3.5 stars

The story that happens somewhere in England during the Iron Age. The legendary King Arthur, the war leader that defeated the Saxons, is long dead. Britons and Saxons live together in peace for about a generation, in a land of dragons and ogres and elves and pixies, forgetful of the violence and the slaughter of the war.

But then something happens, and all hell breaks loose.

The Buried Giant is not a historical novel, and it’s not exactly a fantasy one. The story takes place in a pre-scientific, superstitious era where people believed that there were strange forces around, such as pixies which are associated with illness and death. It was a way to explain phenomena that could not otherwise be explained and Ishiguro quite dexterously incorporated these forces in the background of his novel.

The Buried Giant is a story of love and societal loss of memory. It could take place in any era. Even during our time, there have been terrible conflicts, based on hatred, Rwanda genocide and the most persecuted minority in the world, the Rohingya people in Myanmar, are two recent examples. People of different ethnic backgrounds lived together for one or two generations, and then there was an event, something that stirred things up and these same people who didn’t previously hate each other, suddenly remember that they are supposed to hate each other. “The battle over how a nation remembers is really a battle over what this nation is going to do next,” says Kazuo Ishiguro.

At the heart of the novel there is an elderly couple who also suffer of memory loss. Occasionally, fragments of memory penetrate the strange mist that deliberately make the people forgetful and they remember that once they had a son, long gone now. They embark on a journey to find him. During this long journey, they are thinking about their life together and they are concerned that their shared memories are gone. What could happen to their love if they cannot remember the years of their marriage? And if they actually remember the dark moments of their long relationship, could then their love survive?

It’s a question that all that have found themselves in a long relationship must have asked at some point, whether this is about a relationship with a partner, or parents or siblings. Sometimes is just better to forget, I think. “Forgetting is as integral to memory as death is to life, ” says Rabih Alameddine in The Angel of History. Unless we deal with or bury painful things, it’s difficult to move forward. Sometimes, we just need to draw a line and look into the future, or else everything is going to end in disintegration and hatred.