This is one that took a while for me to be convinced by. For the better part of 80 pages I was telling others that it was reading like Mr Carson from Downton Abbey was taking a road trip across 1950s Britain with the Lord’s car to meet up with Mrs Hughes. Pleasant and easy reading, but not exactly enthralling.

Then the hints of a plot start dripping through. Flashbacks to conversations, arguments, a budding romantic connection between Carson and Hughes (well, actually Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton, but once the reference point came to mind in the first few pages I never shook it), and of course the attempts to rationalise and excuse the growing Nazi sympathies of the employer, Lord Darlington. If When We Were Orphans, another lauded work of Ishiguro’s I read this year, was eccentric and alive, The Remains of the Day was exploration of British restraint and dignity.

And what an exploration it was. Told entirely in first person, we see the conflicts in Stevens’ mind, with his quest to embody the sense of dignity he so admires and emulate the highly regarded butlers of his time constantly at odds with his humanity and his employer. It does the job of both showing and telling perfectly, giving his blinded perspective of highly charged emotional events, displaying the physical effects and the lack of understanding. In particular, his manner around his dying elderly father, slowly passing away whilst Stevens has tasks to do and the drip feeding of the emotional effects on the body.

But self-awareness and self-doubt does start to creep in. In the latter half of the book, having spent a few days travelling and reflecting, he starts to re-read the letter from Miss Kenton that started the whole trip off in the first place, considering whether she was quite so keen to move back to work and away from her husband after all. He starts to reflect on his playing the part of Peter to Lord Darlington’s Jesus, denying his existence to guests of his new employer and new owner of the mansion, or the severity of his Nazi ideology and associations with Herr Ribbentrop.

The scene that epitomises this is the flashback of a conversation between Stevens and Lord Darlington’s godson, who turned up during a pivotal meeting between Lord Darlington, the British PM, and Ribbentrop. The godson almost pleadingly trying to get Stevens to admit he’s on his side, that he can see Darlington be misled, played with as a useful pawn in British society, and Stevens feeling the tinge of regret at playing the loyally blind servant to his faithful and beyond reproach employer.

When We Were Orphans got a 7.5 from me in my reading log. It was an enthralling read, again exploring the theme of a blinded man pursuing his ideals, but whiffed the ending in my mind. This wasn’t that; it didn’t capture your mind through action and adventure, but through quiet reflection and exploration of duty and dignity, in a similar sense to the theme of what it means to be a gentleman in Great Expectation. Not my favourite book of the year, but still good enough to get an 8/10 for me.