Fade to Black

Book Review by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

“The owl of Minerva,” wrote Hegel, “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” By this he meant to say that an epoch or an era cannot really be judged or estimated until it has entered its closing phase. For those of us fated to lead smaller and less portentous existences, it is still the gathering shade of evening that very often gives rise to our most intense, and sometimes necessarily our most melancholy, moments of reflection and retrospect.

A whole musical repertoire has been consecrated to (one of my favorite words) the crepuscular. Many of these compositions, too, are marked by a certain mournfulness, though some of Debussy’s nocturnes can strike the ear as relatively affirmative. It has been proposed that Debussy was influenced by the nightfall paintings of James McNeill Whistler, and it would certainly be apt for the purposes of this article if that turned out to be true. The best-loved of Whistler’s “moonlights,” as he called them, is the hauntingly lit “Nocturne” that gives us Battersea Bridge as a long London day fades to black. Critics seem to agree that Whistler’s main influence at that time was the Japanese woodblock master Hiroshige, whose marvelous work, along with other Japanese aesthetic achievements, was just then being made known to the West.

So Kazuo Ishiguro has quite a tradition on which to draw in these five tales of human emotion in the waning hours of light. It’s the time of day that isn’t quite day when some people — such as myself — start to feel truly awake. It’s also pre-eminently the moment, especially if moonrise chances to be involved, when life may seem rather stale without music. This is all well known to the cafe proprietors of Venice — the location of the first and last of these stories — who make sure to employ bands or orchestras that never cease to perform. Indeed, the narrator of “Crooner” tells us that as a freelance guitarist on the Piazza San Marco he can remember “once last summer, going from band to band and playing ‘The Godfather’ nine times in one afternoon.”

Ishiguro likes this flat “Godfather” note well enough to strike it again twice in the last story, “Cellists,” and it is only fair to warn you that he relies for much of his effect not on the slow metamorphosis of blue into gray but on bathos and sometimes on pure farce. In “Malvern Hills,” another guitarist, believing himself underappreciated in the metropolis, seeks a more tranquil life in the west of England and plays a nasty practical joke that has unintended consequences. The fact that he plays it on two holiday-making Swiss musicians is almost irrelevant: music itself has little to do with the narrative, and the three characters might as well have juggling or animal-training in common.

The only other story set in England, “Come Rain or Come Shine,” descends from farce almost into slapstick. An unambitious young man comes to stay with a more go-ahead couple who had been his friends at university. The purpose of the invitation soon discloses itself: Ray is supposed to act as an emollient on the evidently fraying marriage of Charlie and Emily. The crucial thing Ray and Emily have in common is that, as the slightly unexciting opening sentence informs us: “Like me, Emily loved old American popular songs.” But he is sternly instructed by Charlie to discard this, his only ace, and indeed if Emily even mentions “that croony nostalgia music” to pretend that he knows nothing of the subject. So that’s the end of music as the food of love or indeed the fuel of narrative, and the action downshifts into Ray’s accidentally disfiguring Emily’s private diary and then trying to make enough of a mess to convince her that the apartment has been invaded by a dog.

The “croony nostalgia” theme is back in the story “Nocturne,” where we meet again a character from the opening tale, “Crooner.” She is now a hysterical and fading star, recovering from plastic surgery in a private wing of a Beverly Hills hotel. Meeting a face-lifted saxophonist from an adjoining room, she forms an apparently spontaneous love-hate attachment and in the course of the “love” part incites him to help steal a music-award statuette that she abruptly decides should be rightfully his. All you have to believe is that two still-heavily-bandaged middle-aged people would escape arrest as they roamed a hotel ballroom and crammed the statuette up the rear end of a turkey. Oh, you would also have to believe that the star, Lindy Gardner, has taken the same surname as her crooner ex-husband, Tony.

Ishiguro doesn’t put himself to very much trouble with his names. The cop who fails to see what’s in front of his nose in the above story produces his ID and says, unmemorably, “L.A.P.D. . . . Name’s Morgan.” Charlie and Ray were at school with someone named Tony Barton. In “Malvern Hills” the young man’s former schoolteachers are identified as having been just plain Mrs. Fraser and Mr. Travis. One of them is awarded an unsurprising nickname. The prospective lover of the mystery woman in “Cellists” is a certain Peter Henderson. In the same story there appears a relatively exotic Hungarian. His name is Tibor.

As if in recompense for this banality, Ishiguro does like to afflict his characters with something like Tourette’s syndrome. Whether it’s Venice or Malvern, it is perfect strangers who are told, without any appreciable loss of time, that the long-standing marriage of the person who is doing all the talking is coming to an end. In one instance this disclosure is made in the glare of full morning sunlight, in the other it does take place during an attempted nocturnal serenade, but there’s no evocation of the lengthening shadows. (In any case, people surely tend to make these tragically abrupt confessions to strangers somewhat nearer to the end of the night.)

The story that most justifies its inclusion under the book’s title is “Cellists,” where it is only by means of a slowly developed series of “movements” and after a long sequence of late après-midis that we are led to appreciate the world of mania and deception that can underlie, as with the world of chess, the universe inhabited by the fanatically musical. This time I shouldn’t say anything about the plot or rather its absence, except that it, too, has its jokey element: the old joke about the person who doesn’t know whether or not he can play the violin, because he’s never tried. It’s set at the end of the season as well, as if to emphasize the evanescence of everything, but it’s somehow a slight waste of Venice, and if Ishiguro’s narrator — all five stories are first person — had omitted to mention “the evening passeggiatta,” the setting could have been anywhere. Understatement is one thing, but in aiming for it Ishiguro generally achieves the merely ordinary. Here, for instance, is Ray’s no-doubt eagle eye as it surveys the apartment of his two old friends:

“Maybe Emily had done the tidying herself; in any case, the large living room was looking pretty immaculate. Tidiness aside, it had been stylishly done up, with modern designer furniture and arty objects — though someone being unkind might have said it was all too obviously for effect.”

Of course it could all have been done not for effect, or “done up” somehow unstylishly or accoutred with “designer furniture” that cleverly contrived not to be modern. An objet that was deliberately not d’art would also, in this context, be something of an innovation.

And how, in case you should ask, did the narrator of “Nocturne” wake up after his silly Beverly Hills adventure? “With a jerk.” How did Miss McCormack nod when her potential cello-playing genius had stilled his bow? Why, she nodded “approvingly.” What kind of glance did Emily give to her diary? “No more than a cursory” one. I became dispirited as I noticed that Ishiguro almost never chose a formulation or phrase that could be called his own when a stock expression would do.

He seemed to me, in “A Pale View of Hills” and “The Remains of the Day,” to have intuited something subtle and miniature and layered, in what I read as a latent analogy between English and Japanese society. In “The Unconsoled,” which was heavier going, he at least showed how musical commitments could be, as one might say, a cause of “discord.” “Never Let Me Go” was so orchestrated as to slowly gather pace and rhythm from its varied sections. But these five too-easy pieces are neither absorbingly serious nor engagingly frivolous: a real problem with a musical set, and a disaster, if only in a minor key, when it’s a question of prose.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/Hitchens-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print