From the Archives: A Pale View of Hills
A Pale View of Hills
by Kazuo Ishiguro
(Vintage, 1982)
Like many readers, I did not read Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills until after "discovering" him through his novel, The Remains of the Day. As I prepare a review of his newly released Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, I felt a need to return to Ishiguro's early books to get my bearings on his artistry. As I re-read A Pale of View of Hills, I was struck by how different Ishiguro and Ondaatje (another favorite author of mine) are, especially in their handling of the subject of lives shredded by World War II. Ondaatje relies on imagery-laden scenes and spare dialogue to carry the burden of his characters' sadness. Ishiguro's prose is as spare and clean as a room in a traditional Japanese home -- solid tatami floor, feather-light screens, warm and shadowy light. Ondaatje's characters feel steeped in romance, even when they're in agony, while Ishiguro's characters fumble behind politeness and their fear keeps their agonies at bay; emotions are deep, but too frightening to face head on.
A Pale View of Hills uses the narrative effect that captured a much wider audience in The Remains of the Day: the narrator who's walking down memory lane and trying to sort things out, make excuses, find a way to forgive or fool himself once and for all. It doesn't surprise me that A Pale View of Hills was a quietly received book -- unfortunately, the Japanese author and setting probably kept many readers away. However, it does not deserve to sink into obscurity. Ishiguro deftly keeps the big setting of post-atomic bomb Nagasaki at bay, like a dreadful cloud hovering on the horizon, and only comes into sharper focus during a visit to the Peace Memorial near the end of the novel. Instead, the novel concentrates on the small domestic moments of families torn asunder by devastation, families who are trying to assemble new lives. A mother and 10-year old daughter move to a shabby cottage on the outskirts of a new apartment complex where they are befriended by a pregnant wife who welcomes a distraction from her husband's and father-in-law's insecurities and her anxieties about the upcoming birth of her first child. Unfortunately, the more she learns about this mother and daughter, the more unsettled she becomes. This story unravels slowly and is narrated from the wife's future, where she is now living in a cottage in soggy England, and struggling to make sense of her twenty-something daughter's recent suicide; her second husband is dead, and her relationship with her younger daughter from that marriage is strained. Not all the story's gaps are filled in -- like what became of her first husband, or how she met her second husband -- but that lends an authenticity to the novel's voice of reminiscence. This book is unsettling and wonderful and has aged quite nicely.
Here's the review of A Pale View of Hills from the April 19, 1982 edition of The New Yorker -- spare on flowery praise, but firm in its approval, a fitting tribute.
"A middle-aged Japanese woman named Etsuko, who survived the boming of Nagasaki (she lived on its outskirts) and moved some years later to rural England, finds her memories of life in Nagasaki's ruins reawakened when her older daughter, after years of severe depression, hangs herself, and her younger daughter comes out from London, after the funeral to comfort her. Etsuko dreams, talks, and thinks about the months after the bomb dropped, when she established a shaky friendship with a haughty woman and her secretive child --wealthy refugees living temporarily nearby. This web of memories features the child's nightmarish visions, which now haunt Etsuko, and the mother's indifference toward her child's welfare, which holds a clue to Etsuko's present sorrow. A fine, strong novel (Kazuo Ishiguro's first); the plot's subtle pattern is the attentive reader's ample reward."