Still easily one of the most brilliant novels I’ve ever read, now twice. I am often on the lookout not only for good novel, which I like of course, but perfect novels. This is a perfect novel.
If you’ve never read it, Stevens is a butler from a fine old English estate. It’s after the war now though and what was once the stately manor has been sold off to a rich American, who wanted one of those famous kinds of butlers. We learn early on that Stevens is earnest in his attempts to connect to the new owner, but his being American makes some of the lines of demarcation of service hard to understand. For one, Stevens believes the new owner would like banter, and so Stevens has been practicing. We also slowly learn that Stevens is about to embark on a trip, partially financed by the owner who has lent him a car. The trip is meant to be a holiday, but Stevens has decided to potentially use it as a recruiting trip to try to hire back a previous housekeeper who left to get married twenty years earlier. A recent letter has suggested to her that her marriage is no longer a happy one and perhaps she’d be amenable. We also learn that Stevens has extraordinarily strong feelings about what makes a good butler. He’s not trying to say he himself is a great butler, or not one of the greats, but there’s evidence he’s quite good at it. So he lets us know about these. We learn through this that he considers his father, the Stevens, Sr. to have been one of the greats.
As he takes his trip he continues to explain about the past of the house, his past with the housekeeper, and the past owner and how things began to fall apart. We slowly come to understands, more or less as Stevens allows himself to better understand, that many of the moments of the past proved to be more dearly important than they seemed at the time, and now he’s paying the price of their absence in his life now. This is one of the most beautifully sad novels I have ever read.