Good, True, and Beautiful Books

As the world of grand houses and great dinner parties diminishes, Stevens, an English butler in his autumn days, ponders if his life was a life well lived. When the new American owner of Darlington Hall tells Stevens to take some time off, Stevens decides to take his first-ever vacation from his household duties. He justifies this very out-of-character trip by telling himself that he will use the journey to visit Miss Kenton, a previous housekeeper of Darlington Hall who he hopes might return to employment there. As Stevens travels and thinks back over his many years as a butler, he struggles to be honest with himself about his doubts regarding his previous, now-disgraced employer and his feelings for Miss Kenton. This book is a slow and beautiful read, told in the form of Stevens’s journal entries. It raises deep questions about the nature of duty, dignity, and human connection. 

Best for: Adults who like slow, character-driven writing.  

Discern: Drunkenness at a dinner party; a character is asked to explain sex, but the encounter is humorous and nonvulgar.  

Technical Deep Dive 

Ishiguro is a master of his craft, and I could write about a dozen different techniques he uses beautifully in this book, but one of my favorites is the way he uses an unreliable narrator. An unreliable narrator is when the character whose viewpoint the story is told from is shown to be untrustworthy as the story progresses. Though you start out believing everything the character says is true as you usually do when reading a story told from a first-person perspective, the events around the character begin to reveal to the reader that some of what the narrator is telling them doesn’t quite add up. The reader begins to see that they, like those in the story, have been played by the narrator.

Ishiguro, however, deploys this technique in a unique way. Stevens has spent his life seeking to be a butler of dignity. To him, the most important part of being dignified is remaining collected and never showing his true feelings unless he is alone. But as the story progresses, the reader begins to see that Stevens has concealed his feelings for so long that he cannot even be honest about them when writing in his private journal. He constantly seeks to justify past actions, such as enjoying cocoa with Miss Kenton, as “merely professional.” However, it slowly becomes clear to the reader that he has feelings for her that he has long suppressed. Similarly, he glosses over moments where he displayed embarrassment about his previous employer, refusing to acknowledge any doubts to himself about whether he should have given the prime of his life to serving the man. While the reader can see Stevens’s true feelings through his actions, Stevens remains self-deceived until he finally lets himself acknowledge some of the truths that he has so long suppressed.