Fifteen years I had this filed under exquisite and cold, and the thing that corrected me was one sentence about bantering.

Fifteen years I had this filed under exquisite and cold. I read it in 1990, decided it was a beautiful piece of miniature-making about a butler, admired the control, felt nothing, and shelved it. What I had missed, and only saw when I came back to it in my forties, is that the control is not the author's style. It is Stevens's.

Every evasion in that prose is a decision the narrator makes on the page, in real time, not to look at something. The syntax gets more elaborate precisely as the material gets less bearable. Watch what happens to his sentences during the passage where his father dies upstairs while the conference continues below: the subordinate clauses multiply, the professional vocabulary thickens, and a man describes the worst night of his life in the register of a staffing report. Ishiguro sustains that for a whole novel without once breaking the voice to signal that he knows. He trusts the reader completely, which almost nobody does.

The Weymouth ending is the only place where the machinery shows — slightly, and only if you go looking. The business about bantering is a fraction too neat as a closing figure, and it is also the sentence that undid me, so what do I know. Ten regardless.

A note on the film, since people ask. Hopkins is extraordinary and the film cannot do the thing the book does, because a camera looks at a face and the entire novel is built on our not being permitted to. Watch it afterwards.

And read the last stretch in one sitting. I stopped for a telephone call and it took me twenty minutes to get back inside the voice.