Books, Arts & Manners: ‘Remains’ to Be Seen

I HAVE not read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, but seeing the Merchant—Ivory movie version makes me want to do so, which is a good sign. Had I begun by seeing the inept Howards End, nothing about it would have induced me to read Forster’s masterpiece. The Remains of the Day, on screen, has a restraint, an elegant spareness, an invitation to thought: it is rather like a Japanese rock garden, and also a poignant portrait of the English class system up to World War II. The samurai credo joins the gentleman’s-gentle-man mentality, the twain meeting in a coupling that puts Kipling to rest.

Stevens, the butler hero, is a superlative practitioner of the craft of service, near-identured to his master, Lord Darlington, an aristocratic twit secretly working on appeasement with Hitler as he convokes international meetings at his stately manor, Darlington Hall. Stevens stands by his master through the thick of political

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John Simon

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I HAVE not read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, but seeing the Merchant—Ivory movie version makes me want to do so, which is a good sign. Had I begun by seeing the inept Howards End, nothing about it would have induced me to read Forster’s masterpiece. The Remains of the Day, on screen, has a restraint, an elegant spareness, an invitation to thought: it is rather like a Japanese rock garden, and also a poignant portrait of the English class system up to World War II. The samurai credo joins the gentleman’s-gentle-man mentality, the twain meeting in a coupling that puts Kipling to rest.

Stevens, the butler hero, is a superlative practitioner of the craft of service, near-identured to his master, Lord Darlington, an aristocratic twit secretly working on appeasement with Hitler as he convokes international meetings at his stately manor, Darlington Hall. Stevens stands by his master through the thick of political