ADVENT BOOKS Week 1: revisiting some of our favourites from the last 8 years

 

 Thank you, as ever, to our many contributors - we couldn't possibly do this without you!

During the lead-up to Christmas, we're posting Advent Books - revisiting some of our favourite reviews and books from more than eight years of Writers Review. These can be found daily on Instagram @WritersReview, Facebook, Twitter @WritersReview1 and we're now on Bluesky too: @writersreview.bsky.social.

Hope you'll enjoy them and find some great new reads or old favourites to enjoy. Here are the choices from the first week. Thank you, as ever, to our many contributors - we couldn't possibly do this without you!

Reviewed by Linda Newbery: - our very first post! "Chevalier's ability to present historical events as if they're unfolding in front of us gives startling impact to the characters' bafflement at the 'monster' fossils Mary finds, seen through the lens of nineteenth-century religious belief..."

Reviewed by Adele Geras: "Although at first sight it’s a very simple story, its construction is enormously intricate and the words are put together with such finesse that you don’t realise what skill has gone into the plotting and how brilliantly each revelation is brought to your attention."

Celia answers questions from Adele and Linda:  "There is a definite magic in that first moment when the ideas begin to swarm together ..."

Reviewed by Nick Manns: "An exhilarating book ... open-minded, big-hearted and generous ... Paul Broks has a light touch and is able to guide us through a complex world."

Reviewed by Marcus Berkmann:   "In my opinion, one of the greatest post-war novels of them all, far ahead of anything else that Kazuo has written and liable (if it so moves you) to stay in your head for months if not years after you have finished it."

Reviewed by Yvonne Coppard: "From the tiny amount of information recorded about Lucrezia (Borgia), O’Farrell creates a novel full of tension and suspense."

Reviewed by Graeme Fife: "Du Maurier weaves a careful web of intrigue, the threads of which she untangles with great dexterity. This is adroitly worked mystery and suspense."

Guest review by Susan Elkin: NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

" ... Of course, she (Kathy) is terrified but Ishiguro’s drawing of her character is a masterclass in understatement, repression and denial."

Susan Elkin taught English in secondary schools for 36 years, latterly developing a parallel career as a writer. Since 1990 she has written over 5000 articles for newspapers and magazines, English text books, how-to books for teachers, a book about careers in theatre and latterly three volumes of memoir: Please Miss We’re Boys (2019), The Alzheimer’s Diaries (2022) and All Booked Up (2024). She lives in South London.

I read Never Let Me Go casually when it was published in 2005. Then it got taken up by several examination boards as a GCSE set text and I was commissioned by Hodder to write a study guilde – which meant a lot of very careful analytical thinking. I’ve written five of these on different titles and it’s certainly an effective way of honing very attentive reading skills – like teaching without the students.

Never Let Me Go presents a world, more or less like our own, except that there is a parallel breeding programme of clones whose organs are gradually harvested when they reach maturity. There’s a complex, albeit patchy, system for making it as humane as it can be which often, rereading again now after 11 years, reminds me of animal welfare concerns in real life: hideous things go on but meat eaters simply don’t want to think about that. In the same way, people on the periphery of Never Let Me Go need kidneys, livers and hearts for transplant but choose not to think too hard about the source.

The novel is narrated by Kathy H and although her attention to detail is punctilious, she is the most unreliable of narrators. She is coming to the end of an unusually long eleven year stint as a “carer” and looking back at Hailsham, the beloved institution, now closed, where she and her friends Ruth and Tommy were brought up. Soon she will have to start her “donations” – chilling choice of euphemism. There is nothing voluntary about this. She faces a series of four organ-harvesting operations which will end in death. Of course, she’s terrified but Ishiguro’s drawing of her character is a masterclass in understatement, repression and denial.

We never meet the organ beneficiaries or see the surgery in action. The author isn’t interested in that sort of detail. He doesn’t dwell on science and specifics either. We simply see Ruth and Tommy and others in “recovery” (another sinister euphemism) centres where there is always an officially appointed carer. Instead the novel focuses on relationships and personalities and, crucially, explores whether or not you are fully human if you are cloned and unable to reproduce. Do you have a soul because if you don’t then does that make you expendable? There’s a lot of emphasis on creative art at the enlightened Hailsham to prove that you do – but what’s the point if you’re only being bred to die?

Well, there have been other novels about organ harvesting: Spares by Michael Marshall Smith (1996), Under the Skin by Michael Faber (2000) and, in a sense, My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult, (2004) for example. So why did Ishiguro choose to visit this topic? My contention is that organ removal isn’t the main thrust of the novel. The donation programme is merely the setting.

Never Let Me Go is actually a compelling, but searingly bleak, novel about the death which awaits us all: a parable about mortality. As children “we’re told but not told” as Miss Lucy says in the novel. We know about death – vaguely. Then, as we grow up, most of us choose not to think about it much. And we bolster our denial with euphemisms.

All religions offer some sort of explanation of death in order to enable their believers to face the future without fear or despair. Unbelievers have to face knowing that their lives will “complete” (yet another Never Let Me Go euphemism) possibly after being “all hooked up” and with “drugs, pain and exhaustion”. In the novel the rumours about the possibility of deferral represent a religion of hope – which is eventually dispelled by Miss Emily. “Your life must now run the course which has been set for it” she tells Kathy and Tommy. And that, of course, is true for all of us.

Never Let Me Go, pubished by Faber, was adapted as a film in 2010 with Carey Mulligan as Kathy. Inevitably it lost most of the subtlety of this fine novel.


Susan Elkin’s Study and Revise for GCSE: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro was published by Hodder Education in 2016.

KLARA AND THE SUN by Kazuo Ishiguro, reviewed by Adèle Geras

 

"The other critics were right. I’ll join the chorus. It’s a masterpiece."

Adèle Geras has written books for readers of all ages. Her novel Dangerous Woman, under the pseudonym Hope Adams, is published by Michael Joseph.  Website: www.adelegerasbooks.com
Twitter: @adelegeras

I’ve been an Ishiguro fan since falling in love with his first novel, A Pale View of Hills. I have loved all the novels I’ve read by him but I am not a completist. I have avoided Never Let Me Go, because I know what it’s about and I don’t feel strong enough. I have also not read The Buried Giant because I’m a little allergic to anything Game of Thrones-ish or Tolkienian but I think I may try that now, after having heard Ishiguro talking about it.

Both my daughters had read Klara and the Sun and loved it, so in order to be able to discuss it with them and because it was short and because everyone was saying it was a masterpiece, I overcame my normal aversion to anything AI related and downloaded it to my Kindle.

Aversion to AI? Yes, I’m afraid so…I’m not keen on robots and not particularly interested in them. If anything, I think I’m slightly afraid of them. I admire the achievement that lies behind them. I am in awe of the science and as long as the robots are enlisted to help medical procedures, or build cars I feel safe. But once they can be substituted for humans, I’m a little more wary.

I needn’t have worried. Before I reached the end of the first page, I was bewitched. Completely happy to spend the rest of the story in the head/mind/body of Klara and by the end I was as bereft at parting from her as if she’d been fully human. The main achievement of this novel, I think, is to make the reader accept Klara totally. There’s never a moment when you forget she’s artificial (because she’s been programmed to learn from humans and part of what she’s learned is to have what must be called ‘feelings’ even though we know she is incapable of feelings on one level) but also never a moment when you don’t fully sympathise with her and when you aren’t rooting for her and longing with her for certain outcomes.

I never give spoilers when I write reviews but I can tell you that `Klara is chosen to be a companion for a sick teenager called Josie. She goes to live with the family and also meets the family who live next door and a housekeeper called Melania Housekeeper. Josie’s parents are doing all they can to keep their daughter alive. We suspect she’s ill because she’s been ‘uplifted’…. that’s to say, genetically modified in some way. The boy next door, Rick, has not been ‘uplifted’. The plot is spare but constantly gripping and I’m not going to say any more about it.

What I found most startling and striking is the way Ishiguro manages to make an entire fictional universe from so little. Just from Klara’s very limited perspective, a whole physical world is conjured up, in which the Sun is hugely important. Klara is solar powered so of course she regards the Sun as a kind of deity, but I very quickly became a believer too. It’s very hard not to.

The physical landscape is shown to us through Klara’s eyes, and I found it extraordinarily vivid. No one else I’ve read has mentioned this, but I often felt as though I were in an Edward Hopper painting. There’s one particular scene in a diner in the city which reminded me powerfully of Nighthawks. The field between the house and the Barn appeared in my head like one of those Hopper paintings where the grass grows right up to the front door. Ishiguro describes things in the most unflashy way possible. Klara is telling us what she sees, in a straight and matter of fact manner. That’s it. Also, what becomes striking as we progress through the story is the power of the emotions (that’s the only way I can describe them) that Klara is both seeing around her and experiencing for herself.

Can robots have feelings? I’ve heard Ishiguro say that Klara is designed to copy humans and so copying how they feel and how they express that emotion is part of the programming. It’s so skilfully done that by the end, I was unreservedly invested in Klara and the end…well, I won’t spoil it for new readers. What I will say is: it’s still with me. I can’t forget it. And I have a whole new attitude to the Sun.

The other critics were right. I’ll join the chorus. It’s a masterpiece.

Klara and the Sun is published by Faber.

More Kazuo Ishiguro titles are reviewed here:

The Unconsoled, reviewed by Marcus Berkmann

and The Buried Giant, reviewed by Linda Sargent

Guest review by Marcus Berkmann: THE UNCONSOLED by Kazuo Ishiguro

"In my opinion, one of the greatest post-war novels of them all, far ahead of anything else that Kazuo has written and liable (if it so moves you) to stay in your head for months if not years after you have finished it."

Marcus Berkmann is a regular contributor to Private Eye, Saga Magazine and the Daily Mail, for whom he writes book reviews. He has also written ten books, including last year’s Berkmann’s Cricketing Miscellany, and he is a regular contestant on BBC Radio 4’s Round Britain Quiz.

Many years ago, longer ago than even I can remember, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s first three novels: the two Japanese ones, and the multi-million-selling, Booker-Prize-winning The Remains of the Day. At that point I rather thought that was it for Kazuo. I admired his books for their cool, formal style and clenched emotional constipation, but loved them? No. There are so many other books to read, not all of them by P G Wodehouse, and only so many years in which to do it.

But I kept an eye on Kazuo, especially when I found out that he was the only Booker-Prize-winning novelist who had once been a grouse beater at Balmoral (in his school holidays). And gradually I started reading him again: Nocturnes, a series of short stories vaguely about music (not bad), Never Let Me Go, a genuinely disturbing novel about clones (brilliant) and When We Were Orphans, a detective novel without much of a plot (a slight misfire). There were only two books left, and one of them was the fattest and most terrifying of them all, The Unconsoled.

The Unconsoled was Ishiguro’s oddity. Written after The Remains of the Day, when one literary journalist of my acquaintance said ‘he could have written anything he wanted’, it’s three times as long as any of his other books and very much stranger. It features Ryder, a concert pianist who is in some unnamed foreign European city to play a recital. Ryder is a star: everyone wants a bit of him and he does his best to please everybody. But he is also grievously overworked and his sense of reality has given way to a sort of dreamlike state, where time is elastic, geography folds in on itself and he keeps forgetting what he is supposed to be doing next. Even reading it makes you feel slightly woozy, and for a while you keep wondering whether there’s going to be an explanation for all this. Then you remember you’re reading Kazuo Ishiguro, who doesn’t do explanations.

What it builds into is, in my opinion, one of the greatest post-war novels of them all, far ahead of anything else that Kazuo has written and liable (if it so moves you) to stay in your head for months if not years after you have finished it. In his travels Ryder meets many people who tell him, at great length, their complete life stories, in a way that you might recognise if you have read Rachel Cusk’s later and equally bold Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy. (If she got the idea from The Unconsoled, all I can say is that she has excellent taste.) The book is also, extraordinarily for Ishiguro, very funny. Who knew he even had a sense of humour? Maybe his eyebrow has been raised throughout his other books. I may have to reread them to find out.

On publication the ferocious literary critic James Wood famously said that The Unconsoled ‘invented its own category of badness’, and I have good friends, clever, well-read men and women, who hate the book and all who sail in her. So let’s just say it won’t be to everyone’s taste. But when the Nobel Prize Committee gave Ishiguro their Literature prize in 2017, I bet it was for this book more than for any other. In their citation they describe him as a writer ‘who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’ — which by extraordinary coincidence describes The Unconsoled perfectly.

The Unconsoled is published by Faber & Faber.

See also:The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, reviewed by Linda Sargent

Guest review by Linda Sargent: THE BURIED GIANT by Kazuo Ishiguro

Linda Sargent is a writer who works as a publisher’s reader (David Fickling Books since 2002). She has published short stories and articles and her first novel, Paper Wings, appeared in 2010; she is also the author of Words and Wings, a training guide to creative reminiscence work, available as a free download from her website.

Recently we saw the theatrical version of La Strada, based on the film by Fellini who is quoted as saying that, “the best cinema (has) the language of dreams, everything you see there has meaning, but the meaning is not always literal or easily understandable”. This surely applies to all great art, and certainly to Ishiguro’s powerful and hypnotic book, The Buried Giant. Anyone, picking it up and imagining they’re embarking on another foray into a Game of Thrones’ world is likely to be disappointed, and yet the fundamentals are there, but mystical rather than literal. Similarly, there are the echoes of one of my favourite childhood authors, Rosemary Sutcliff, in her vivid recreations of Roman and post-Roman Britain. This, though, is a Britain of bogs and forests where ogres lurk, stark mountains and rivers sprinkled with sprites and pixies, a Britain of meandering and uncharted paths and all shrouded in a memory-hazing mist, emanating from the dragon, Querig, as she slumbers under an enchantment cast by the now dead, Merlin. A Britain that, for me, evoked reminders of more recent wars too, such as those in the Balkans.

In this story Arthur is dead and his one remaining knight, an ancient (almost Pythonesque) Sir Gawain, wanders the land on his faithful horse, Horace, feeling it must be he who is tasked with Querig’s end. It is on Horace that the book’s two main characters, the elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice finally reach their destination of the river and its waiting boatman.

 

The story begins with Beatrice and Axl preparing to leave their communal, but not especially friendly, Hobbit-like burrow; they set off to find their son, absent for some years, planning to travel on foot to his village, despite the hazards of the wild landscape. Essentially, it is an archetypal journey story, fraught with both helpers and hinderers. They and everyone they meet, carry an unsettlingly vague notion of the past that both inhibits and protects them in their present life. Beatrice is nursing a pain that she tries to hide from Axl, but it is clear to him, and to the reader, that it is no trivial matter and at one point, en route, the two elderly Britons seek out a monastery where a monk may be able to offer help to Beatrice, but where other dangers await. Meanwhile, they have met with Sir Gawain, Wistan, a Saxon warrior on his own quest and also his Saxon boy companion, Edwin, rescued from ostracism in his village because of a wound (apparently caused by an ogre) and also on a personal mission, to find his mother. The four of them come together, encounter dangers and frights, are separated and re-united; however, the binding thread running through the story is the abiding power of love between Axl and Beatrice. Throughout, Axl tenderly refers to his wife as “princess” as he encourages and nurtures her during their exhausting and challenging journey. And it is this love, with all of its past imperfections, that mirrors the buried anger and resentment of the people in this mist-covered land. What is raised here is the question of the seductive enticement of repressing memories of past violence (of burying the giant) and how, once uncovered, the dangers implicit in lifting the lid on possible revenge and retribution. Near the end of the book as memories begin to clear, there’s a moving plea from the elderly Axl to the young, newly fired-up, Edwin: “Master Edwin! We beg this of you. In the days to come, remember us. Remember us and this friendship when you were still a boy”.

With so much upheaval, displacement and distrust caused by ongoing conflict in our current world this is indeed a story for our times: a story for all time and one that demands many readings. I loved it.