As generally happens in Arthurian quests, a noble band assembles around Axl and Beatrice, including a hyper-competent Saxon warrior, a teenage outcast with a ghastly secret and Sir Gawain himself, touchy and past his prime but still formidable. I think Gawain's character has some echoes of a certain kind of an aging lonely bushi. That figure of the solitary warrior, caught in unswerving loyalty emits an aura of 'Chusingura'.
As a species humans need to remember, but they also need, desperately, to forget, both as people and as communities, and those twin needs are finely, precariously balanced.All this Ishiguro relates to us bluntly and plainly, almost willfully so, as if to do otherwise would be to distort the truth with the sparkly Instagram filter of eloquence.
If at first Ishiguro's language sounds flat and unadorned, it's that very flatness that makes you wonder what's buried underneath. It's a voice he found before he ever started writing, back when he was still a singer-songwriter. Yes, the emotions would be there, but they'll be slightly obliquely there, in the words themselves. People have to feel it between the lines.
