The Remains of the Day

This Booker Prize-winner is quite an extraordinary book.
After going through it, the narrative reveals added layers that somehow exudes the dignity of speech that so perfectly characterises British household servants. Between unaffected lines lies a quiet narrative of a butler, struggling to comprehend the new social order, confronting the realisation that everything he built his life around was not what he trusted it to be.


This is heartbreaking in its own right, and can possibly bring one to tears at its climax (which in retrospect might actually make you feel better, better at least than the settling chill that remains; the final awakening that is almost unforgiving.) I think that remarkable because it so closely mirrors our own lives, our irrepressible youth, our subsequent failures and triumphs. When we will one day, 50 years hence stand upon a wharf and flashback.

The more intriguing reading of the story is that Stevens stubbornly adheres to a social code which the rest of the world has forsaken. His idealism, though easily caricatured, is more appealing than the real world that he refuses to accede to.

"The world of Churchill and Lord Darlington and Stevens Jr. has been abolished. In its stead stands the Britain of Tony Blair and Charles and Camilla and Elton John.

Gone are gentlemen's gentlemen. Gone are gentlemen. Gone is the ideal of "dignity" of which Stevens so often speaks in the novel."

At the end of the story, Stevens asks:

"What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one's life took? I should cease looking back so much, I should adopt a more positive outlook, & try to make the best of what remains of my day .’’

One up from Never Let Me Go, I think.