When British writer Kazuo Ishiguro comes out with a book, it’s an event.

He is, after all, recognized as one of Britain’s most important writers. His most widely known work, Remains of the Day, for which he won the Booker Prize, is required reading on high school curricula. It was made into a star-studded movie, as was his last novel, Never Let Me Go.

So when Ishiguro said in an interview that people might take his latest work The Buried Giant as “fantasy,” fellow writer Ursula K. Le Guin took notice.

“It appears that the author takes the word for an insult,” she wrote on her blog. “To me that is so insulting, it reflects such thoughtless prejudice, that I had to write this piece in response. Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.”

“She blogged a retreat, did you see that?” Ishiguro says in an interview about a week later. “She said that she had been too hasty in accusing me of sneering at fantasy.” But it did open up a conversation about genre. For the record, he agrees with Le Guin about fantasy — it was one of the few ways he felt he could tackle the story he wanted to tell: one about societal memory.

In a nutshell: an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, journey from their small village to find their son, who they remember but only faintly. It is the time after war, when the Romans have left and England is beginning to form as a country; there is a gently balanced peace in the land. But there is also a mist, a fog that is covering up people’s memories, both personal and societal.

In The Buried Giant, legendary myths from other cultures — the ferryman, for example, (right out of Greek mythology) make an appearance in this book Ishiguro refers to as a “fable.” “I didn’t really think of it as fantasy so much as going back to the old stories. I’ve always liked things like The Odyssey and Iliad, Beowulf,” he says.

Also making an appearance are ogres and pixies and a dragon (Querig — remember her from the Arthurian tales?) whose breath is creating the mist that’s clouding people’s memories. Two warriors are interested in Querig: Wistan, a Saxon, who wants to slay Querig, thus parting the fogs and restoring memory, and Sir Gawain (yes, the one from the tales) whose mission is to safeguard Querig and thus the mist.

The ogres and dragons, Ishiguro says, “are very important elements in storytelling and always have been ever since people started to tell stories. Somewhere along the way recently we’ve developed a prejudiced attitude toward fantasy, we’ve looked down on fantasy, when the reality is that this is what we need when we’re telling stories.”

At the time he initially conceived the book, back in the 1990s, the conflicts in Yugoslavia at Srebrenica and in Rwanda, he says, had thrown him for a bit of a loop. “It seemed very, very, close,” he says. “When the Cold War ended we thought everything was going to be marvellous, that Eastern Europe was going to open up.” But suddenly, he says, there were concentration camps and the Srebrenica massacre “in places where we used to go on holiday.”

“Those two things were maybe the initial triggers (for the book) rather than any intrinsic fascination with ancient Britain.” In reality, he is using as a setting a period of time — about 90 years — when historians “can’t agree at all what happened.” It’s a void that’s tempting to the imagination: “because there is an historical basis, I think it makes it easier to say this is a story that should be applied to modern situations.”

At the same time as Srebrenica and Rwanda, “it occurred to me that a lot of countries and nations had buried dark memories and that sometime there was good reason to bury them.” While there is an idea that if we forget history we’re doomed to repeat it, he says, the reality is much more complicated. History can also “be manipulated to mobilize hatred in a community … a lot of the time people want you to remember selective bits of history but in order to mobilize the next war.”

Revisionist history and cherry-picking memory “happens all the time,” Ishiguro says.

“I think the South Africans after apartheid sensed that they were really on a knife edge … What do they do with … all the resentments, anger, sense of injustice that’s bottled up in that country? And I think they almost miraculously probably got it right with their Truth and Reconciliation Committee. It was a formalized way of trying to balance the need for grievance and a sense of justice on the one hand and saying, well, let’s just let that lie.

“I think it’s much more of a careful balancing act between what you remember and what you don’t.”

The same is true for personal relationships, which Ishiguro juxtaposes in The Buried Giant. Axl and Beatrice seem to be warm and loving; Axl calls her “Princess” and worries for her comfort and health. But when the mists part they get a glimpse of unsettling details, remembered or dreamt, who knows?

Remembering is complicated, Ishiguro is saying. Through the couple’s relationship, Ishiguro explores the question “can (love) survive remembering all the dark things from a long marriage?” (He has been married to his own wife, Lorna, for 29 years.)

“On the other hand, if you don’t remember those things is the love based on something phoney?” Axl and Beatrice fear remembering things. Nations, Ishiguro points out, go on and on and on. Individuals “know their time together is limited so they feel they ought to remember so that their love isn’t based on false memory, on forgetfulness.”

Or, as Beatrice puts it: “I’m wondering if, without our memories, there’s nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.”

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While one of the things that makes the Arthurian era enticing is that there is so little written about it, that is also what makes it difficult, Ishiguro says. Consider the language. He started writing The Buried Giant in 2004. He had, he says, the kernel of the story. After writing about 70 pages of the book, he showed it to his wife. “she said a lot of this is interesting … but the way they speak to each other is all wrong.”

When he went back to the book a few years later, “I tried to make it as simple as possible while still suggesting some kind of foreignness. And I did that this time by subtracting rather than adding words. I took out words that you or I might say. I would take out a “that” or an “of” or a “from” so it seems to read simply or even more simply than normal English but it creates this kind of strange, stilted rhythm that makes it seem slightly foreign.”

It’s tricky, incorporating different styles of writing, different genres, to effectively tell a story. And Ishiguro is quick to admire the trait in others. One younger writer he points to as one he thinks is important — partly because of his ability to break through the barriers of genre, is David Mitchell, whose most recent book was last year’s The Bone Clocks.

“I don’t read nearly as much contemporary as I should,” he confesses. “I read things like Stephen Mitchell’s new translation of Homer. (But) I think that David Mitchell is a very important figure ... He’s somebody who did actually break the mould. One of the important things he does is right from the start he wasn’t afraid of stepping into any kind of genre. And I think he’s done a lot to break down the barriers between popular and literary and between the so-called genres.”

In the end, the story is more important: Genres are “sales things, and we shouldn’t get too concerned about them.”

Editor’s Note: This article has been changed from a previous version which named Wistan as a Briton and the Saxons as leaving the country.