“‘And remember, like all these types, he’s very vain.’”
Tell a dream, lose a reader, says Henry James. What if the dream were set in very small type and went on for 535 pages?, says Kazuo Ishiguro. Would that work?
Astonishingly, the answer (which comes in the form of The Unconsoled, Ishiguro’s fourth and quite possibly best book) is yes. The Unconsoled is the bumblebee of contemporary literature: by all rights it should collapse under the weight of its own fatal misconceivedness, and yet — off it flies into the pantheon.
How (seriously, how) does Ishiguro pull it off?
First a word about what reading The Unconsoled is like. At first it seems to be a work of standard, even stodgy, realism. A famous pianist, Ryder, arrives to give a concert in an unnamed European city and checks into his hotel. Ishiguro renders this scene with an alarming lack of urgency (what exactly is this three-page monologue about the proper way to hold a suitcase doing here?) — but, you figure, you’re in the hands of a Nobel Prize winner. Surely things will get underway shortly.
They do not. The elevator ride takes as long as a transatlantic flight. The porter’s tour of the room (with inexplicable detours into the porter’s relationship with his daughter and grandson) unfolds with the slowness of ice melting.
The strangenesses — of pace, of emphasis, of perspective — accumulate until the end of chapter one, when Ryder, alone at last, looks up at the ceiling of his hotel room and realizes, with a start, that he is in fact in his childhood bedroom, cleverly disguised. What a relief!, he thinks, and sinks off to sleep.
And what a relief for us! Because now at last we realize what Ishiguro is up to — and it isn’t having a stroke; it’s writing a novel within which the reader feels as if she’s having a dream. Ishiguro is, in other words, aiming for a loophole in Henry James’s formulation. Being told about someone else’s dream is, indeed, awful. But dreaming is one of the great and mysterious joys of being human. So this is Ishiguro’s challenge: he wants to induce in you, the fully waking reader, the feeling of dreaming — without triggering your reflexive horror at anything that feels the least bit like listening to your spouse’s misty recollections over breakfast.
How to do it?
Imagine that you, in every moment of your life, are carrying around a device called a strangeness detector, whose needle ranges from zero to 10. Is that person… not wearing pants?? 10! 10! Oh, wait. They’re leggings. 2.
One of the hallmarks of dreaming is that your strangeness detector becomes wildly insensitive. Things that would, in waking life, register as full-blown 10’s (being married to a stranger, finding yourself in charge of a herd of baby goats), cause only the mildest of flutters. So the characteristic sensation of dreaming, strangeness-wise, is of ticking along at a 2 or a 3. Then you wake up, and, for the few seconds before you get out of bed (and begin boring your spouse with what you just dreamt), your detector, roving over your memory of the baby goats etc., flashes briefly at an 8 or a 9.
Most artists, tasked with depicting dreams, remember only this 8 or 9 — and so they reach for the technicolor paints and the wah-wah pedal (see: What Dreams May Come, Lisey’s Story, Inception). This turns out, artistically, to be a disaster. The strangeness detector, in the presence of all this exuberant dreaminess, switches off — like a sniffer dog confronted with a bag of chili powder.
What Ishiguro understands is that, for a work of art to register as convincingly dream-like, it must carry only a faint whiff of the surreal. No dissolving bridges, no undulating hillsides. Just a hotel porter who goes on too long. An imminent engagement (“‘And let me assure you, sir, all the arrangements for Thursday night are in hand,”) about which you can’t remember anything except that it’s hugely important. The Unconsoled — a novel preoccupied with music — is as disciplined in its construction as a concerto. Every detail, every scene, unfolds within its chosen, surreal key.
My favorite of these just-dreamy-enough moments comes when Ryder grants an interview to a local journalist. Ryder introduces himself to the journalist and the photographer (there will be a few pictures to accompany the article) and, after a bit of polite chitchat, the journalist and photographer resume the conversation they were having before he came up. What they’re discussing, it turns out, is how best to manipulate Ryder — and they keep on discussing it, at full volume and right in front of him. “‘And remember, like all these types, he’s very vain. So pretend to be a big fan of his.’” “‘I’ll start talking about his performance in Vienna or something like that. I’ve got some notes on it here, I’ll bluff my way.’” The journalist and photographer go on like this for the entire afternoon, shifting seamlessly between flattery and spiteful laughs about how susceptible this loser is to flattery. Ryder listens in helpless confusion. It’s a hilariously apt depiction of how it feels to be trapped in some transparently insincere bit of professional socializing — and a virtuosic demonstration of what this novel can do, of why you’d want to write a dream-novel in the first place.
Humor, says George Saunders, is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker than we’re used to. And dreams — as many a spiritual teacher, psychoanalyst, and mortified individual dreamer have noted — are capable of some ruthlessly condensed truth-telling. The waking mind conducts a multi-day symposium on whether, underneath the sweetness, there might be something a bit sinister about your new neighbor; the dreaming mind turns her into a spider.
Which is to say that The Unconsoled, for all its outward improbabilities, is a deeply realistic novel — not factual, but startlingly, hilariously true. Worrying about your parents’ approval is like being unable to remember whether and how they’re coming to your concert. Trying to find a moment to yourself is like wandering an unfamiliar city in search of a single goddamn room with a piano and a door that closes.
And living, being alive — that is precisely like inhabiting a world that’s being fabricated by our minds, full of patches and glitches and inconsistencies smoothed over. Because that is, of course, what we’re doing in every moment. This is the great meta-truth of dreaming — a truth usually discernible only in lucid dreams. To have a lucid dream, you must either be lucky or diligent: there are how-to books, YouTube tutorials, vitamin supplements. Ishiguro offers the experience — infinitely renewable, available at all hours — for the price of a paperback.
Occasionally, taking the book from the shelf yet again, I say to my wife, “I pretty much always want to be reading The Unconsoled.” She’s now heard this enough that she smiles indulgently, or ignores me. What I mean, I think, is that I want to remember that I always am reading The Unconsoled — whether it’s in my hands or not.