Yev's Reviews > The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day is a character study that's both beautifully written and meticulously detailed. Every character is so well developed and characterized that it's as if they were actual people. On a technical level I have no complaints. This travelogue and memoir presented by a butler in 1956 England shifts the mundane into the profound. Its prose is excellent, its lessons are life-changing, and its entirely suitable for academic purposes. For certain readers at the appropriate time, it may be one of the most important books they'll ever read. For example here are two anonymous posts from Warosu:

The Remains of the Day's ending still sticks with me. It made me completely reevaluate my entire life philosophy. I didn't want to be Stevens, an old man alone with a life of subservience to a people and broader society who never really gave a shit about me, passing on everything I wanted on account of an outward-face I had assumed. It was the one book that I've read that changed my life more than anything I've ever read.

The Remains of the Day hit me incredibly hard, right through a chink in my armor. That deep sorrow of Stevens felt like it was aimed directly at people like me. I cried because it scared me more deeply than anything ever had before or since. I became terrified that I'd go through life with my armor up and my detachment so complete that, at my own twilight, I'd look back and regret the way I'd spent my life.

That's wonderful and I'm glad for them. My personal experience instead was mostly indifference with occasional frustration and annoyance. The writing, as beautiful as it is, didn't bring me much enjoyment and that's what I read for. One of the reasons that I don't read much literary fiction is that often one of its primary modes is moral edification. Often that either doesn't interest me or I already know and (dis)agree with it, in which case it doesn't have much to offer. I don't mean that it isn't important and valuable, because it is very much is.

The protagonist, the butler Mr. Stevens, is an exemplar of the sociologist Robert Merton's Bureaucratic Virtuoso and how that may contribute to Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil. This is somewhat muddled by that Stevens such is an unreliable narrator that I'm reminded of Gene Wolfe's Severian. If you aren't paying attention it would be easy to misconstrue what this book is about and personal beliefs can skew its ostensible meaning into its exact opposite.

What I feel about The Remains of the Day is very clear to me though. If it weren't for how well it's written I would've given this 2 stars easily. A badly written version would've been an insufferable 1 stars. However, if it didn't have the problem that I've written about several books before, most recently Navola and The Mercy of Gods, then I would've rated it much more highly. That problem is agency. Do I rate that quality too highly? Perhaps relative to how much others care I do. Stevens willfully and intentionally relinquishes his agency in a way described by Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom. What Arendt, Fromm, and Ishiguro have in common in that each of these books explain in their own way the psychological and societal conditions that allowed for the rise of authoritarianism, specifically Nazism in the case of all three books.

How much of any of this matters is up to each individual reader to decide. I've seen reviews where it's all that mattered to them and others where it didn't matter at all. Personally I view this as the story of a life and everything else is incidental. It's about the human condition in the way that applauded and lauded by a critical consensus. I appreciate that it wasn't allegorical. The personal circumstances and setting could've been a knight and his lord set in the High Middle Ages England and I don't believe that it would've been all that different.

The Remains of the Day was suggested to me by Oepin, who I may have read the most suggested books from, because it's in his Top 3 for the year. It's among the best written books I've read this year, but definitely not anywhere close in terms of enjoyment. This was the first book by Ishiguro that I've read and I'll eventually read more by him because this wasn't enough on its own for me to decide how I feel about him.