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What does 1t mean to be a butler?

> ‘The Remains of the Day’ novel review

Ethan Gibson
Contributor

 

krekekrk

I; it always noble to live one’s life totally
in service to something greater than
oneself? Or is it more often the case

that such preoccupations—with career,
tradition, or propriety—blind individuals
to the possibilities of love, happiness,
and fulfillment? Kazuo Ishiguro, the
Nobel Prize-winning author of Never Let
Me Go and The Buried Giant, explores
these questions with subtle brilliance

in his 1989 Booker Prize-winning
masterpiece The Remains of the Day.

The Remains of the Day is set in July
1956 and told from the point of view of
Stevens, an aging English butler. The
home he has worked in for decades,
Darlington Hall, has recently been sold
to an American. At the suggestion of
his new employer, Stevens embarks on
a journey by car through the English
countryside to visit Miss Kenton, the
former housekeeper at Darlington Hall.
Ostensibly, his goal is to convince her
to return to work at the Hall. His true

How a show about a cycling weed
dealer became a master class
on character-driven TV

> Allow HBO's ‘High Maintenance’ to light up your world

Jacey Gibb
Distribution Manager

 

Dz make for entertaining
television.
Way back, in the long-ago time
of 2005, Weeds introduced us to the
tragically-comedic Nancy Botwin, a
suburban widow who—gasp—also
deals pot. A few years later, Breaking
Bad blew onto the scene and set a new
bar for gritty, antihero-driven dramas.
More recently, you have Netflix’s Narcos,
which has given us the based-on-real-
events story of Pablo Escobar—and
more importantly, dat moustache.
However, most drug-related
programming, sooner or later, tends
to lean heavily into the dramatic
side of things: Drug deals gone
horribly wrong, gang violence,
guns, betrayals over millions of
dollars, more guns, showdowns in
the desert, did I mention guns?

feelings for Miss Kenton, suppressed
for decades, are at the heart of the
novel’s powerful sense of loss.

This is, above all, a novel not just
of lost love, but of love unrealized and
unexplored. Stevens and Miss Kenton
are never able to fully express to one
another their true selves. In all the years
they worked together, their relationship
remained fatally cordial and decorous.
To Kenton’s frustration, Stevens’
professionalism and sense of duty—
inherited from his father—preclude
him from the intimacy he cannot even
admit he desires. Stevens’ work-life
balance hardly recognizes a personal
life at all; his dedication to service is
so absolute that it eclipses all other
concerns. As Miss Kenton and Stevens
reconcile, the latter comes to realize (and
admit) what his life has amounted to.

As Stevens faces the evening of his
life, he is also disappointed with the
product of his professional life. The
man to whom he dedicated the majority
of his career, Lord Darlington, was
ultimately a deeply flawed character with
misaligned sympathies. In one of the
novel’s most poignant scenes, Stevens
finds himself deeply questioning the
integrity of his association with Lord

That’s why High Maintenance
is such a refreshing piece of
drug-based television.

Originally a web series from 2012
to 2015, High Maintenance made the
jump to HBO in 2016 and has enjoyed
two brief, wonderful seasons since.

The first six-episode season
introduces us to “The Guy,” played by
series co-creator Ben Sinclair, a bike-
pedaling pot peddler who embodies
the opposite of most pop culture drug
dealers. He’s friendly and personable,
but he’s also a background character.
Instead, High Maintenance shifts the
focus on new, different characters every
episode, who then interact with The Guy
at some point by buying weed from him.

In an interview with Splitsider,
Sinclair mentions how the series started
as a way to compare weed smokers
from Los Angles to the weed smokers
of New York: “We thought we could do
it in a way that actually showed adult

Darlington. Not only has Stevens lost
his opportunity for love—he has also
been stripped of the pride he held in
his career, which he had placed above
all other concerns, and which cost him
his relationship with Miss Kenton.

As with all great novels, The
Remains of the Day illustrates serious
realities of human nature—in this case,
through the self-incriminating and
subtly devastating voice of the butler
Stevens. It is arguably an indictment of
the class system that trapped Stevens,
but it also has a certain funereal sense
to it: One almost feels as though
Stevens is the last of a species soon to
be extinct—not a dinosaur, but a living
relic of a disappearing era. However,
Stevens’ situation is hardly unique
to the stifling stratification of British
society. As Ishiguro has said, we are
all butlers in one way or another. We
are—like Stevens—dangerously prone
to neglecting what truly matters in
life, in order to preserve feelings of
dignity, propriety, sophistication, or
normality. The genius of Ishiguro’s
novel is that it illuminates this truth
through the beautifully crafted and
profoundly sad story of an English
butler whose time has all but run out.

New Yorkers who are dealing with the
city. We feel that people in New York
smoke for many different reasons,
whether it’s a city stress or they just like
to smoke because it keeps them alive
in different ways.” The emphasis is on
telling organic, believable stories about
realistic characters who just happen
to also occasionally smoke weed.
Where the show really succeeds
is in the expanded 10-episode second
season, where we also delve more into
The Guy’s personal life. In the premiere,
were introduced to his relationship/
non-relationship with a cute Australian
bartender. In another episode, The Guy
talks about his current living situation
with clients-turned-friends. In the
seasons best episode, he winds up
confined to a hospital bed with nothing
but a vape pen to keep him company—
until the hospital calls his most recent
emergency contact, his soon-to-be-ex-
wife. All of these bits and pieces slowly

Te sm Mat oa ey ge

 

 

help build together The Guy’s life for the
viewers, while still juggling the stories
of other single-episode characters.

High Maintenance is a show about
smaller moments. The moments
shared between a weed dealer and his
agoraphobic client, who doesn’t even
smoke but has spent years buying pot
just to have the brief interactions with
The Guy. One episode even centres on
a dog whose owners are undergoing a
separation and who embarks on his own
romance with a high-energy dog walker.
There’s no grand story arc, no endgame
that High Maintenance is working
towards, and it plays out beautifully.

Admittedly, this slice-of-life
storytelling can sometimes feel too
unambitious when an episode’s moments
fall flat or fail to produce any meaningful
resolutions for the characters. Yet,
more often than not, it’s heartwarming,
thoughtful, surreal, and more
hilarious than it has any right to be.

‘The Remains of the Day’ book cover