A man looks back on the worth of his life
5 stars
Like many of my contemporaries I watched the Merchant Ivory film made from this novel when it came out years ago, but I wanted to take this in as an unabridged audiobook of the Booker Prize winning novel. I was already listening to another audiobook at the same time, but once I started this one it grabbed me so completely I just wanted to listen through to the end. The evocation of the inner life of the main character, Mr. Stevens, through very precise diction is simply masterful, along with the switches between the recollections from the pre-war episodes and the narrator's present-day were deft and illuminating. Stevens is the most polished sounding unreliable narrator imaginable, voiced perfectly by Nicholas Guy Smith in the audiobook version with just enough inflection to guide the listener to the meaning that likes just behind the words. The film concentrates most on the unrequited …
Like many of my contemporaries I watched the Merchant Ivory film made from this novel when it came out years ago, but I wanted to take this in as an unabridged audiobook of the Booker Prize winning novel. I was already listening to another audiobook at the same time, but once I started this one it grabbed me so completely I just wanted to listen through to the end. The evocation of the inner life of the main character, Mr. Stevens, through very precise diction is simply masterful, along with the switches between the recollections from the pre-war episodes and the narrator's present-day were deft and illuminating. Stevens is the most polished sounding unreliable narrator imaginable, voiced perfectly by Nicholas Guy Smith in the audiobook version with just enough inflection to guide the listener to the meaning that likes just behind the words. The film concentrates most on the unrequited love between him and the Miss Kenton character, but in the book even more time is devoted to the Anglo-German relations in the lead-up to World War II, with lots of intrigue and secrets. Stevens evaluates what he has done all his life by the end of it, which hits home for me now that I'm of a similar age to what he would have been, and seeing that things might have turned out happier, has to conclude that it doesn't matter because the past cannot be changed, decisions that were taken cannot be unmade. He spent so much his time suppressing emotion that it cannot make sense to try to salvage emotion at the end. I found the novel to be moving.
