The Unconsoled is a difficult, perplexing and uniquely challenging book. I’m struggling. Not because I don’t admire or enjoy it; perhaps by the end I may even agree with those who think it’s a masterpiece. There are scenes relating to the narrator Ryder’s small family (if indeed they are his family) that I’ve found almost unbearably poignant. There are also moments of exquisite comedy. To give an early example, I adored the deadpan way in which Ryder complains about a Miss Stratmann failing to give him a copy of his mysterious schedule (“the fault was hers”) and then, just a few lines later, without passing comment, starts talking of his recent plane journey in which he was “making careful study” of that same schedule.
Impressive as these moments are, this book is also so demanding that I haven’t made much headway. I can almost agree with the Reading group contributor who declared “this was a chore” – so long as I can also slip in the goody-two-shoes proviso that some chores are rather enjoyable.
Anyway, the point is that I’m having to take it slowly and carefully. At the time of writing I’m just coming up to page 200 – not the best vantage from which to comment on such a complicated and confusing book. Then again, this position is also potentially interesting; partly because this is a book with such a high dropout rate that I now know as much as some readers ever will, and partly because at this stage I have so many questions in common with Ryder. I currently have the same problem as the narrator while he moves through the story. Like him, I don’t know where I am being led or why. I don’t, in short, know what the hell is going on. But this is a confusion that makes me feel all the more curious and empathetic, and all the more tempted to speculate. Handily enough, on last week’s blog, the reviewer John Self provided a series of excellent questions to further fuel this speculation – and it struck me as a fun idea to play around with the formula of this article and to have a pop at them now. Over to John Self:
1. John Carey (who recognised the book as a “masterpiece” from the off (and defended it on the same Late Review panel that saw Tony Parsons call for it to be burned) says: “This is a book about stress, a problem of epidemic proportions in our culture that modern fiction largely ignores.” Is it?
At this stage, as noted, I’m unsure what the book is about, if anything. One thing I can say about stress, however, is how effectively the reader also experiences it. The fact that events aren’t explained in the book in the usual way undermines the normal expectations of moving through a novel.
Meanwhile, if Ryder is baffled by the world around him in the novel, so are we. If he is troubled that he keeps getting distracted and is never able to bring anything to the conclusion he intends, so are we. It’s singularly frustrating that episodes in the book never quite play out to the full – that so many story strands are left hanging while the narrative is dragged off in unexpected directions. And it isn’t just a case of simple reading difficulty. I also found myself repeatedly worrying about Ryder’s small boy Boris, forever left behind in cafes and hotel rooms, or pulled to the point of exhaustion by the ever-moving narrative thread.
Similarly, if Ryder is forever feeling that moments of respite and reflection are snatched away from him, so are we. I’m starting to find it exhausting that every time the poor man lies down, the phone rings and someone comes along to drag him into yet another round of unanswered questions.
On the subject of these questions, meanwhile, it is astonishingly frustrating to have so many apparent clues set in front of us – and then snatched away. I don’t even know, at this stage, if the narrator is who most people think he is. There is a tantalising suggestion on page one that the porter does not recognise Ryder – that the whole confusion of the book might have arisen from a case of mistaken identity. Like I say - stressful.
Fortunately, while this wild goose chase is unsettling, it’s also funny. I can understand why people might be irritated to feel that an author is toying with them. But it’s also amusing when he trips us up, closes doors in our face and points us in the wrong direction. There’s a peculiar wit guiding these sequences of events that refuse to follow any order. Sequences which allow Ryder to – say – walk into one place miles away from his hotel, through a room, out the back and into his hotel again.
And yes, I find it hard to explain why I find such moments are funny – but it doesn’t diminish my enjoyment. Reading group contributor Lisa Summers summed this up nicely:
“I absolutely loved this book when I read it a number of years ago and thought it was a masterpiece. I recommended it to everyone I knew who read literary fiction, but they all hated it and never got past the first couple of chapters. Finally I asked one of them, ‘So you didn’t think it was funny at all?’ She did not. I can’t imagine slogging through the whole thing without laughing – quietly and out loud – but on the other hand, just rereading a few pages now, I can’t explain what’s funny, exactly. Still, I’m guessing it’s getting, or not, the humour that creates the great divide.”
Like Lisa Summers I would say there’s something more than stress here too.
2. Without giving too much away, the novel’s narrative follows dream logic very closely. (A working title was Piano Dreams …) Ishiguro says that he wanted to explore how memory works in a way similar to dream. Is the narrative a dream?
The lack of guiding logic already mentioned seems to me to follow a particularly dreamlike pattern. Also, throughout the book so far, things blur in and out of focus, faces emerge from nowhere and recede back into the mist, time is out of joint, things that seem pressingly urgent can be immediately forgotten … So yes, it feels like reading a dream. Whether that actually means Ryder is dreaming, however, I don’t yet dare say.
3. Ishiguro has described one of the techniques in the novel as “appropriation”, where the different characters that Ryder meets represent himself at different stages in his life – or his impressions of himself. Does this help comprehension of what is undoubtedly a somewhat knotty book? Is comprehension in the usual narrative sense even important?
As I’ve been reading, it struck me that this could be a journey through Ryder’s head – that he is trawling through memories and symbolically important episodes so much as physical space. Do the rooms in the hotel represent the chambers of his mind? Are the conversations he has with a small sweet boy called Boris something to do with a family he has lost in the real world? Are his attempts to remember phone conversations memories within memories?
Similarly, I suppose you could see, for instance, a character called Brodsky, who is an alcoholic conductor, as an older version of Ryder who has gone to seed and squandered his talent. Little boy lost Boris might conceivably be the little boy lost in all of us … And yet, at the moment, this idea leaves me more confused than ever before. Can all these people represent Ryder? In which case why go to so much trouble introducing them and giving them apparently distinct personalities? How, for instance, can a woman he meets inspecting tickets on a tram, who turns out to have been a childhood friend and is annoyed that he failed to show up for a dinner, also be Ryder?
I’m just asking more questions, aren’t I? I suppose the overall conclusion to take from this early attempt to answer questions about The Unconsoled is that I’m none too wise about anything in it. What I am interested in is whether I will feel differently by the time I reach the end. Will it start making sense? Will there be any answers at all? Will it even be worth trying to ask questions about the book as a unified whole rather than just taking each page at face value, one at a time? We’ll see …
