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Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in ten years, The Buried Giant, adds an entirely new dimension to the fantasy genre he adopts. Ishiguro takes us through Iron Age Britain with an immediacy that gives a book about ogres, dragons and Arthurian Knights the feeling of historical fiction. The story’s overarching concern is memory and forgetfulness and its implications for a society that has lost its fixed centre. The novel sees an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off on a quest to find their barely remembered son in a far-off village. On their travels they meet a warrior whose mission intertwines with their own, and their attempts to retrace a hidden past become impacted by the dangers of a world in flux and anxiety-filled.

The Buried Giant naturally draws comparisons with the extensive tradition of Arthurian Romance, both popular and specialised. Indeed, the senile and paranoid old knight comes as a welcome nod to Arthurian parody. Amidst the fascinating allusions to a contemporary society that values selective forgetfulness over confronting a troubled past, The Buried Giant is laced with soft humour and moments of intense humanity, all communicated through a deceptively intricate narrative. Though it remains a book with a straightforward narrative at its heart, it seems as if this simplicity has come with a great deal of hard work on the part of the author. Ishiguro trusts in timeless structures of storytelling to give further poignancy to a story about empathy and respect. What’s more is the masterful treatment of such values without any hint of moral didacticism. The title of this truly effective novel seems to argue that what we choose to bury, big or small, will continue to haunt us — it shows us how the act of forgetting is not the end.