The Buried Giant is set in a misty, primordial England populated by feuding Saxons and Britons coexist in an uneasy but functioning truce, yet the land is wreathed in icy mists, the exhalation of a she-dragon, we learn, whose effect is to rob people of their memories. We follow an ageing couple, Axl and Beatrice, who live in a British settlement 'warren', composed of tunnels dug into a hillside. They decide to journey to a village, a few days’ walk away, to visit their son, they can hardly remember him, but assume he will be waiting “impatiently” to see them.
However we're simultaneously in a weird world, not just because it is populated by ogres, sprites, demons, but also because Ishiguro puts a fog over the narrative, littering it with elisions, false turns and feints that make us doubt what we have read. There will be a big setup for a battle, i.e. the technical details of swordplay, or of how to construct a tower so that it will become a deadly trap for those seeking to storm it. Then the scene will happen offstage, as it were. We might even doubt whether it happened at all and I think it's also a part of Ishiguro's modus operandi.
In his previous books, the author focused on individual experiences, but now he wanted to look at the behavior of societies as a whole. Specifically, he was interested in memory, and the role that collective remembering and forgetting plays in the ways societies recover after catastrophes, i.e. Germany, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, where people did terrible things to one another and then had to learn how to live together afterward, side by side.
