CHIPPING CAMPDEN, England — About a decade ago, Kazuo Ishiguro was 50 pages into a new novel when, uncharacteristically, he was paralyzed by doubt. The novel, a mythic tale set roughly 1,500 years ago in a wild, fantastical England populated by ogres, pixies, knights and dragons, was unlike anything he’d ever written. He worried that the setting and the dialogue might seem stilted or silly.
He asked his wife, Lorna, to read the opening pages. Her response was brutal.
“She looked at it and said, ‘This will not do,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘I don’t mean you need to tweak it; you need to start from scratch. None of this can be seen by anybody.’ ”
He put the book aside and wrote a collection of short stories instead. He didn’t return to the novel for six years.
That novel, “The Buried Giant,” will finally come out in early March, and it’s the weirdest, riskiest and most ambitious thing he’s published in his celebrated 33-year career. Though it tackles many of Mr. Ishiguro’s hallmark themes — memory and how it fades and gets suppressed and distorted, and our inability to fully face the past — “The Buried Giant” signals a stark departure from his spare, emotionally understated novels like “The Remains of the Day,” and “Never Let Me Go,” an eerie and melancholy dystopian love story.
“The Buried Giant” centers on an old couple, Axl and Beatrice, who travel across a treacherous and lawless landscape to find their lost son, while hobbled by the fog of collective amnesia that seems to have descended on the land through a curse. They meet an old knight, Sir Gawain, who’s on his own quixotic quest and becomes their protector from a host of mundane and supernatural threats.
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“The usual way to go is to just decline,” Mr. Ishiguro said.
“You’re not going to do that,” she replied. “You’re too worked up about it.”
After his wife’s cutting critique of the early pages of “The Buried Giant,” Mr. Ishiguro wasn’t prepared for another ego bashing. When he returned to the novel in 2011, he started from scratch and didn’t show her until he was done.
He sought her advice again when he was casting around for a title. They batted around ideas during car trips to their country cottage as they drove past fields of grazing sheep and miles of lush farmland. After many false starts, they found a phrase that fit. It had been buried in the text all along, at the beginning, when Axl and Beatrice set out on their journey, and later in a passage that refers to the excavation of painful memories.
“The giant well buried is now beginning to stir,” Mr. Ishiguro said, referring to the scene late in the novel. “And when it wakes up, there’s going to be mayhem.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 20, 2015, on page C19 of the New York edition with the headline: A New Enchanted Realm . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
