Veteran readers of Ishiguro therefore will approach The Buried Giant, his first novel in a decade, in a spirit of deep precaution. We know that first appearances will deceive, that we will not be able to rely upon our narrator’s word, that minor details noted in passing may prove to have outsize significance. But which details? There are plenty of surprising ones in the novel’s first pages, which situate us in an England “not much beyond the Iron Age,” populated by unnamed plagues, human settlements dug deep into hills, panting ogres who abduct small children, and a dragon.

“You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding land or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated,” the novel begins. From subsequent clues, we can deduce that the year is approximately 450 A.D., but despite our unnamed narrator’s anthropological tone, we are not in England as it actually was then, but as it was imagined seven centuries later by Geoffrey of Monmouth and the other mythologizers who gave us King Arthur, Sir Gawain, and the wizard Merlin. Can it be that The Buried Giant is an exalted exercise in fan fiction? It is hard to shake the sense that Ishiguro is up to his old tricks: one expects the ogres to be revealed as members of a rival village, the dragon to be some kind of a communal delusion, and Merlin to be a crackpot. But in fact the ogres are ogres, the dragon is a dragon, and Merlin actually does possess supernatural powers. Giants really do stride through Ishiguro’s England, and really are buried beneath it.

Our guides through the craggy hills and bleak moors of the medieval countryside are an elderly couple named Axl and Beatrice. They live in poverty, ostracized by the rest of their village, and appear to have sunk into a grim senility. They cannot remember basic facts about their past: Have they always lived in this village? Did they have children? We soon learn that this smothering forgetfulness does not afflict them alone. Their entire village is amnesic:

In this community the past was rarely discussed. I do not mean that it was taboo. I mean that it had somehow faded into a mist as dense as that which hung over the marshes. It simply did not occur to these villagers to think about the past—even the recent one.

This activates one’s Ishiguro antennae. Might he not be evoking our own situation in the year 2015? As I write, the news is dominated by outrage over a torture report that describes atrocities we knew about 10 years ago; outrage over the sex crimes allegedly committed by a beloved comedian, despite the fact that some of those allegations have been public knowledge since at least 2005; and apocalyptic environmental forecasts, many of which were first articulated in the 1970s. Many novelists write about memory, but they tend to focus on the nexus between memory and identity. What are we but the sum of our memories? Ishiguro studies this question in The Buried Giant, but he is just as interested in collective memory. What does a society choose to remember? George Santayana is credited with coining the historian’s mantra, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The Buried Giant poses a heretical counterargument: Might human civilization, in order to prosper, have no choice but to erase the past?