poliphilo

Ishiguro's turn to have a go at the Matter of Britain. His ancient Brits (husband and wife) live in a Hobbit hole (sort of) in an Altzheimerish mist of forgetting (or is it a blessed cloud of unknowing) which affects the whole of their society. Prompted by faint stirrings of memory they set off in a quest for the son they may once have had, accompanied by a mad, dragon-bitten boy, an Arthurian knight who comes trailing intimations of Lewis Carroll and T.H. White and a Saxon warrior with the swordsmanship of a Kurosawa samurai. Their adventures are coldly nightmarish, the love that sustains them- but will it sustain them all the way?- is deeply touchng.

A lot of the critics hated the book. Not me. I've fallen in love with it.