Fantasy is a tool of the storyteller. It is a way of talking about things that are not, and cannot be, literally true. It is a way of making our metaphors concrete, and it shades into myth in one direction, allegory in another. Once, many years ago, a French translator decided that my novel “Stardust” was an allegory, based on and around John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (it wasn’t), and somewhat loosely translated the book with footnotes to that effect. This has left me a little shy of talking about allegory, and very shy of ever mentioning “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

Kazuo Ishiguro is a remarkable novelist, both for the quality of his work — because his novels share a careful, precise approach to language and to character — and because he does not ever write the same novel, or even the same type of novel, twice. In “The Buried Giant,” his seventh and latest, he begins with clear, unhurried, unfussy language to describe the England of some 1,500 years ago, in a novel as well crafted as it is odd. Some of the oddness comes from the medieval terrain: This is a novel about an elderly couple going from one village to the next, set in a semi-historical England of the sixth or perhaps seventh century, in which the Britons and the Saxons have been at bloody war. The Britons have been driven west and the Saxons control the east of England, but Saxons and Britons live side by side in a post-Arthurian twilight, in a mythical time of ogres, sprites and dragons — most of all the dragon Querig, who dominates the second half of the book, in which one character needs to kill her as badly as another needs to keep her alive. Other oddities come from the characters, many of whom navigate their way through the story as if asleep and uncertain whether they will like what they find if they wake up.

The elderly couple are Axl and Beatrice — “Perhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them” — who start out living in a hill-warren village, ill treated by their fellow Britons. Axl and Beatrice love each other deeply and care for each other as best they can. Beatrice has a malady, a pain in her side she insists is nothing serious, for which she seeks a cure. They have reached the age when their memories have become unreliable, when names, faces and even events slip away. But the problems with memory and event are not just theirs; all the people in their community, and even those in neighboring villages, Briton and Saxon, appear to be having the same difficulties. There is a mist that takes memories: good memories and bad, lost children, old rancors and wounds. And memories are valuable. They make us who we are.

As Beatrice says: “If that’s how you’ve remembered it, Axl, let it be the way it was. With this mist upon us, any memory’s a precious thing and we’d best hold tight to it.”