The Remains of the Day, read too late and just in time
I had avoided this for years on the assumption that a novel narrated by a butler on a motoring holiday would be a slow, tasteful, entirely inert thing. That was wrong in a way I find slightly embarrassing, because the book is about inertness, and it is not inert.
The narration is the whole engine. Stevens tells the story of a week-long drive and, underneath it, the story of thirty years of service, and every time he approaches something that matters he arranges the sentence so that it slides past. He does not lie. He is scrupulous. He simply describes the wrong half of every scene. After sixty pages you learn to read the half he leaves out, and after that the book becomes almost unbearable in the best sense.
There is a sequence in the middle where a member of the household staff comes to speak to him about something urgent and personal, and he manages the entire conversation as a matter of correct procedure. It is the most painful scene I have read this year and nobody raises their voice.
What surprised me is how funny it is. The long passage about the meaning of dignity, with its examples and counter-examples and its careful weighing of a colleague's professional standing, is comic in the way that a person taking themselves very seriously in a small room is comic. The comedy and the tragedy are the same material. I do not know how that is done.
I have one reservation, which is about the frame: the drive itself sometimes feels like scaffolding, a sequence of villages and hotels arranged to trigger memories on schedule. It works, but you can see it working.
Then the last twenty pages happen and the reservation stops mattering. There is a conversation on a pier at dusk that does the thing the whole book has been withholding, and it does it quietly, and then the narrator gets up and goes back to work. I sat with the closed paperback for a while afterwards, which is the only review that counts.