Click here to order it for £6.The giant buried in this novel may well be Kazuo Ishiguro. The Buried Giant is published by Faber (£8.99). Yet as the focus splinters in the final third – our mysteriously placed narrator taking the stage to deliver a gnomic coup de grâce – I most felt the novel’s emotional clout in its portrait of a marriage with hints of past wrongdoing, forgotten in the fog or as a matter of convenience: a fragile settlement of its own, like love despite itself. Recalling other novels that have deployed amnesia to teasing effect (China Miéville’s The City & the City, JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus), the idea of whitewashed bloodshed is powerful. Promoting the novel in the press, the author gave currency to the idea that The Buried Giant might be an allegory of precarious post-genocidal peace. More intriguing even than the choice of story is the way it’s told: what is Ishiguro up to? The bulk of the text consists of formal dialogue, stiff almost to the point of comedy there are weirdly icy fight scenes itemising stance and weapon grip and there’s a narcotised narrator with one foot in the past he’s describing and the other in a hard-to-locate present we’re meant to share: “Once inside it, you would not have thought this longhouse different from the sort of rustic canteen many of you will have experienced in one institution or another.” En route the pair amass various companions, including rival swordsmen out to slay Querig and restore everyone’s senses, but as memories of a recent savage war stir, it’s not clear whether the prevailing blackout might after all be preferable. The story follows Axl and Beatrice, an elderly married couple on a hazardous cross-country trek in search of their son, lost in circumstances that, like much else, they can’t recall legend has it that a dragon named Querig exhales a memory-wiping mist that accounts for other people’s pasts too.

Le Guin’s evisceration (“toneless, inexact”, “flat, dull”, “painful”) chimed with the bloodier end of Fleet Street’s full-spectrum response to the hardback publication, which ran from contemptuous to bowled over with much head-scratching in between. K azuo Ishiguro’s first novel since Never Let Me Go is certainly brave, not least because its ogre-stalked, post-Arthurian setting plants a flag on terrain patrolled by dragons of its own: witness the drily hilarious tit-for-tat flaming that Ursula Le Guin issued on her blog after Ishiguro voiced reluctance to have the book pigeonholed as fantasy.

The buried giant by kazuo ishiguro