Kazuo Ishiguro's breakout hit about a British butler in the twilight of the British aristocratic system and of his own life and service.
Although the prose has a stately quality to it, the voice becomes gratingly mannered after a short while. Stevens' fussy, fusty manner of speaking quickly descends from parody to self-parody, and the whole thing reads like a writing exercise that has Ishiguro became a little bit too enamored of. The various running jokes: Stevens' uptightness, his conflicts with the outspoken Miss Kenton, feel repetitive and overdone. A lighter touch may have been sufficient, as would have a swifter presentation of the events of the book, which proceed with purposeful slowness that makes the slim book read longer than it actually is.
Setting aside the quibbles about the style, what I find most objectionable about the novel is its own moral self-seriousness. The novel presents a fantasia-version of British politics and geopolitics in the interwar period, insisting that the great decisions of the day were made at the manors, country houses, and estates of the British aristocracy, before being ratified in Parliament. The novel's presentation of Stevens' moral self-questioning about having spent a lifetime in the service of a Nazi sympathizer who may have sabotaged the British war project feels self-serving rather than truly heartbreaking. It's less a reckoning with the horrors of the Second World War than another way to glamorize the British role in the war and to offer the nation another round of self-congratulation.
There aren't any hard questions here, because, after all, we know who the good guys and the bad guys were. A book that genuinely looked the anti-war movement squarely in the eye and went toe to toe with the tough moral questions involved in the war would have been far more interesting, and would have actually felt substantial. This book, in contrast, has a flimsy and disposable feeling, its lightness in proportion to its adherence to national myth. I can't recommend it to anyone looking for something more than a string of tired butler jokes.