The Remains of the Day in 10 Minutes: A Butler's Silent Heartbreak at the Empire's Dusk

Opening: A Butler by the Sea, Having Missed His Whole Life

Picture this: Weymouth, on England's west coast, a wooden pier reaching out into a grey sea. Evening is coming on, and at the far end sits an old man alone, in a black suit, his back perfectly straight. His posture is immaculate, as if he were still waiting for the dinner bell to summon him to his master. He has just spent six days driving across England to see a woman he should have proposed to thirty years ago. She has just told him she is going back to her marriage. He sits there, the sea wind blowing, understanding everything and admitting none of it to himself. This is the image The Remains of the Day leaves you with on its last page: a man who has spent his whole life inside the word restraint, hearing for the first time, faintly, the bell he missed.

What Kind of Book This Is: Kazuo Ishiguro's Most English Novel

The story is set in July 1956, the year of the Suez Crisis, the twilight of the British Empire. Its author is a British writer of Japanese descent, who left Nagasaki with his family as a small child and never went back, yet wrote in English a novel widely called the most English of all English novels. It won the Booker Prize in 1989, and its author later won the Nobel Prize in Literature. There is not a trace of Japan in the book itself: an English country house, an old butler, a few country lanes, the afterglow of an empire — every texture in it is English through and through. The title, The Remains of the Day, carries all of this at once: what is left of a day, of a life's best years already spent, of an empire whose day is nearly done.

The cruelest and most tender thing Ishiguro does is this: he makes a man who will not admit his heart is broken tell the whole story of his own broken life, in his own words.

People and World: Four People, One Great House, England in 1956

Our narrator, Stevens, is the aging butler of Darlington Hall in Oxfordshire. He has spent his whole life on a single pursuit: treating dignity — meaning professional perfection and emotional restraint — as more important than life itself. By the summer of 1956, Darlington Hall has long since passed to a new owner, the easygoing, joking American gentleman Mr. Farraday. Half the staff are gone, the furniture is under dust sheets, and the great days are over. Farraday lends Stevens his Ford and suggests he take a few days off to see something of the country.

Stevens's official reason for the trip is to visit a former colleague, Miss Kenton, once the housekeeper at Darlington Hall, who married someone else years ago and now lives alone in a small town in the west of England. He wants to persuade her to come back and help out for a few days — and, incidentally... well, incidentally, to see an old face again. What travels with him on the road is his own memory: Lord Darlington's house in its heyday, his father, the young Miss Kenton, meeting after meeting on the fate of Europe conducted behind closed doors — all of it long gone, and all of it blown back to him, inch by inch, on the country wind.

Another thread of memory is the day-to-day of the years he and Miss Kenton worked together. Two senior servants running a great house side by side, there was an understanding between them, and a warmth. She would bring a cup of tea to his elbow when he was buried in work; she would contradict him sharply in front of the junior staff, then soften once they were alone. Neither of them ever named what was between them — Stevens's line was always that as colleagues, they ought to keep things professional. In the end she grew tired of waiting, married someone else, and left Darlington Hall.

Ishiguro handles this beautifully — the thing Miss Kenton is almost about to say keeps recurring through the book, and every single time it is interrupted at the last second: a telephone call, a tray to carry, an unexpected visitor, an "I really must be getting on." The reader gets more anxious with every page: he loves her, the whole world can see it, and he is the only one wrapping it up in professional language. Restraint is not the absence of feeling; restraint is putting the feeling in a drawer and turning the key until it snaps.

image_hint: The butler's pantry at Darlington Hall in the 1920s, late-afternoon light slanting in through a high window; at one end of the wooden desk, Stevens bent over a guest list, at the other, the young Miss Kenton standing with a cup of tea, her lips parted as if about to speak, then lowering her eyes, setting the cup quietly at his elbow, and turning to leave.

Act Four, Memory Three: Two Jewish Housemaids Dismissed, the Price of Blind Loyalty

Now comes the heaviest blow of all the memories. Lord Darlington is an old-school English aristocrat who, out of sympathy for a defeated Germany and a certain gentlemanly sense of honor, hosts a series of pro-German, appeasement-minded meetings at the Hall, and is gradually used by the Nazi circles around him. Among the many things the lord does that history will later prove wrong is this: he orders Stevens to dismiss two Jewish housemaids from the staff, under the pretext of a "staffing adjustment," for no reason but their being Jewish. Stevens carries out the order. Miss Kenton is furious enough to threaten resignation over it, but in the end she does not leave — she stays to help him clean up the mess, though the crack it opens in her never closes again.

On the surface it is a novel about a butler; one layer down, a love story; one layer further down, a political allegory — 1956 is exactly the year of the Suez Crisis, the year the British Empire's real decline begins. An old butler sits alone by the sea in the empire's twilight, and his own late years fold silently over the late years of an entire order. What makes the writing so admired comes down to one phrase: unreliable narration. Stevens speaks in English so courteous, so nearly diplomatic, that every true thing is hidden on the far side of the sentence — the reader has to assemble the whole picture out of what he does not say, what he skirts, what he passes over lightly. It is nothing like reading an ordinary first-person novel: you read with one part of your mind supplying, silently, the sentence he refuses to say — and the more you supply, the more it breaks your heart.

Why Read the Book Itself: You Already Know How It Ends, and It Will Still Break You

You already know now how the story ends: Miss Kenton goes back to her marriage, Stevens sits alone on the pier, no tears, no outcry, resolving to practice telling jokes. This is not a story a spoiler can ruin — it is a novel that stands or falls on how it is told, not on what happens. The text itself is full of the butler's turn of mind, laid out in Ishiguro's exquisitely precise English: his definition of dignity, his parsing of what makes a butler great, the professional digressions he suddenly inserts into the very scene where he is listening to his father die — digressions that give him away completely, though he himself never notices.

Read it not to find out what he missed — you already know that. Read it to hear, in his own voice, a man who will not admit he missed anything tell the whole story of what he missed, word by word. And read it, too, for prose that many call the very sound of English itself: restrained, precise, courteous, like a tailcoat pressed without a single crease out of place, wrapped around a lifetime of heartbreak.