The Remains of the Day

By: Kazuo Ishiguro / Narrated By: Simon Prebble

Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins

Uhm? Considering Simon Prebble’s narration is no longer available, dare I say it? This was a terrific audiobook!

After I decided to do a little homage to that wonderful narrator, Simon Prebble, my sister pointed out that his narration of The Remains of the Day was no longer available… I mean whatthehey?!? So we considered pulling it as an option for the Tell Me What’s Next homage but decided that it was still a worthy offering. Personally, I thought The Death of Ivan Ilyich was going to take it, but wouldn’t you know the winner by a landslide was this WONderful story by noted author Kazuo Ishiguro? So I figured I’d listen to it, it’d be riddled with audio/production problems or something, and I could tell y’all: See? They re-recorded this with another narrator because it was godawful and this version isn’t worthy of trying to hunt down on OverDrive or anything.

Oooooh, so sorry, but I have NO idea why on god’s green earth the powers that be wanted to redo something that wound up so sublime. So, my apologies, but Simon Prebble is fanTAStic. Okay, okay, he is indeed performing Ishiguro’s writing, but still, he beautifully brings that staid old butler, Stevens, to life.

One thing I have to say about Ishiguro’s writing, which is where the greatness starts, is that Stevens could very well be an unlikable character. The butler is writing this, his thoughts as he takes a four-day road journey to visit an old colleague, the housekeeper Miss Kenton, as though he’s offering words of advice, words of profound wisdom for would-be up and coming butlers. It’s how a butler should ALWAYS behave, how they must not think, how they must not feel, how they should be butlers to great homes first, foremost, always. And he backs it up with memories which keep cropping up as he drives through the countryside, meeting the type of people he’d never had the chance to interact with before. His memories are of the great people Lord Darlington used to meet with.

His memories are also of dramatic run-ins with Miss Kenton, of his father coming to work at the estate when he gets too old to be anything but an under butler. Through all of these memories, no matter how emotionally charged things get, Stevens tells us that of course he reacted the way he did: to service, to his duty to Lord Darlington. A butler must never choose anything other than to do his duty at top form. And we could EASILY despise him when his father is dying, and he leaves the dying old man, saying he’s really quite busy right now. After all, it was his father, a butler extraordinaire, who instilled it in Stevens as to what was owed to the job, how unemotional and in control one has to be. But then we hear people in the get-together that Stevens has just rejoined downstairs to serve: “Stevens? There are tears running down your face,” even as he keeps his chin set high, keeps doing his duty.

Though Stevens is clueless, we see that somewhere in his ice-cold soul, something dear was hurting mightily.

There are many instances of this, of where we see how much Stevens cares through the way people respond to him. Of his choosing duty over warmth. I love that! You know, the old: Show, don’t tell thing. Ishiguro shows the heart, the soul, of Stevens even though the man himself is late to realize any of it.

What I also loved was the way we see that Lord Darlington, contrary to everything Stevens says about the great man and the huge misunderstandings that arose after all was said and done by history, was actually a Nazi sympathizer. The book covers the pricey peace after WWI, where Darlington felt most strongly for the indignities the German elite felt rather than for what the other countries, France in particular, suffered. We see as Stevens carries out Darlington’s orders that two long-serving maids are let go, all because they are Jewish. Miss Kenton is indignant, raises quite a fuss and that’s probably the part where I reeeeally did not like Stevens. He thinks it’s quite humorous that Miss Kenton is still working even though she was enraged enough to threaten to quit. He reminds her of her words/the threat as a little joke every now and again. Plus, he chose duty over what was good and right. So see? It’d be really easy to not like the man.

But that’s where Simon Prebble’s fantastic narration comes in. He actually sounds completely and unutterably clueless, even as we can hear somewhere in his voice that his heart is breaking, or that perhaps now he sees that something was dearly wrong, or that maybe he had options, choices, that maybe there’s a thing called happiness that he’s had nowhere in his life. When Prebble comes to the part near the end where Stevens breaks down telling his story of life serving Lord Darlington, of the intrepid Miss Kenton, of the 30 years he served, and now he has to learn how to “banter” with his new American employer? Prebble had me in tears, making me want to hug Stevens even as I wanted to pop him upside the head with a resounding: All these years ya coulda chosen your heart!

Grand writing, grand narration. Definitely, if you find yourself with a little extra time, and quite a bit of patience, Google the beJESus outta this one, and find Simon Prebble’s narration. I dunno, though, if it’s better than the Nicholas Guy Smith version (I have his narration of A Very Expensive Poison, and he was awfully good), and I’m sooooo tempted to pop a credit and try it out, but alas! There are soooo many audiobooks, toooo little time. Maybe, if you’ve listened to the N. Guy Smith edition, would you shoot me a line and let me know if it’s worth journeying into the warm-heart-within-the-icy-demeanor of the Butler of Note?

As it is, I’m still waiting for someone to notice how AWEsome it’d be for them to redo Ulrich Baer’s Rilke-based audiobook, The Dark Interval…