Fantastic Metropolis

One evening Ryder is supposed to give a speech at a dinner party, but due to a series of irritating incidents, he is never able to get to his feet and deliver it. The next day everybody is talking about how successful his speech was. While the reader has been privy to the failure of Ryder in one of his worlds, “offstage” Ryder, the professional musician, has been performing grandly in the other.

That the literal existence of these two parallel worlds is clearly Ishiguro’s intention is hinted at by the only overt reference to science fiction which occurs in the novel. Ryder goes to see a movie one night—2001: A Space Odyssey. It is a favourite of Ryder’s that he “never tired of seeing.” (12) Yet in Ryder’s 2001, Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner make the fateful trip to Jupiter. (13) If you are reading this in the same world that I am writing it in you will probably know that the actors were Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea.

Aside from Ryder’s extraordinary mental powers and his movement between parallel worlds, there are other fantastic elements in the novel which may have well been influenced by the climactic scenes which occur on Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are a number of prominent distortions of space and time which are introduced into the narrative as natural elements of the geography of the city in which Ryder finds himself, but which appear to be simply impossible in terms of the known laws of the universe.

When Ryder attends the dinner party, he arrives there after a long journey by car from his hotel. Yet towards the end of the evening, after his failed speech, he realises that the dinner party is being held in an annexe of the hotel that he is staying in. At first this realisation takes him by surprise:

“I’m very tired now too,” Stephan said. “I’ll walk back with you.”

“Walk back?”

“Yes,” I’m going to sleep in one of the [hotel] rooms tonight. I often do that if I’m on duty early in the morning.”

Then Ryder states:

For a moment his words continued to puzzle me. Then as I looked past the clusters of standing and seated dinner guests… to where the vast room disappeared into darkness, it suddenly dawned on me that we were in the atrium of the hotel. (14)

While it might be possible to explain this in terms of Ryder’s parallel existences (e.g.: in one of Ryder’s worlds the dinner party is held far away from the hotel, but in the other it is simply downstairs), this explanation does not sit well with similar distortions of space which occur elsewhere in the novel. The most dramatic of these occurs when Ryder attends a lunch at an inn in the countryside outside of the city. He realises after lunch that the inn is in fact an extension of the Hungarian Cafe in the city centre:

...I had at that moment remembered that this cafe and the one in which I had left Boris were in fact parts of the same building, this being one of those establishments offering contrasting rooms—opening onto separate streets—catering to different kinds of clientele. (15)

Except one of the streets is in the middle of the city and the other is miles away. Ryder does, however, manage to negotiate a narrow passageway which takes him in very little time back to the city.

Corridors, passageways and rooms are often distorted in The Unconsoled. They are often narrower than they should be, darker than they should be, longer than would be physically possible, and their nature changes frequently. At one point, Ryder finds that a white-tiled corridor in a concert hall, previously used by the catering staff, becomes a short while later filled with doors that lead to the dressing rooms of the musicians who are to perform. There is no obvious explanation for these events. Ryder does not exercise any unusual mental power to rearrange the physical dimensions of the world, but rather accepts the world as it changes around him in the same manner that a dreamer accepts the shifting landscapes of a dream.

Picking up on the often dreamlike structure of the narrative, one study site for The Unconsoled on the internet posed the question “How much of The Unconsoled can be explained as Ryder’s dream?” (16) For myself the answer is easy—none of it can. Ryder is not dreaming, and nowhere in the book is this suggested. Ryder never wakes up. The intersecting realities that he experiences are his reality as he lives it, not as he dreams it.

Stripped of the fantastic elements which contribute to the book’s dreamlike narrative, The Unconsoled would be a much slimmer, much quieter Ishiguro novel about the significance of the artist in society. It is a book, I think, that Ishiguro could have easily written, a book which may have more readily satisfied his critics. Instead Ishiguro chose to experiment with his narrative. He took the shifting realities of the world of dreams and used it to restructure his previous approach to novel writing. To do this he has borrowed some well-known elements from speculative fiction, creating in the process a challenging novel that deserves to be widely recognised as a classic of fantastic fiction.