The Buried Giant is the story of the elderly husband and wife, Axl and Beatrice, badly treated by their fellow Britons in their village. They go on a journey with the idea of visiting their son, whose whereabouts and the exact location is unknown. The story is allegorical through and through, for at the end, the couple’s trip ends up with them finding their own selves instead of their son.

In this story, I consider Axl to be the main character who doesn’t remember who he really was and thinks of himself as a plain farmer. In the past, he served King Arthur as a valiant knight and mediated the peace between Saxons and Britons, but due to his strong sense of ethics, he ended up defecting from King Arthur’s court.

The second important Character is Beatrice, Axl’s wife and sidekick. Although supposedly kind and wise, she committed adultery, something we find about much later. Her greatest wish is to see her son and she is the one who talks Axl into taking the trip. She has some unknown pain or disease and because of that, she is extremely needy, depending on Axl all the time, which annoyed me a little.

During their journey, they meet Sir Gawain and come across a monastery where they think they’ll be okay but are disappointed with the backstabbing by some monks whose Abbot is wicked and is in cahoots with Lord Brennus who wants them dead. Lord Brennus is the Britton Lord who wants to start a war with the Saxons, and for that end, he wants to tame the she-dragon Querig to make her fight on his side.

As to the dragon Querig, her breathing causes a mist which erases or changes the memories of those who smell it. At one point, Beatrice tells Axl, “If that’s how you’ve remembered it, Axl, let it be the way it was. With this mist upon us, any memory’s a precious thing and we’d best hold tight to it.”
Querig was cunning and fierce, but she’s old and weak now, although none of the story characters is aware of this fact until the end.

Among the most important characters in the story is a Saxon warrior, Wistan, who is immune to the effects of the dragon’s breath. He volunteers to escort Axl and Beatrice through their journey. In Wistan’s presence, Axl begins to get impressions from his own past.

Added to the group is Edwin, a young boy who seeks his mother and dreams of her voice calling him. Edwin is bitten by an ogre and is considered dangerous by the superstitious people and, because of that, may be harmed by them, until Wistan rescues Edwin and takes him as his apprentice, and Beatrice and Axl let the both to travel with them.

Another important character in the story is the boatman, whom the characters meet twice in the story. His job is to take people one by one to an island where they’ll be isolated yet happy. Only those couples who can prove to the boatman that their love is perfect and true, without bitterness or jealousy or shame, can cross to the island together in the same boat. Allegorically speaking, the boatman is Charon of the myth, the ferryman of Hades who carries souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead.

The setting is England right after King Arthur’s time, and the story’s main conflict is the results of the amnesia-causing mist that comes from the breaths of the she-dragon Querig.

In the beginning, I almost stopped to read this book as it sounded infantile and odd, and I didn’t -yet- see the allegories in it. Then, the couple met Sir Gawain of King Arthur fame, and he brought life to my reading.

Sir Gawain is happy to have served his king, but he also feels guilty, although he doesn’t really admit it, for his part in aiding Arthur and Merlin’s decision to let Querig spread the mist. This reminded me of soldiers trained to obey orders from the top, which constitutes the only morality for them.

Although I am trying not to give away the entire plot, in the end, we find out that Wistan the Warrior is the one who wants to kill the dragon and Sir Gawain is the one who wants to protect it.

The themes in the story are love, war, failing memory, self-delusion, remembrances, guilt, worry, and fear. The premise of the novel has to do with the idea that memories are valuable and without them, we are all lost.

The closing is convincing and with meaning. Yet, while the ending scene can be considered as moving, it annoyed me. It could well be that my annoyance was at the way Beatrice acted.

The novel is masterfully constructed and crafted with a playful yet serious imagination. The language, at times, imitates the awkward phrasing of the age of King Arthur’s era; yet, it agrees with the story and its narration.

I have read other books by Ishiguro. The enjoyment I got from them far exceeds this one. Still, I can appreciate the literary magnitude of this book.

the author's coming up with the memory-altering mist idea.

is KAZUO ISHIGURO, born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954. He moved to Britain at the age of 5, and is the author of 6 novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Premio Scanno, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, winner of the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go (2005, Corine Internationaler Buchpreis, Serono Literary Prize, Casino de Santiago European Novel Award, shortlisted for the Booker Prize). Nocturnes (2009), his connected stories collection, was awarded the Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa International Literary Prize. In 1995 Ishiguro received an OBE for Services to Literature and in 1998 the French decoration of Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

it is a literary fantasy, which is of the kind hard to come by.

As I said before, I enjoyed this author's other books much more, but this book has several elevated points and it may help other writers to read it.

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