QUEST, PT. 2 & 3

King Arthur fighting the Saxons. c. 1315. Illustration from the Rochefoucauld Grail manuscript. 

PART II:

Part II of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Buried Giant might as well be called “Escape To and the From the Creepiest Fucking Monastery Ever.” Or maybe, for reasons I’ll get to later “Nightmare Imagery Dump.” 

An unknown but oppressive past is everywhere at the start of this section. Several times in Part I has someone suggested that Axl has a heroic backstory that he cannot remember. Here again, in Part II, Wistan says that he mistook Axl for a regal man that he had been starstruck by as a child. These references happen enough that, by the end of this section, Axl seems to become convinced, asking Gawain as they make their escape from the spooky monastery if he remembers fighting alongside him. Was Axl an Arthurian knight? Beatrice too spends parts of this section reassembling her past. With her, it’s a hazy image of her being alongside a savage warrior named Harvey. 

But it’s not only Axl and Beatrice who have war and brutality in their past, the setting does as well. After they arrive at the monastery, Wistan makes note of its architecture, telling Axl that it was built for wartime protection and is full of tricky traps that are designed to not just stop but brutalize an invading army.

Thus, it is suggested that the memory of war is what the monks are atoning for when they chain themselves up in this little cage so they can be pecked at by raptors. This apparently is an old self-flagellation-esque tradition, but in the past the birds would just peck at you angrily. Now, the monks are being mutilated and killed in their atonement ritual. They’re understandably freaked out by the change, but apparently not freaked out enough to stop.

And then, just when every aspect of this fantasy world has gotten a little too sprawling with mystery for me, Wistan gives us some answers. He pulls Axl aside and gives him the lowdown early in this chapter, making it again clear that he knows much more than he has told anyone. According to him, the monastery is an old battlestation from some forgotten brutal war. Yes, the monks are trying to atone for the incredible violence of that war, but not to achieve some kind of cosmic justice. They want to try to erase it from having ever happened. They are in fact, quite shockingly, working to protect Querig, the mist-making dragon whose magic lets everyone forget this cultural trauma. All that to say, these monks are the bad guys. Or, at the very least, they are not on the side of truth. And we—as champions of Axl and Beatrice—are. 

Right? 

These answers are interesting but they do lead to a feeling of unsteadiness in this section. The patient plotting of the quest in Part I is gone and there is instead a series of arresting images, intriguing lore, and somewhat jumbled scenes.

In one of those scenes, Axl and Beatrice finally get a midnight meeting with Jonus. Unfortunately, the wise old man is all fucked up from his last bird-torture session. Still, he says that Beatrice is healthy (Oh, yeah. That was, like, the reason for visiting the monastery, I guess). We get the impression that the monks are—much like the Beatrice and Axl’s old neighbors and Edwin’s fellow townsfolk—dangerous in their impenetrable ignorance. Really, that’s how almost everyone in this book who doesn’t have a speaking role is characterized: brash and foolish brutes, acting out tragic injustices out of superstition and fear. Maybe the monks, in their alliance with Querig, are a little more strategic than that, however Jonus makes it clear that they are dangerous. He arranges an escape for Beatrice, Axl, and Edwin.

And escape they do, exiting this long dark underground corridor where they run into Gawain and then stumble upon pile after pile of human remains. There are bones everywhere, mass grave style, including the skulls of children. This gives us a sense of the scale and reality of this forgotten genocidal conflict and the imagery here is truly arresting. But then there is a mythical animal that stalks them in the tunnel and when Gawain finally chops off its head the head is still alive for some reason.

It’s with this out-of-left-field attack that I find myself in a bit of literary-fantasy-fatigue. I can follow everything just fine but I’m not sure where the story is headed. It feels like a dream, meandering and moody, all vibes but no clear stakes. Again, this whole escape scene is just another series of striking images that pile up on top of the previous ones until you can’t quite remember all of them or consider what they all mean. Oh yeah, and Edwin actually has a dragon bite and he’s getting extra kooky during this whole escape.  So much so that when they all find daylight again at the end of this tunnel of death, Edwins runs away, back to the monastery to be beside his warrior-father-figure Wistan. 

This takes us to our first point of view shift where we get to see and hear things from Edwin’s perspective. I don’t quite get the purpose of this shift, at the end of Part II, other than it allows us some more jumbled imagery from Edwin’s memory: a tied-up and mistreated young woman who berated young Edwin in his past, Wistan leading Edwin in a weird Socratic seminar to discover on his own the traps hidden in the monastery’s architecture.   

Amidst these images, we learn that poor old Wistan is injured. Briton soldiers indeed showed up to get Saxon Wiston because the monks sold our crew out. However, they were roundly defeated by the warrior. He even used the exact deadly tactics that he had foreshadowed when he was surveying with Edwin the strange hollow tower at the center of the monastery and guessing it a sort of trap for invaders.

It’s in this way that we end Part II a little unsatisfactorily. The Briton’s want Wiston to stop doing whatever he’s set out to do. Edwin wants Wiston to resume his warrior apprenticeship. The monks want Querig to keep making everyone forget about a bloody past. Gawain wants to slay Querig because…I guess, because QUEST! And Beatrice and Axl want to see their son, supposedly, even though no one has mentioned him for quite a while.

With Beatrice and Axl removed from the emotional core of the novel here, I can feel how compelling their melancholy quest was in Part I. I still believe they are at the center of the allegory here. However, the momentum they provided in Part I is lost here.

I’m going to keep reading, in hopes that it’s not lost for good.

PART III:

Gawain starts off part three with some facts.

He does, in fact, know from Axl the bloody wars of the past. Axl was one of Arthur's warriors and joylessly participated in what was essentially a war crime: the slaughter of Saxon women, children, and elders in their homes, homes that were assumed to be protected by some Briton-Saxon wartime pact. In other words, Arthur and his knights created the Geneva conventions of their day and then Arthur and his knights majorly violated them. Axl wasn't having any of it and suggested he was going to confront Arthur, maybe even violently. Gawain defended the decision as brutal but necessary and he still does.

Their debate here is very reminiscent of real and imagined discussions before and after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the slaughter of hundreds of thousands carried out to end a war and, in theory, stop the slaughter of many more. Which makes the looming-behind-the-camera figure of Ishiguro--our Japenese-born and yet very British storyteller--very intriguing. What does he feel about this debate?

If I were to guess, I would guess he's not a fan of the utilitarian argument. Or, at the very least, he knows the limitations of the utilitarian argument. Namely, that it is rendered very weak when it is your sword that is stained with the blood of women and children. The "greater good" is a paltry consolation for those that drop the bomb, just as it is for the poor souls that survive it.

This is the conflict Gawain is still wrestling with as he argues with a group of widows that heckle him as he trudges on to kill Querig, and it starts of a section of the book that jumps back and forth between our Edwin/Wistan warrior story and our Axl/Beatrice son-seeking story.

Part 3.2: "Edwin/Wistan" or "Mommy, Look!"

Edwin finally reunites with Wistan, who is injured and feverish in some nearby hut. Edwin has been still hearing his mother's voice begging him to rescue her and, when Wistan starts talking about how badass Edwin will be when he's done training him to be a warrior and a hunter, Edwin decides to deceive him. He says, essentially, "You're totally right, Stan. I'm such a natural hunter, I can smell Querig right now. Let's go get her!" knowing he's only going to lead Wistan to his mother to free her.

Part 3.3: "Axl/Beatrice" or "How About No More Boats?"

From there we jump to Axl and Beatrice, road-weary and unwell, who find a boathouse along a river and ask the boatman there for a ride downstream to see their son. He offers them a ride in a basket, which is safe as the river is calm, but they'll have to travel separately, each in a basket of their own tethered together. The combination of the words "boatman" and the "separation" spikes my danger-radar as much as it does Beatrice's because she protests. Axl tries to reassure her and eventually they are off. At one point Axl calls her name and, curiously, an exhausted and possibly ill Beatrice says, "Axl, I thought maybe you'd left me again" (my emphasis). What happens next is the half-described hazy plot of a nightmare. First, there is a row boat on the shore; Axl goes to see if they can use it; there's an old woman in the boat, petrified, contorted, whispering warnings. Then, at one end of the boat are symbolically creepy skinned rabbits (remember those!) but also moving creatures that Axl thinks are rats; suddenly the old woman is covered in these things the Axl realizes are pixies and they are sort of talking to Axl through the old woman, like a swarm of fleshy mind-control spiders. These pixies are never fully described but they are certainly not Tinkerbells. We see them only as "small, scrawny creatures" (231) who appear to him as a swarm of "limbs and shoulders" (232). The pixies seem to have the lulling-to-deadly-sleep qualities akin to hypothermia or a deadly drug. Axl fights off the lull long enough to intuit that the voice of the woman is also coming from Beatrice as the pixies swarm her. In true nightmare fashion, the voice Axl hears is both the voice of Beatrice and is speaking about Breatrice, informing Axl that his wife is near death and the Axl should abandon her to the pixies who can at least give her a peaceful and pain-free end, which is something Axl cannot provide. Axl rages on and rescues Beatrice, but in doing so they are back on land and forced to keep walking, which feels somehow more dangerous than floating along on the pixie-cursed river.

Part 3.4: "Edwin/Wistan" or "Our Boys are Gettin' Weird"

Quick cut to Eddie and Stan: they're climbing a cliff, Edwin thinks Wistan has been softened by his fever, but Edwin ain't remembering things too good. He seems impatient and unfocused, cloudy and irrational. Is Querig's mist finally getting to him? Wistan chastises his impatience; Edwin plods on through a creepy unnatural forest to a frozen lake; Edwin sees dead ogres with their heads stuck in the water and Wistan does not; Wistan says, "chill out and rest" and Edwin says "let's fucking go!" All in all, everyone is cracking up a little bit. Finally Edwin calms down a bit and admits his deception to Wistan. Wistan seems to accept and understand the lie, after all, he too had him mother kidnapped by Britons. Then Wistan asks his trainee to make a strange promise: that he always hate the Britons, no matter what they do for him and no matter what happens to Wistan. The Britons are the enemy; they deserve nothing but death.

Part 3.5: "Axl/Beatrice" or "Have a Goat!"

This next section is told in a delightful back-and-forth time jumps but I'll recount it linearly: our married couple stumble across a sweet little cabin where they find a young girl and her two younger brothers. They are greeted by the girl as if they are the answer to her prayers, for these three children have not parents and seem to want Axl and Beatrice (henceforth, Be-Axl) to stay indefinitely. After a rest, Be-Axl learn that the kids have been feeding poison to their goat so that they can feed it Querig to kill her. (They had two goats but an ogre took the other one and is slowly dying from it in what looks like a quicksand hole beside their house. Shrug emoji.)

Long story short--the kids implore Be-Axl to the goat to Querig. They decline; the kids insist; they decline again; the kids insist. Then, eventually, they agree. The next thing you know, Be-Axl are leading a goat up the mountainside to kill a She-Dragon, just like Gawain and Ed-Stan.

But before this section ends, Beatrice has a very thematically compelling wondering. What will happen, she muses, if and when the mist dissipates? She admits she's afraid of what it will change about marriage, which is maybe based on forgetting. And then, as an echo of Edwin's promise to Wistan, Axl asks Beatrice to promise him something: that no matter what happens, Beatrice will always remember how she loves Axl in this moment, and that nothing uncovered by Querig's death will replace that feeling.

Beatrice easily makes the promise, making it sound to us poor readers as one impossible to keep. All along, we've been told that the she-dragon is where danger lives. I feel tangibly now that they real danger lies in what the she-dragon is keeping hidden and, dare I say...buried.

Part 3.6: "Gawain" or "No Gentry for Old Men"

So Gawain has found Beatrice and Axl on the mountainside and is leading them to Querig and thinking a lot about death and how he will face it. He remembers fallen friends who craved water and wonders if he will find his way back to the ogre lake if he's wounded. (Gawain seems to see the lakeside ogre's that Edwin saw as giant downed trees so who knows what's real?) The tone of this section is definitely "final tragic monologue" as we hear Gawain talk in circles of wondering, doubt, and rationalization. From his point of view, Axl is feircely driven to deliver the poison goat to Querig, even to the detriment of his dear wife who is being carried by Gawain's horse up the mountain.

It's hard to know who's version of events to trust at this point, but it is clear that our three sets of heroes are poised to converge on top of this mountain. While this section ends with Gawain wondering how far behind them Wistan is, all narrative clues suggest that the Saxon warrior is in front of them.

This section regains a momentum that feels like a focus: all roads lead to Querig or whatever Querig represents. So, let's follow those roads. Shall we?

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References:

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Buried Giant. Alfred A. Knopf. 2015.

King Arthur fighting the Saxons. The Independent, 3 September 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/king-arthur-legendary-figure-was-real-and-lived-most-of-his-life-in-strathclyde-academic-claims-10483364.html. Accessed 5 August 2024.

Media: 

Consider accompanying your reading with this selection from Gia Margaret's dreamy 2023 album Romantic Piano:

Here's a classy video of Ishiguro talking about the role memory plays in with work after he won the Nobel Prize: