BAD DREAM

By Paul Gray

KAZUO ISHIGURO'S THE REMAINS of the Day (1989) is an astonishing novel in several regards. Its narrator, an aging and obsessively punctilious butler named Stevens, sets out in 1956 on a motoring trip; he wants to persuade Miss Kenton, a former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, to come back and work for the house's new American owner. But as Stevens remembers the good old days, the 1930s, his dry reserve and matter-of-fact tone are threatened by a troubling perception: perhaps his devotion to Lord Darlington, later disgraced for having tried to appease the Nazis, was misplaced. Near the end, when he briefly weeps for his wasted life, the pathos is shattering.

For a Japanese-born, British-educated young writer--Ishiguro was in his late 20s when the novel appeared--to have created Stevens and his insular existence struck many readers as remarkable.

The Unconsoled (Knopf; 535 pages; $25), Ishiguro's first novel since The Remains of the Day, traces much the same emotional arc as its predecessor: a buttoned-up narrator hero goes through several days of experiences and memories that finally reduce him to tears. This time, though, readers may find themselves crying a good deal earlier, not out of sympathy but frustration.

Ryder, an internationally famous pianist, checks into a hotel in a European town he cannot identify. Something seems to be expected of him--the clerk at the registration desk makes several references to "Thursday night"--but Ryder doesn't know exactly what. A porter named Gustav escorts Ryder and his luggage into an elevator, tells him, "We're not going up far," then launches into a lengthy monologue about his attempts to win greater respect for the craft of portering. Since a later detail suggests that Ryder's room is on the second floor, the elevator must move with the speed of a glacier. But events here seem to occur outside the space-time continuum, and they grow quickly more preposterous.

The porter asks Ryder the next morning to look up his daughter Sophie and his grandson Boris in the Hungarian Cafe. When Ryder does so, Sophie tells him about a house she will see tomorrow, in the hope that the three of them can settle down there together. Ryder takes this odd information calmly: "For the fact was, as we had been sitting together, Sophie's face had come to seem steadily more familiar to me, until now I thought I could even remember vaguely some earlier discussions about buying just such a house in the woods."

Somewhere around this point, the narrative rules governing The Unconsoled become ominously clear: sequential non sequiturs, ungoverned absurdity. Ishiguro has essentially re-created the world of Alice in Wonderland, but without the commonsensical presence of Alice. Ryder, unlike Lewis Carroll's feisty heroine, is totally passive, grounded only in the vagaries of each passing moment. He is guided through tall doors and short doors; he repeatedly takes, or is taken on, long car trips, only to discover that he can easily walk back to his point of origin. But he hardly ever seems surprised by or interested in the oddities of his situation. Why do people keep complimenting him on an after-dinner speech he failed to deliver? Why do all the local monologists speak--I dare say, mind you, if I may say so--in polite British locutions?

Too steady a diet of excursions that lead only to more excursions, of interruptions of prior interruptions, can render readers peevish. Ultimately, The Unconsoled suggests a considerable talent pursuing a questionable achievement. Ishiguro has created the literary equivalent of an endless bad dream: the fright engendered by impossible expectations, the frustration of feeling powerless to deflect an apparently inevitable slide toward shame and ruin. But Ryder's ordeal seems less malevolent than capricious. He is the benumbed victim of nothing more sinister than a patchy memory and a tight schedule. Why reproduce a free-floating nightmare when the real thing lurks each night for billions of people, unbidden and free of charge?