Kazuo Ishiguro is never letting go

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10 April 2012

Kazuo Ishiguro might well be the most peculiar writer I've ever interviewed. It's not that he's mean, grumpy or pompous. Or that he hates doing interviews; he likes doing them, and answers questions so expansively that he's hard to interrupt. He's neat and clean and says "thank you" to the waiter (we are in the Groucho Club). So what is it? I think it's just that he's so straight. A polite pedantry infuses his every sentence. It's as if he has just beamed down from another planet and must explain everything to you - the Earthling - as if it were news.

We're meeting to talk about the film adaptation of his Booker-shortlisted novel, Never Let Me Go. Unlike some writers, Ishiguro, 56 (his friends call him "Ish") has no problem with his novels being turned into films, though it probably helps in this instance that the screenplay was written by his friend, Alex Garland, and that he (Ishiguro) is an executive producer. He says he loves it - and though he thinks it "flattering" when I compare the film to his book and find it wanting, he wishes I wouldn't.

"When I see films made from books, I make a huge effort not to remember the book," he says. "It's important to see the film as a film. Of course, it's easier with an old book. If it's Wuthering Heights or something, it's like going to the theatre and seeing another version; it might as well be Chekhov. This book came out in 2006, so it's harder to do that. But it's a movie. Every discussion shouldn't be dominated by a comparison with the novel."

Never Let Me Go, which I'd describe as dystopian were it not for the fact that it is set in a wholly recognisable England of the Nineties, is about three friends (in the film played by Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield) who attend the same boarding school; one of them, Kathy (Mulligan) is the book's carefully withholding narrator. The horror of the tale becomes apparent only slowly (and you might want to skip to the next paragraph if you don't want to know). The friends' elite education is not what it seems. Thanks to a scientific breakthrough, the three of them are clones.

Protected and cherished in childhood, in adulthood they will be expected to give up their organs one by one. The book is about love (the three friends form a painful triangle) but it is also a metaphor for the human condition. These lives represent our universal state: none of us can escape the end; it's just that theirs comes sooner than ours.

Of course, there will be some who will see the film and wonder why these young people go softly and unresistingly into the night. Why don't they rise up at the injustice of it all? Ishiguro has no truck with this. He thinks we are all walking towards death's embrace every day, quietly, without fuss. Nor did he want to write another story about slaves who rebel. "The reality is that people don't try to escape - from nasty marriages, or from dictators. The history of the 20th century is one totalitarian regime after another. I wanted to say, 'Just for a little while, let's look at this aspect of human behaviour'."

But he doesn't believe it is a bleak book; he calls it his "most cheerful book" to date. "There are bleak things in it. We all live inside bodies that will deteriorate. But when you look at human beings, they're capable of very decent things: love, loyalty. When time is running out, they don't care about possessions or status. They want to put things right if they've done wrong. It's not my view of life that it's peopled by savages, that all people want is money and to kill each other."

Like all Ishiguro's novels - his most famous book is still The Remains Of The Day, which won the Booker Prize in 1989 and was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins as a repressed butler - Never Let Me Go is also about self-denial. He thinks his enduring fascination with self-denial is connected to his Japanese background; he has been in Britain for 40 years - he lives in Golders Green - and has never written in anything other than English. He came to Guildford from Nagasaki in 1960, aged six, when his father, an oceanographer, was offered a job there - and his dual background plays an essential part in his writing. "I have this experience of another culture," he says. "A world that faded away. And in many ways, I'm also a very Japanese writer, keeping back the really scary and important emotions."

He was 35 before he returned to Japan. Did it feel strange? "It wasn't as foreign as all that," he reflects. "Where I grew up had hardly changed. The next-door neighbour was still there, and the lady from the corner shop. Of course, the reason it has always been so vivid to me is precisely because I left. If you stay in the same place, there's a blur. There's no motive to remember."

His father died in 2007 but his mother is still around, and she remains his biggest fan. "Japanese people don't really travel; they're not a nation of emigrants. They like their country and they stay inside it. They're slightly xenophobic. So for them, it felt like a vindication of what would have seemed a very peculiar decision: not only had I managed to have a career but I had overcome what the Japanese see as a huge barrier: the English language."

His role, growing up, as a cultural go-between for his parents fed his interest in the British class system. (Before university, he worked for the Queen Mother as a grouse-beater at Balmoral.)

Success came quickly. After completing an English and philosophy degree, he worked for a homeless charity in London (where he met his Scottish wife, Lorna) and, in his free time, he wrote songs (the long hair has gone but he still owns the guitars). When nothing came of the music career, he enrolled on Malcolm Bradbury's creative writing course at the University of East Anglia.

In 1982, he published his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, and he has been writing full- time ever since. In his twenties and thirties, the awards stacked up like planes over an airport, one coming in to land seemingly every five minutes. He was named by Granta magazine as one of its 20 "Best Young British Novelists" in both 1983 and 1993.

His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, won the Whitbread Book of the Year. His third, The Remains Of The Day, won the Booker Prize. The only blot on the landscape came in 1995, when he published the more experimental The Unconsoled, which many reviewers loathed.

It's odd, then, that he complains now about not having been taken seriously as a younger writer. When Granta selected him as a rising star, he thought it patronising. "The illustration was of a baby with a fountain pen behind its ear. I wanted to say, 'Don't patronise us because we look vaguely young. Many of us have done our best work. We're not babies. We've written Money and Midnight's Children and Flaubert's Parrot.'" He lists several authors who, he says, wrote their best work young (though given that many of them also died young, it might in fact have turned out to have been their worst work - how can we ever know?): the Brontës, Jane Austen, Kafka, Chekhov, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. "Luckily, I noticed it [the trend for writers to peak early] when I was young enough to do something about it. I wanted to say to my peers, 'This isn't the time to start farting about writing travel pieces or getting that columnist's job. If you're serious about fiction, this is the time you're most likely to write a masterpiece.'"

Crikey. Isn't it spooky to have such a sense of your own powers when you're young? And doesn't this suggest that he feels them to be waning now? He ignores the first question but to the second he says: "No, I don't [feel them waning]. But there's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring."

From the start, he decided that he wouldn't try and write 20 books. He wanted to write two or three, or even just one, that would be valued even after his death. Each of his novels usually takes him five years to write.

Ishiguro lives with his wife and teenage daughter. "My wife is the most savage critic. She doesn't feel intimidated by my reputation. As far as she's concerned, she's just criticising a boyfriend who'd recently had a go at fiction. She can tell me to abandon whole novels." And has he ever done that? "Yes. I've done that recently. She said, 'Just stop'."

The book in question was Ishiguro's Anglo-Saxon novel. He'd done a lot of research. He'd created "a whole post-King Arthur world". And now it lies in a drawer, waiting for him to pick it up again. Will this ever happen? He insists that it will but I find the idea of an Ishiguro novel set in 500AD hard to imagine: the blood and the sweat; the dirt and the disease; the absence of certain quiet proprieties. I can more easily imagine Rowan Williams visiting a lap-dancing club.

The full version of this interview appears in the March issue of Esquire, on sale today

Kazuo Ishiguro is never letting go

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