In The Buried Giant, Ishiguro has created a mournful, quiet, and soft medievalist fantasy world that stands in stark tonal contrast to many other works of its ilk. It opens with a calm, bittersweet scene. An aging man wakes up before his wife and watches her wake with tenderness. She remarks that she’s glad he didn’t pass away in his sleep. The two go about their days. They begin to plan a trip. The only disquieting elements present are the forgetful haze over the town, and the town’s other denizens callousness in depriving Axl and Beatrice of their candle. As the two leave the town, they travel from their relatively comfortable, calm, plodding town into a wider and scarier world. In many works, the hero’s exit from their pastoral hometown is one thrumming with excitement and curiosity about the adventures that lie before them. In The Buried Giant, leaving the village represents for Axl and Beatrice walking tentatively out into a wider, threatening, uncertain world. They cross the Great Plain at the periphery, at risk of being swallowed up by marauding monsters or by the sheer wideness of the surrounding territory.
As they travel farther and farther from their village, they are witness to all sorts of frightening sights. The village nearly turning on Edwin, the monster under the monastery, the eerie iron penitence mask in the shed, and so on. These sights aren’t exciting challenges that the protagonists meet with swords drawn and wits sharp, these are overwhelming threats to their life and safety.
The world that Ishiguro crafts is mournful and tragic as well as simultaneously soft and frightening. Especially in the last quarter of the book, memory-scabs are ripped off of the old wounds and trauma of most of the cast. Even the characters who do not lose their memory are revealed to the reader as even more intensely sad than previously thought. A trauma survivor tries to take a fellow, younger survivor under his wing because he sees his vulnerable younger self in him. The same survivor-warrior volunteers himself for death along with an old knight, who’s struggling to reconcile the horrible deeds of the late uncle he’s always idolized. The survivor-warrior asks our elderly protagonists to find a home for his young charge if he is to die. The beloved old knight dies next to the dragon he was tasked with protecting. Children left on their own hope desperately to have their parents returned to them. The traumatized boy is abandoned by the entity he had believed was his mother’s voice. A sentence is devoted to a withered old she-dragon’s love for her hawthorne bush, and it’s described as her only comfort moments before she’s killed in her sleep.
The world itself is revealed to be in mourning as the mist lifts. Facts come to light about the horrible massacre that occurred in the recent past. The quiet life witnessed at the beginning of the book in the two villages is not just calm, steadfast village people doing their work and getting through the day. They are people in recovery, in the stage where processing usually occurs but unable to process because they are unable to remember. They’re permanently stuck in that stage a few moments after you’ve stopped crying, where your ears are ringing and your face is caked with tears and snot and you can’t quite feel anything. With the Saxon armies on the horizon, this numb foggy sad state is simultaneously the calm after the storm, and the ominous quiet before the storm hits. Amongst this calm before/after the storm, Axl tenderly and lovingly wraps up his wife to prepare her for her journey to the other side. It’s unclear if the other side is a physical other shore or death, but either way it is clear to the reader that the two lovers are going to be separated. Axl wades back to the shore in frigid water, and the book leaves it there.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant was written into the typically optimistic genre of medievalist fantasy. In many works, the plucky orphan saves the day and has earned their reword. Evil, corrupt powers that be are removed from their position. The bad guys are always easily identifiable. Better-suited leaders are put back in place. The dead are mourned, but with closure and recovery afterwards. Often, wedding and coronation bells ring. The world is large, but relatively safe and its danger is desirable. However, in The Buried Giant, nothing will be okay. The world is sad and quiet- no triumphant trumpets or celebratory bells here. The ground is wet, the sky is dark, and no one is safe.
Getting Medieval 