While he saw himself as a knight for goodness and justice - and was also perceived as that by Stevens - he supported fascist propaganda, Nazi ideologies and the end of democracy. Lord Darlington dabbled in international affairs, especially in the years before the second war, by inviting important people into his house for informal meetings. In fact, through Steven’s narrations, we get a glimpse of the controversies that kept Great Britain busy between World War I and II. On his way from Salisbury to Dorset and Devon, and back again, Stevens reminisces about his life as a butler for a man that, as the novel reveals in bits and pieces, was not the well-natured and cosmopolitan figure that he intended to be. Little was I aware that this book would raise all these questions, not necessarily in regards with a change in the calendar year, but in regards with a whole lifetime stretched before one’s eyes.Īs we accompany a butler called Stevens on his probably one and only leisure trip through UK’s South, we learn about his time as chief of staff at Darlington Hall - a place that saw its best days during and between both world wars and has now, after Lord Darlington’s death, become the residency of a rich American gentlemen, with a reduced staff and less glamorous social gatherings. After all, the period around New Year’s Eve is filled with considerations about what was, the occasional ‘what could have been’, and the uncertainty of what is about to come. As 2022 came to an end, I picked Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day (1989) from my shelf, not knowing that it would become quite an apt companion for the turn of the year.
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