1 - Ishiguro and the Question of England

Summary

In Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the narrator, Etsuko, looks out at the view of the surrounding countryside from her English garden and comments ‘I always think it’s so truly like England out here’. The phrase ‘truly like’ emphasizes a central topic in Ishiguro’s work: the question of England, or of what it is ‘truly like’ that is evoked especially in The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, and The Buried Giant. Such novels underscore the idea that human communities are permanent only in their heterogeneity and instability, in their fragile and conflicted status, and in the varied and ever-changing terms in which they talk to themselves about themselves. Ishiguro’s novels repeatedly return to and continually reinvent forms of Englishness because they recognize that England is an invention, a phantasm that can therefore only be ‘truly like’ itself, not itself. His narratives are not only about the exilic, ungrounded condition of the immigrant or of the cultural stranger within a society, but also (and therefore) about the ersatz, ungrounded condition of us all.