![]() "I was surprised to find," he says, "how little there was about servants written by servants, given that a sizable proportion of people in this country were employed in service right up until the Second World War. Just as Wodehouse made immortal a world that never existed except in his imagination, so also Ishiguro projects his imagination into a poorly documented zone. (It should be said that Ishiguro's butler is, in his way, as complete a fiction as Jeeves. The Remains of the Day, in its quiet, almost stealthy way, demolishes the value system of the whole upstairs-downstairs world. Now that the popularity of another television series, Downton Abbey, has introduced a new generation to the bizarreries of the English class system, Ishiguro's powerful, understated entry into that lost time to make, as he says, a portrait of a "wasted life" provides a salutary, disenchanted counterpoint to the less sceptical methods of Julian Fellowes's TV drama. ![]() One can't help feeling that Gordon Jackson's portrayal of the stoic Hudson in the 1970s TV series Upstairs, Downstairs may have been as important to Ishiguro as Jeeves: the butler as liminal figure, standing on the border between the worlds of "upstairs" and "downstairs", Mr Hudson to the servants, plain Hudson to the gilded creatures he serves. ![]() The English butler, the shadow that speaks, is, like all good myths, multiple and contradictory. ![]()
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