The musicians (or a pop-music lover in one of the stories) are failures of one sort or another: second-raters, has-beens, obscure strugglers. Music is art, and redeems; even as life - the halfway reach of an artist’s talent, the remote chances of worldly success, the compromises needed just to survive - curdles.
Ishiguro, whose complex ambiguity is his form of affirmation, simultaneously shatters and restores characters. He reduces them to dust but, as in the Spanish poet Francisco Quevedo’s sonnet, it is “enamored dust.’’ No consolation there, for them or us.
The protagonist of “Malvern Hills’’ is a young songwriter who looks for a rock band to join but is rebuffed because the bands prefer “safe’’ covers and don’t want to be saddled with original material. Unabashed, he retreats to his married sister’s country café where he helps out while working up a batch of new songs.
Soon there is friction: The brother-in-law resents his taking time off from duties to compose. Here, as in the commercial bent of the rock bands, “real life’’ has no patience for art’s explorations.
Easy enough, but Ishiguro is never easy. Two Swiss hikers come upon the young man practicing one of his songs. They are entranced; their praise takes on value when they disclose that they too are musicians. Hacks, though; they make a living traveling around Europe playing standards at weddings.
Life has curdled, then, in a story that surmounts a certain didactic simplicity with its unexpectably moving glimpse of the two failed artists. At the end - Ishiguro’s endings end nothing - the young man goes back to working on his music; neither heroic nor defiant but simply because it is what he does.
“Nocturne’’ sets out similar alternatives in a far more elaborate way. Here it is the protagonist who settles for hackery. A brilliant jazz saxophonist, he makes his living doing movie music and occasional backup gigs, and exercises his real art only in private.
