Kazuo Ishiguro only publishes every five years or so, so it’s unusual to have a new book from him so comparatively hot on the heels of the underwhelming Never Let Me Go. Sadly, Nocturnes is also a disappointment.
It is Ishiguro’s first book of short stories, a medium you feel he should be ideally suited for given his spare style and understated, repressed characters and action. Sadly, his foray into the shorter form does not deliver the greater pungency one expects. In many ways these stories feel like ideas that weren’t substantial enough to become full length novels.
Several of the stories are linked by sharing characters and themes. Broadly speaking, all of the stories happen at night (hence, Nocturnes), and feature music in some way.
As ever with Ishiguro, the primary concern is status. In the first story, a Hollywood star must leave his wife because they no longer deliver the right star quality as a couple. In the final story, a woman gives cello lessons even though she has never picked one up and played it. In the title story, a jazz musician is booked into a hotel following plastic surgery, which he requires in order to take his career to the next level.
Several stories contain moments of real comedy, the standout example of which is in Nocturne where the jazz musician ends up with his hand shoved up a turkey’s arse in order to conceal the theft of an statuette. Like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, there’s a perfectly rational explanation.
Occasionally, Ishiguro’s writing gets going, and there are many sentences of great beauty and precision. I’ve always found it frustrating that he pares his language down so radically that you wonder if he actually has a style. It’s not the same as Hemingway’s economy, which feels strange and arresting, but rather that of someone deliberately telling you a story devoid of emotion.
Although I like Ishiguro’s other work a great deal, only The Unconsoled, his masterpiece and possibly the best English fiction of the last twenty years, really breaks out of his obsession with a palette of greys.
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