Axl asks why their son left, and Beatrice replies: “It could be he quarreled with the elders and had to leave. I’ve asked around, and there’s no one here remembers him. But he wouldn’t have done anything to bring shame on himself, I know for sure. Can you remember nothing of it yourself, Axl?”

Image Kazuo Ishiguro sets "The Buried Giant," his new novel about memory and denial, in Britain around the time of King Arthur. Credit... Andrew Testa for The New York Times

These sorts of conversations among people who can’t remember the most essential details of their lives quickly grow tiresome, and “The Buried Giant,” alas, is awash in them. The result is a fuzzy, dreamlike narrative not unlike the one in Mr. Ishiguro’s circuitous and opaque 1995 novel, “The Unconsoled,” which featured a hero who also appeared to suffer from memory loss, wandering about an unnamed European town, having a series of vaguely portentous encounters.

Beatrice is determined to visit their son’s village — conveniently, she seems to remember where it’s located — and she and Axl set off by foot on a journey that will take them across the perilous Great Plain around noon (when its “dark forces” were “most likely to be dormant”) and then over hill and dale, through forests and up a mountain. Their trip is, at once, a quest narrative and one of those allegorical journeys from innocence into knowledge — reminiscent of Dorothy’s travels in Oz, and Frodo Baggins’s in Middle-earth.

Along the way, Beatrice and Axl acquire two traveling companions: a Saxon warrior named Wistan, and Edwin, a 12-year-old boy whom Wistan has rescued from two ogres and plans to train as his apprentice. There are meetings with enigmatic strangers like Sir Gawain, and close calls with murderous monks and a giant, doglike beast, and the ever-present lurking danger of the she-dragon Querig.

Instead of one unreliable narrator, as he’s often used in the past, Mr. Ishiguro moves from one character’s point of view to another’s, but his prose remains flat-footed throughout — vaguely inflected with a forced old-timeyness that’s more mannered than convincing.