The Unconsoled

The Unconsoled is Kazuo Ishiguro's fourth novel, published in 1995, the year it won the Cheltenham Prize. Ryder, the narrator, is a pianist of international standing who has come to an unnamed city to perform on Thursday night, and the book never leaves the strange few days that follow.

The city works on dream logic. Ryder is greeted with a schedule he does not remember making, is mistaken for a father, a son and an old friend by people he has never met, and recognises buildings, streets and pieces of his own childhood as he moves through them. Ishiguro writes all of it in the calm register of a man taking minutes at a meeting, which makes the unreality harder to shake rather than easier.

The novel is long, and its subject is expectation: what a city asks of the artist it has invited, what a family asks of a man who has been away too long, and what happens to a reputation when the performance it rests on keeps being postponed. Almost all of its dialogue is polite, circular and about something other than the thing it appears to be about, and the reader is left to assemble what is happening from what other people require of Ryder. It is the most formally unusual of Ishiguro's novels and the one that divides his readers most sharply.