The Remains of the Day

I just finished reading The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I had seen the excellent movie adaptation several times. Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson deserved their Academy Award nomination. So the book has been on my list of ones I wanted to read.

The book was excellent. The movie followed it closely, so if you've seen the movie you get a sense of what the book is like. But the book adds so much more.

The narrator is the butler, Mr. Stevens, who serves in Darlington Hall fro the early 1920's to the mid 1950's. He is obsessed with being a great butler, and spends a great deal of time discussing what makes one such a butler, and the nature of dignity. But what he fails at consequently is being fully human. He suppresses his feelings and his rational thinking. 

As a result, he fails to establish meaningful relationships with his father and Miss Kenton, both of whom try unsuccessfully to reach out to him. Because he is unable to establish human contact, he loses both. Indeed, when his father dies upstairs he is more concerned with how well he served a gathering downstairs.

He also fails to see or to act as his Lord Darlington becomes a dupe of Germans and Nazis in pre-war England. He totally trusts Lord Darlington's flawed judgment and naivete, and refuses to use independent thinking. 

By the end of the book, we see that he has a sense of what he has lost, he even cries, yet the book ends with him deciding to practice "bantering" so that he can better serve the new owner of Darlington Hall. He will spend the "remains of the day" just trying to be a good servant.

It's a well-written book. Well worth a read. And the movie is well worth a viewing.

The book - and the movie - both contain an incident that made me thing back to my first post college job.

The incident involves Lord Darlington, under the influence of a Nazi sympathizer, orders Stevens to fire two maids who had served in the home for several years just because they were Jewish. It is clear that he does not like the idea, but because Darlington had ordered it he will do so. He discusses it with Miss Kenton, who is clearly horrified at the injustice of such an act and threatens to quit. But she does not do so. She later admits that she did not quit as she had no where else to go and described herself as a coward. Stevens fires the maids as he was told to do so, assuming tht Lord Darlington knows what he is doing. Lord Darlington later admits, and Stevens finally feels free to admit he had had misgivings. Or so he claims. Remember, he is the narrator, so we can't be sure what he really thought at the time, or what he thinks is now called for. 

In my case, when I graduated from college I wanted to gain some practical skills. I found a business that made wooden furniture, cabinets, laminated shelving, and more, and they were willing to take me on as an apprentice. I even joined the local carpenters' union.

I did learn some skills. I even made the bed on which my wife and I still sleep.

As an apprentice, when I was not directly helping the other workers, I was given lots of menial, low-level tasks. One of them was drilling holes in the legs of some school desks we were making. Hundreds of them.

I was guided by some shop drawings I had been given. But then I happened to see the original blueprints, the ones that the customer had been shown and for which he had paid. I realized they were different; I was drilling fewer holes than the original plans had called for.

I went to one of the bosses and pointed it out. He said he knew, but we saved time and money by doing it the way we were. I said the customer had paid for the more extensive way. He smiled and said the customer would never know, and we made more money.

I was stunned. We were cheating the customer. I said I cold not take part in doing that. The boss was surprised, but took me off the job and gave it to another apprentice.

Being union, he could not easily fire me, so instead he assignment me to every dirty, unpleasant job in the plant. Sweeping up all the sawdust. Taking out the scraps and garbage. Cleaning the machines. Cleaning the bathrooms.

I got bored. But then in the bathrooms I began doing some drawing on the walls of the stalls. Some of them were cartoons and caricatures of the boss. Yeah, I know, dumb. But I was 22 - what did I know? Since I cleaned the bathrooms, I cleared the drawings off the walls regularly. And the bosses didn't generally use the same bathroom as the workers, so I thought I was safe.

Nope. Either the boss had used the bathroom unexpectedly, or someone had reported my artwork.

I got called into the office. The boss asked if I had done the drawing. I admitted I had. He then showed me a blueprint. He asked me to copy part of it. I did. He looked at my work, and asked if I'd like to work in the office!

My new job was looking at plans for projects and identifying all the work we could do, from which the bosses would make proposals to the project directors. If we got the contracts, I would create shop drawings to give to the workers. Turns out I was doing some of the work of the boss in question, freeing him for longer lunches and drinking at his girlfriend's apartment.

This continued for several months. Then one afternoon we got a call for a project. The boss had just come back from "lunch." He'd obviously had a few drinks. The boss asked for the name of the potential customer. When he heard the name he said the person must be a Jew, and to quote them a higher rate. He laughed and said that's what we do for Jews and ni**ers.  

I was a disgusted. 

By that point I was a newlywed - remember that bed that I made? - and could not quit immediately. But I began actively searching, and a couple of weeks later found another job and gave notice.

Unlike Miss Kenton, I had found a way out.

Pax et bonum