Dark Ages 
 Kazuo Ishiguro is a chameleon of genre. Each of his books that I have read has been a riff on a different popular type: the great-detective story in When We Were Orphans, upstairs/downstairs in The Remains of the Day, Kafkaesque existentialism in The Unconsoled, and the boarding-school story in at least the start of Never Let Me Go. This new one fits precisely into the niche that Amazon calls "fantasy-adventure." 
 The setting is England in the dark ages. The great works of the departed Romans are now ruins. King Arthur has gone, although his nephew, the aged Sir Gawain, still trundles around in rusted armor looking for dragons. The peace that Arthur maintained between Britons and Saxons still holds in the main, although the country is scattered with small isolated communities fearfully following their own laws. 
 Ishiguro's language has always matched his genres, and it gives a curiously flat and unsophisticated air to this one, as though from a much less experienced writer. But it is deliberate, and the reader soon sinks into it. Part of the effect derives from his almost complete avoidance of words of Latin or French origin; this is Anglo-Saxon rendered in modern English. Though Ishiguro's writing has always tended towards the simplistic, since his subjects are usually people who see through a glass darkly, characters who view their worlds as though they were a complete universe, entirely missing the larger happenings just outside their blinkered vision: the detective focused on his own fame, the butler communicating only with other butlers, both missing the stirrings of war around them. 
 But this one is different. It is not just a few self-absorbed characters who miss the bigger picture, but the entire society. These truly are the dark ages; the great deeds are past and nobody remembers them. Few people can remember even things that happened the week before; a mist of forgetfulness covers the land, and nobody knows the reason. It is as though the whole land has become prematurely senile. 
 Although Ishiguro's novel follows the old trope of the hero's journey, it is quite unusual in that the pilgrims are a couple of elderly people, Axl and his wife Beatrice, who one day set out on a journey to join their son, in a place several days distant. Indeed, of the five major characters, three are old, one is a boy, and only one, the Saxon warrior Wistan, is in the prime of life. Together, they represent the past, a possible future (with surely deliberate echoes of T. H. White's THE SWORD IN THE STONE), and the man of action in the present who offers the only hope of linking the two. 
 Ishiguro's mysteries are not confined to forgetfulness. There is no explanation, for example, of why the old couple, who have forgotten much, are so sure that their son is waiting for them at this distant place. As the story accelerates, the narrative is passed from speaker to speaker, zigzagging back and forth in time, one section sometimes appearing to contradict another; nothing will remain as one first thought. Identities will shift, allegiances be called into question, memories brought to the surface. But although questions of right and wrong become increasingly hard to disentangle, there is always the sense of a higher concept of honor that remains unchanged. That, and an abiding love. For repetitious as the old couple may appear in their assurances to one another, their affection is touching, and their final scene brings tears to the eyes.