The novel inhabits the gap in the historical record, argued over by archaeologists and historians, about what happened after the Roman occupation. “Dressed in rusted chainmail and mounted on a weary steed”, Gawain’s “sacred mission” is to slay the she-dragon Querig. Its horseman is none other than Sir Gawain, the youngest of King Arthur’s knights, a figure of myth and legend, of chivalry and poetry and in Ishiguro’s imagining, now an old man responding – just like John Wayne in The Searchers or James Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid – to one last call to arms. Instead The Buried Giant, his first novel since 2005’s Never Let Me Go, takes us back to Britain after the Romans have departed, and the Anglo-Saxons are on the brink of fully occupying the island the moment, in other words, “when England is created”. And peaceful people need him when violence is needed, but he’s not really welcome in a peaceful community.”īut it was not to the American frontier that Ishiguro looked for the backdrop for his own lone rider. What particularly resonates with Ishiguro is the idea of a man somehow adrift from history: “There’s a real sense that there’s a whole world travelling there in that man … he’s out of time, somebody who belongs to a more violent world. Ishiguro’s prototype was the character familiar from the westerns he loves, the John Ford and Sam Peckinpah movies that so frequently, as in Ford’s The Searchers, open with a distant rider crossing a vast landscape, “like a self-contained little community of just a man and a horse, a lonely community that moves from place to place”. “That lone rider figure has always done it for me,” he laughs. Now, with the publication of his seventh, The Buried Giant, he has finally had his way.

For a long time, he tells me, as we sit in his Cotswolds cottage on a bright, wintry afternoon, he’s wanted one of his novels to feature a man and his horse.

Kazuo Ishiguro – for all that tight authorial control he is associated with – is no different. N ovelists might appear to be in charge of their invented worlds, but they often have to wait a surprisingly long time to do what they want fiction isn’t quite as malleable as it may seem.

The buried giant