There’s Edwin, a young Saxon boy bitten by a dragon – yes, here be dragons, and ogres, and pixies too, not to mention all manner of magical enchantments. In the course of their journey they encounter three other travellers whose fates become entwined with theirs. Guessing at some “unnamed loss”, the couple deduce that they must have once had a son, and thus set out to find him. The couple describe their affliction as a “mist as dense as that which hung over the marshes”, and equally opaque. Such forgetfulness is far from figurative, however this land is beset by a shared amnesia, “Like a sickness come over all of us”, muses Beatrice, an elderly Briton who lives with her husband Axl in a warren-like community “dug deep into the hillside”. The nation’s most recent history is that of the celebrated King Arthur, a man who won a “great peace” across the land, the legacy of which is that the once warring Saxons and Britons now live side-by-side, their “barbarous past” forgotten. Long abandoned villas, now falling into rack and ruin dot the landscape as proof of a more civilized past. It’s a dark time, the country is mostly “miles of desolate, uncultivated land here and there rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland” – a far cry from the well -maintained roads of prior Roman rule. Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s eagerly awaited seventh novel – 10 years in the writing – is set in England sometime around the Sixth Century AD.
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