I bought this book—and even bought a second one as a gift for a friend!—based on the first few chapters and its resemblance to a 2001 Ishiguro short story published in the New Yorker, “A Village After Dark,” which is a masterpiece of weirdness and withholding. In the short story, terrain shifts, memories change, no one knows quite why they’re here, a village becomes a warren closing in on itself. Forgotten crimes could indicate that the village is a metaphor for England’s colonial history. There’s a sublimely pleasurable sense of vague horror. As a writer I’ve studied this story’s technique. It’s a master-class in how to get away with changing the rules. The trick, we discover as Ishiguro knocks out the underpinnings of narrative (time? not working; space? not working; location? obscure; motivation? unclear; characterization? eh), is to pin everything on the serenity and matter-of-factness of the narrative voice. A reliable narrator—who can paint a scene as confidently as Ishiguro can—can narrate anything and we’ll believe him.
Well, at least it works for a short story, because The Buried Giant, which uses the same technique, goes on my list of officially irritating and unreadable books and might mark a parting of ways between me and Ishiguro. The idea is similar to the “A Village After Dark” premise: an old couple, this time in Dark Ages, post-Arthur England where the Britons and the Saxons were recently at war, live in a warren where the inhabitants are cruel to them and everyone is afflicted with a curse of not being able to remember much. It’s scary and it could be a colonialism allegory. Eventually the couple discovers the source of the memory curse and lift it, at which point things may get worse because they’ll all remember each other’s crimes.
The allegory, I thought, was heavy-handed. The pleasure of the narrative voice was not enough. Reading The Buried Giant, I longed for characterization. These people were not allowed to really be people and thus were impossible to care about. The loss of memory meant nothing when they weren’t distinct characters with distinct memories in the first place. I really had to slog through to the end, and found myself skimming.
An Anthology of Clouds 
That’s so sad that the author killed the magic.