New Ishiguro Novel

The London Times has a pre-release review of Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, Never Let Me Go. This seems like it is going to be a fantastic year for literary fiction -- I am currently half way through Ian McEwan's Saturday, and the next book in my pile is Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Saturday is unlike McEwan's other books in that there are no pedophiles, obsessive stalkers or murderers (yet). However I am enthralled by his description of one day in the life of a London neuro-surgeon as he goes about the seemingly mundane everyday events of aSaturday -- shopping for dinner ingredients, squash with his buddy. Even a scene that might one might expect to be disappointed in -- a minor traffic accident and the following menacing encounter doesn't lead to a random act of unspeakable violence or terror at the hands of a psychopath -- is satisfying and rings true. It is understandably being touted as the favourite for the Booker Prize this year.

The Murakami novel is one that I am greatly looking forward to. The only reason I haven't read it yet is that I read Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle just after the new year started, and I find that if I devour an author's entire oevure in a row, my recollections of the novels bleed into one another (a problem that I had most acutely with Martin Amis's work). I did read another Murakami book, South of the Border, West of the Sun, not long after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but those two are so different that there is no way I could ever confuse them in my memory.

Anyway, McEwan's front-runner status for the Booker Prize seems like it may be challenged by Ishiguro's new novel. The Times' reviewer finds it to be masterful and praises Ishiguro's adroitness in dealing with topics that could easily let an author fall into the traps of genre fiction. Both Ishiguro and McEwan have won the Booker before: the former in 1989 for The Remains of the Day, the latter in 1998 for Amsterdam (although I believe he should have won again in 2001 for Atonement). This year it looks like one of them will join Peter Carey and J.M. Coetzee as the only multiple winners of the Commonwealth's most distinguished literary prize.