In ancient times

The Buried Giant. By Kazuo Ishiguro. Knopf; 336 pages; $26.95. Faber and Faber; 344 pages; £20.

A MIST envelops Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book—his first novel in a decade—but that is by design. “He had felt as one standing in a boat on a wintry river, looking out into dense fog, knowing it would at any moment part to reveal vivid glimpses of the land ahead.” This is Axl, who, at the beginning of “The Buried Giant”, sets off with his wife, Beatrice, on a journey to visit the son they haven’t seen for a very long time. But when that mist parts, the land ahead looks very strange indeed.

The couple—getting on in years, though Axl always calls his wife “princess”—live in a post-Roman Britain which straddles the border between history and myth. There are ogres here, and dragons; King Arthur is not long gone. Sir Gawain (now no spring chicken) comes into the story about halfway through. One way to describe this tale would be to call it a quest, or rather a sequence of quests: for as Axl and Beatrice seek their son, they are joined by a warrior, Wistan, and a strange wounded boy, Edwin, who are hunting the dragon that seems to be the source of the country’s ills.

The mist through which Axl must peer affects everyone, it seems: this land is a place where memories vanish, where nothing is certain, where old companions fail to recognise each other and important conversations fall on deaf ears. Querig the dragon, Axl and Beatrice learn, is the source of the mist that swallows all recollections; kill Querig and memory will return. But as the story progresses, the reader is left to wonder at what price that recollection will come.

So described, this novel seems so simple it might be cleanly slipped into the genre marked “fantasy”. But Mr Ishiguro’s work is never simple. He has always been a trickster, a shape-changer, courageously exploring the novel’s form, and this new book is no exception. His language is plain and clear. But the stories he tells with his clean words are powerful and disturbing.

The erasure of memory in “The Buried Giant” seems curiously selective; the book’s ancient society is on the brink of a great transition—the Saxons arriving in greater and greater numbers, the Vikings hovering across the sea—and calls to mind echoes of more modern conflicts, such as Bosnia or, more recently, in Crimea. Yet the author’s cordial, storytelling tone, one in which the narrative voice speaks, in once-upon-a-time fashion, from an era distant from the novel’s setting, keeps any definite parallel intriguingly elusive.

There are echoes of the young characters in his dystopian, science-fiction novel, “Never Let Me Go”, with their limited understanding of their fate; there is a sense, too, of the strange, broken connections of “The Unconsoled”, which Mr Ishiguro wrote ten years earlier. His new novel is full of haunting images: the stagnant puddles on the faded tiles of a once-grand, now ruined Roman villa; a wounded bat found in a cave, a hole through its ribs “as though someone had taken a bite from a crisp apple”, to the recurring figure of the boatman who bookends this weird, compelling tale. No doubt this book will divide opinion powerfully: but it provokes strong emotions—and lingers long in the mind.