![]() (It should be said that Ishiguro's butler is, in his way, as complete a fiction as Jeeves. ![]() The Remains of the Day, in its quiet, almost stealthy way, demolishes the value system of the whole upstairs-downstairs world. Now that the popularity of another television series, Downton Abbey, has introduced a new generation to the bizarreries of the English class system, Ishiguro's powerful, understated entry into that lost time to make, as he says, a portrait of a "wasted life" provides a salutary, disenchanted counterpoint to the less sceptical methods of Julian Fellowes's TV drama. One can't help feeling that Gordon Jackson's portrayal of the stoic Hudson in the 1970s TV series Upstairs, Downstairs may have been as important to Ishiguro as Jeeves: the butler as liminal figure, standing on the border between the worlds of "upstairs" and "downstairs", Mr Hudson to the servants, plain Hudson to the gilded creatures he serves. ![]() The English butler, the shadow that speaks, is, like all good myths, multiple and contradictory. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |