The butler who never spoke

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize in 1989, is narrated by a man who cannot say what he means. Stevens, the head butler at Darlington Hall, sets off in 1956 on a motoring trip to the West Country, ostensibly to persuade a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, to come back to work. Over six days on the road he looks back on thirty years of service to Lord Darlington, a gentleman whose good intentions led him to sympathise with Nazi Germany before the war.

On the surface, nothing happens. Stevens polishes the silver, ponders the nature of 'dignity' and rehearses small talk for the strangers he is about to meet. Yet the book is one of the most devastating in the language, and it gets there by restraint. Ishiguro lets his narrator's pompous, self-regarding prose do the work: the more carefully Stevens explains what he felt, the more plainly the reader sees what he refused to feel.

The heart of the novel is two failures of nerve. The first is political. Stevens watches his employer dismiss two Jewish maids and says nothing, telling himself that it is not a butler's place to judge. The second is personal. Miss Kenton plainly loves him, and he is too busy with his duties to notice or, more truthfully, too frightened to. On the evening she tells him of a marriage proposal, he stands in the corridor outside her room, aware that she is crying, and walks away.

It would be easy to read Stevens as a figure of fun, and early reviewers, not entirely wrongly, took the book for a gentle satire of English reserve. That reading, however, sells it short. Ishiguro is less interested in mocking his hero than in understanding how a decent man talks himself out of a life. Stevens' loyalty is genuine; his misfortune is to have given it to someone who did not deserve it, and to have mistaken obedience for virtue.

Film has not been kind to the book. The 1993 adaptation, with Anthony Hopkins as Stevens and Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton, is handsome and superbly acted, and it was nominated for eight Academy Awards, but a camera cannot do what Ishiguro's prose does. On screen we see Stevens' face, which hardly moves; on the page we hear him talking himself round, and the gap between the two is the whole drama. The film has to hint at what the novel lets us catch the narrator out in.

A fair objection is that all this restraint can look like a trick. A narrator who lies to himself is a device as old as the novel, and a reader may feel steered towards pity in a way the story has not quite earned. I do not think the charge sticks. The unreliability here is never cheap, because Stevens is not hiding facts from us so much as from himself, and he lets slip, almost in passing, the details that give him away: the tears he did not see, the maids whose names he can hardly recall. Anyone who has avoided an uncomfortable conversation for thirty years will recognise the method.

The final scene, on the pier at Weymouth, is among the quietest heartbreaks in modern fiction. A stranger tells Stevens that the evening is the best part of the day, and Stevens, rather unconvincingly, resolves to practise the art of banter. Nobody should call this a happy ending. It is better described as one that leaves a door ajar, which is more than the butler ever did for himself.