Ishiguro's perfect butler realises too late what his loyalty cost him
In 1956, Stevens, a butler of the old school, borrows his American employer's car and drives toward Cornwall to see a former housekeeper he hopes might return to work. Along the way he recalls decades of flawless service to Lord Darlington, and slowly lets slip the love, and the moral failures, he chose not to notice.
Kazuo Ishiguro published The Remains of the Day in 1989, and it won that year's Booker Prize. Stevens narrates it himself. He has served for decades at Darlington Hall, a fictional country house near Oxford. After Lord Darlington's death the estate was bought by Mr Farraday, a wealthy American who kept Stevens on with a skeleton staff. Anxious about slipping standards, Stevens reads a letter from the former Miss Kenton, now Mrs Benn, and convinces himself she might want her old post back.
The motoring trip is braided with memory. Stevens prizes dignity above all, a butler's ability never to let personal feeling show. He recalls prickly early disputes with Miss Kenton after she arrived in 1922, then growing respect, and the small gestures he ignored, such as her bringing flowers to his pantry. On one night, while he was helping arrange a secret meeting between the Prime Minister and the German ambassador Ribbentrop, she tried to tell him about a marriage proposal. He brushed her aside to attend to duty.
Darlington, as Stevens tells it, was an honourable gentleman who wanted Germany readmitted to civilised Europe after Versailles and hosted sympathetic guests from many countries. Stevens insists his employer was no antisemite, then concedes an insignificant episode when he was ordered to dismiss two Jewish housemaids; Miss Kenton threatened to resign but stayed. After the war Darlington sued a newspaper that called him a Nazi sympathiser and lost his reputation entirely.
When the two finally meet, Mrs Benn says she is reasonably content with her husband and expecting a grandchild, though she admits sometimes imagining a life with Stevens. His heart breaks, and he says nothing of it. On a seaside bench afterwards he confesses to a stranger that Darlington at least made his own mistakes, whereas he cannot claim even that. The stranger replies that evening is the best part of the day. A 1993 film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson earned eight Oscar nominations.
Source: The Remains of the Day
