider by almost everyone, yet he has a longstanding relationship with a local woman, Sophie, and her son. He is driven to events far outside town and returns to the hotel by way of a short passageway. He drifts about being importuned by one resident after another. For example, in the middle of some business or other he will run into an old school friend he hasn’t seen for 30 years who will blather on for six pages. In another example, on the way to a reception he comes across his old family car which he once played in as a child, now decayed with rust. This revelation evokes pages of reminiscences.

Ryder is English so there are glimpses of his childhood in Worcestershire. Most remarkable I suppose is the way the author uses long monologues (my dreams are never verbal, always visual) to advance the story. Time tends to be attenuated. The first day of Mr. Ryder’s stay in town takes up 150 pages of the novel. Space is compressed, at times expanded. The book thus seeks to thwart reader expectations at every turn. We are kept in a constant disequilibrium. Everything is slightly off kilter as in dreams. Yet at the same time the surrealism, I think we can call it that, is held in check. The broad absurdist gesture is rare. Though neither are we ever very far from Lautréamont’s "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Ishiguro wants the striking incongruity, but he also wants a modicum of coherence. The text is a constant job of balance.

Perhaps Ishiguro’s strangest book to date, which is saying something. If you like his work you must read it. For those new to Ishiguro, don’t start here. Start with An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills or When We Were Orphans.

Final note. The surreal hotel setting here reminds me a little of Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries. But there are of course many novels set in hotels. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, technically a spa; by Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises et. al