the remains of the day

This novel is so beautifully written and incredibly sad. Once I finished reading it I wasn't done, the feelings it brought up stayed with me for days. It's written very cleverly, told from the perspective of Stephens, one of England's last great butlers, a dying breed who takes a rare holiday at the urging of his new American employer. The story unfolds during Stephens travels through the English countryside, on a trip to visit the former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, with flashbacks of his heyday as the butler of Darlington Hall, when he believed that in serving a great man he was doing a greater service to the country. But history hasn't been kind to Lord Darlington, and as Stephens reflects on his past you see the doubts and moral uncertainties that have simmered below the perfectly polished surface that he has presented all these years. To see all that Stephens sacrificed personally in service to Lord Darlington, whose name has been tarnished with his political sympathies between World Wars I and II, is tragic. Stephens essentially gives up his life for his employer. Ishiguro writes of people placed in positions of submissiveness brilliantly, I reviewed his novel Never Let Me Go last year, which deals with a person victimized by circumstance in a different, creepier way. This is by far the stronger book out of the two I've read by Ishiguro. The unrealized love story and subtle slights put upon Stephens by his employer and Lord Darlington's associates is a bitter commentary on class in England during the first half of the twentieth century.