Nocturnes

As much as I enjoyed Blood Meridian, I felt the need to follow it with something slightly less heart-stoppingly brutal. Kazuo Ishiguro's short(ish) story collection Nocturnes seemed just right - selling itself as "five stories of music and nightfall" it sounded about as relaxing as reading gets.

I should have known better. I read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go a while back and found it a hugely uncomfortable experience - a truly insidious exercise in drip-feeding the reader with information and implications about the disturbing world its characters live in, and the realisation that they know something is wrong with it but don't know why, and choose to accept it anyway.

While Nocturnes is much more grounded in reality, all of these things are still present. The five stories are really variations on a theme, all dealing with potential unfulfilled, opportunities missed and marriages falling apart. Ishiguro again leads the reader into his situations slowly, which of course makes things worse - it's much more painful to have things torn apart bit by bit than to see them shattered. The result is a thought-provoking but ultimately melancholy set of stories, and things aren't helped by the fact that all of them are left largely unresolved.

But that's not to say that there's nothing to enjoy here - as both a music lover and a musician I appreciated the way in which Ishiguro fixated on the release that music can provide, as well as how it can easily become an obsession for those who see it as the only thing for them. And of course it's well written, with the occasional touch of gentle humour and the feeling that, for all misfortune that befalls his characters, the author does feel some empathy towards them.

Time to read something more fun, though.

3.5/5

Nocturnes don't get much better than this: