QUEST, PT. 4
.jpg)
| [Jersey, Corbiere Lighthouse, II, Channel Islands, England]. c. 1890. |
Please, I don't want to die. Not like this. I don't want to die alone.
— Supergirl, (Volume 6) #23
PART IV:
Of course this was a book about death and memory.
We’ve had two warriors frequently considering their own deaths in the midst of all their questing. We’ve had monks being slashed to death by ravenous birds. We’ve had an elderly couple struggling through their own travels, many times referenced as being exhausted, weak, and physically unwell. We’ve also had piles of bones and genocidal backstory that has been slowly revealed to us.
Part IV brings more death, firstly, Querig’s.
While we are surprised to learn about Quierig’s true protector, we’re even more surprised to find that she is a weak, emaciated creature. She doesn’t even put up a fight against the blade that ends her magical tyranny over the minds of men. It is anticlimactic in a way, or, at best, a subversion of the genre. Likewise, when she does die, the fog of forgetting doesn’t lift in one dramatic release of tension as one would expect. This is not a triumphant resolution; it is foreboding and uncertain one. Wistan has killed a man he respects, Edwin thinks his own mother dead and is walking towards vengeance, and Axl and Beatrice have been told to flee an inevitable war before it is too late.
Then comes our final chapter. Of course it involves the boatman from Part I, except he is suddenly our narrator. He seems entirely unaware of his symbolic presence. He speaks of his duty to ferry people to the island across the river but never does he intimate that he deceives people about what he appears to be—which is (let's say it all together now!) the personification of death. Even when he asks the questions of Axl and Beatrice to see if they can spend what seems to be eternal life together, he calls it a formality and a tradition, void of real meaning. Because, of course they can be together. Right?
I don’t totally know what to make of this chapter. Is the first person switch a way to give the boatman some authority or erase any doubt we would have in him? Or is it just muddy the symbolism a little because Ishiguro doesn’t like to be that overt?
What imbues the ending with meaning though, for me, is to assume that Beatrice is dying. She had long been afraid of what the dissipation of the mist would do to her marriage which was perhaps built upon forgetting. And memories surely challenged their bond, bringing revelations about a past of infidelity, estrangement, and tragedy. Yes, the son we have been questing after is long dead, his grave perhaps on the shores of the island that may or may not be heaven. Yes, Beatrice was unfaithful to Axl at one point. And Yes, Axl drove their son away. But, the only real concern that remains in these final pages is if Beatrice and Axl are able to travel together to the island. We see no real evidence of the disappearing fog changing their relationship; they should be able to go together as promised.
Earlier, the boatman seemed to be able to cast a nightmarish spell that split up long-standing couples right before death. I called that early reference in Part I a Chekhov's gun that must go off by the end of this novel. Well, it doesn’t really go off here, but it is cocked, loaded, and aimed by the time we hit the last page.
Here's what happens: despite all the promises and reassurances from the boatman, suddenly something is wrong with the current and boat and they can only travel one at a time. Beatrice will travel to the island first and then Axl will follow. Axl (and I) feel a con forming. Axl protests.
But when the Boatman doesn’t budge and when Beatrice comforts his suspicions, he relents. He gives Beatrice a long, heartbreaking goodbye and then steps out of the boat. He walks through the shallow water back to shore. The Boatman confirms that he will be back soon to take him back to his wife, but Axl does not hear and keeps walking away, his back to his wife for maybe the first time in this whole book.
Is Beatrice floating away to die as we all must, alone?
Does Axl know this to be true despite the boatman’s reassurances?
Do they still have the kind of love that can actually bind them together in the afterlife or was that a myth all along?
It does not seem like their love has dissipated or has been challenged by what has been revealed about their past. And yet the resignation both show by, after all of their tender doting and care, finally accepting separation, may indicate that they are giving up on something essential. Perhaps there is nothing left to fight, the boatman cannot be dissuaded or deterred. Axl finally sees this and so, defeated, he lets her go.
One thing that I feel palpably in this final section is the coming bloodshed. The somberness with which Wistan achieves his quest is striking, as is his warning to his elderly companions. However, I’m not sure I can square that result of trauma unearthed with the somewhat tender ending of Axl and Beatrice. They seem allegorically separate and I feel like a unsophisticated reader for wanting them to be more congruent in some way.
When I first read that final scene years ago, I not only forgot many of the important details, I think I also misremembered the actual scene. I remembered Axl’s walking away as abandonment. The mist had been cleared and the world had shifted and he was doing what we once thought was impossible, he was abandoning his dear wife because memory is that powerful. It changed his reality and shifted his emotional identity just enough that, just like the husband of that super creepy rabbit-killing woman in Part I whom the boatman took away, he was suddenly willing to abandon his wife and accept death. I read it like death had cast a spell on Axl. The fog was keeping away the spell, just like it was keeping away endless war, but with the the fog gone, his special love, like his homeland’s peace, fell away.
However, that’s not what’s happening exactly. He just doesn’t hear and is walking away defeated, resigned, tired. I’m assuming he will wait and pray that the boatman returns. And, there is no real reason in this final chapter to think that he won’t.
Except, of course he won’t.
The myths about being able to live on the island with your beloved are too tidy and perfect. That's not how dying works. The plague takes you where you are, whether or not you have reconciled with your parents or lived a full life. All love stories end in loneliness, eventually, no matter how strong the bond. Axl has been fighting with every bit of his strength for three hundred pages to be beside his beloved wife. Perhaps with the truth revealed about their past, their poor son, their love seems slightly shallow. He's able to walk away.
You need memory, Ishiguro keeps on telling us, to live rightly in the world. The alternative may seem better—a peace built on lies is still peace! a love built on mystery is still love!—but that's just an illusion. Love must instead confront the inevitable buried giants of living: trauma, grief, death. It may not survive that confrontation, but it also can't avoid it.
This living thing is a package deal; you have to take all of it.
The real fight is not the fight with dragons, pixies, and Saxons. The real fight is the fight to live among it all—all the heartache and betrayal and loss—and all at once, for as long as you get.
⚘ ⚘ ⚘
References:
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Buried Giant. Alfred A. Knopf. 2015.
Jersey, Corbiere Lighthouse, II, Channel Islands, England. [Between and Ca. 1900] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress,<www.loc.gov/item/2002696511/>.
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: