Here be dragons

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of those novels that had everything going for it from my perspective. Mythology, landscape, self-discovery through a journey and the sense of understatement and restraint that comes from a Japanese sensibility filtered through Englishness in the early writing courses at the University of East Anglia. But frankly it is the writing style that is the problem here. It's not a literary approach versus a hack sci-fi/fantasy problem as I think high and so called lowbrow are useless concepts when it comes to assessing quality, as are genres. By which I mean it is useless to try and assess something by a set of aspirations to which the author never aspired to in the first place. The problem is that the style is deliberately clunky. In trying to emulate the sing-song declamatory style of epic myth the dialogue is stilted and the narrative laboured. It probably would have been a much better book if Kazuo had dashed it off more quickly and less self-consciously. So for what it's worth KI write again soon.