Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, “The Buried Giant,” is an eccentric, ham-handed fairy tale with a jumble of story lines lifted from “Beowulf,” Arthurian legend and assorted folk traditions. It is recounted in stilted, formalistic language that’s presumably meant to evoke a bygone era, and set in a mythical Britain equally reminiscent of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones.” King Arthur’s knight Sir Gawain is a major character, and so is a she-dragon named Querig.
This novel is concerned, at heart, with some of the author’s favorite themes: most notably, the role that memory and denial play in shaping people’s sense of themselves. But Mr. Ishiguro seems to have renounced the qualities — precision, elliptical understatement and indirection — that lent his two masterworks, “The Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go,” a tensile strength, and he’s instead embraced a fablelike primitivism that hobbles his instinctive talents. Worse, he has failed here to create a persuasive or fully imagined fictional world.
“The Buried Giant” takes place during an interlude of relative peace between Britons and Saxons, though a “mist of forgetfulness,” which has something to do with Querig, has overtaken the land. Among those afflicted with amnesia are the novel’s two central characters — an elderly couple named Axl and Beatrice — who are so addled that they can’t remember much about their lives together, including any details about their missing son.
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A version of this review appears in print on February 24, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Fable Of Forgetting, Jousting With Myth. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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