Extract

Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically.

A butler drives through the English countryside in his employer's borrowed Ford, rehearsing the great questions of his life in a voice so measured and self-deceiving that the reader grasps the tragedy long before he does. Published in 1989, the novel's genius lies in the space between what Stevens says and what he cannot bring himself to feel. He served a lord who sympathised with the Nazis. He let the woman he loved walk away rather than breach the protocols of service. Every memory he recounts is a masterwork of evasion, and the landscape passing his window is an England that no longer exists and perhaps never did. This is a novel about dignity, and about the catastrophic cost of making dignity the highest virtue.