Sunday, March 08, 2015

Kazuo Ishiguro thinks his fantasy novel is not a fantasy novel. Are we bothered?

Ursula K Le Guin has hit back on behalf of SFF – but so long as people read The Buried Giant, it’s actually a welcome opportunity to dismantle the walls built around different schools of fiction, writes David Barnett

Kazuo Ishiguro
Fantastic claims … Kazuo Ishiguro. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Another day, another argument about whether a book about dragons is fantasy or not. The latest volume under dispute is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, his first novel for 10 years, which boasts a fantastical Arthurian setting, a dragon, mention of ogres and a quest.

Well, if it walks like an orc, quacks like an orc, and generally behaves like an orc, it’s fantasy, right? The author isn’t so sure. In an interview with the New York Times he said: “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

The fantasy author Ursula K Le Guin quickly picked up on Ishiguro’s words in a piece written for the Book View Cafe: “Well, yes, they probably will. Why not? It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.”
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