En route the pair amass various companions, including rival swordsmen out to slay Querig and restore everyone’s senses, but as memories of a recent savage war stir, it’s not clear whether the prevailing blackout might after all be preferable. The story follows Axl and Beatrice, an elderly married couple on a hazardous cross-country trek in search of their son, lost in circumstances that, like much else, they can’t recall legend has it that a dragon named Querig exhales a memory-wiping mist that accounts for other people’s pasts too. Le Guin’s evisceration (“toneless, inexact”, “flat, dull”, “painful”) chimed with the bloodier end of Fleet Street’s full-spectrum response to the hardback publication, which ran from contemptuous to bowled over with much head-scratching in between. K azuo Ishiguro’s first novel since Never Let Me Go is certainly brave, not least because its ogre-stalked, post-Arthurian setting plants a flag on terrain patrolled by dragons of its own: witness the drily hilarious tit-for-tat flaming that Ursula Le Guin issued on her blog after Ishiguro voiced reluctance to have the book pigeonholed as fantasy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |