Buried Giants
The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers. Men will burn their neighbours’ houses by night. Hang children from trees at dawn. The rivers will stink with corpses bloated from their days of voyaging.1
This is Wistan, the Saxon warrior in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, speaking to the elderly Britons, Axl and Beatrice. The story takes place in the fifth century, after the Roman withdrawal and during a period characterised by Ishiguro as one of uneasy peace between Britons and Saxons, following brutal warfare between them and preceding the full-on Saxonisation that followed. But it is a fantasy novel, not a work of history, and Ishiguro says that his inspiration in filling the historical lacuna came from the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with its wolves, giants, and wild men of the woods. The novel begins with the narrator saying,
You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland. […] I am sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time, but there you are.2
This is Britain before England; in effect – not in reality, but in the novel – Britain before history. The fantasy element, which will explain Wistan’s reference to the stirring giant, is that everyone in this society has been suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. To put it briefly, after the death of King Arthur, Merlin put a spell on the she-dragon Querig, who lives next to the cairn of the buried giant, so that her breath became a mist of forgetfulness that covered the land. Arthur’s last surviving knight – Sir Gawain himself – says that he is tasked with slaying the dragon, but for some reason has never succeeded in doing so.
There are very few references to the buried giant, but it seems clear to me that he symbolises tribal hatred. The narrator says at one point, ‘it is always possible the giant’s cairn was erected to mark the site of some such tragedy long ago when young innocents were slaughtered in war.’3 Axl refers to ‘this wretched mist’ because it robs him and Beatrice of their memories of loving each other, but the wider purpose of Merlin’s spell is to keep the peace by suppressing trauma and hatred, ‘a barbarous past hopefully gone for ever’, as Axl says.4 Ishiguro explained this in an episode of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A couple want this mist to go away because they want their precious memories back, so at the personal level this mist is a bad thing […] but from the nation’s point of view getting rid of the source of that mist is probably going to restart a terrible cycle of violence, is probably going to bring on a genocide.
It is for this reason, as it turns out, that Sir Gawain has not been trying to slay Querig, but has in fact been protecting her. It is Wistan who has come to slay the dragon and disinter the buried giant. When Axl realises this he pleads with Wistan:
I beg you leave this place, and let Querig do her work a while longer. Another season or two, that’s the most she’ll last. Yet even that may be long enough for old wounds to heal for ever, and an eternal peace to hold among us. Look how she clings to life, sir! Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.
‘Foolishness’, replies Wistan. ‘How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery?’5 He cuts off Querig’s head and explains more:
My king sent me to destroy this she-dragon not simply to build a monument to kin slain long ago. You begin to see, sir, this dragon died to make ready the way for the coming conquest. […] look across this whole land. In every valley, beside every river, you’ll now find Saxon communities, and each with strong men and growing boys.
This is from the speech with which I began. Wistan goes on,
For you Britons, it’ll be as a ball of fire rolls towards you. You’ll flee or perish. And country by country, this will become a new land, a Saxon land, with no more trace of your people’s time here than a flock or two of sheep wandering the hills untended.6
Our finest living novelist has written a book about the stirrings of tribal hatred, published one year before the shocks of 2016 (just as he published Klara and the Sun one year before the release of ChatGPT). And why is it a dragon that dies to make way for the coming conquest? Because dragons are mythical. Querig’s mist represents the myth of the tribeless society, belief in which waxes and wanes. We could think of the myth as a necessary fiction, a noble lie, an aspiration; or sometimes, when toleration and trust are high, and we’re wishing, with Axl, that peace will hold, as a reality. This is why visions of a golden age tend to look tribeless.
Adam Curtis
[T]he sort of Britain that we wanted to go back to was the old-fashioned Britain, which had Union Jacks, and Empire, and stability, and order, and decency, and all that sort of thing.
This is Colonel Peter Storie-Pugh, who was a prisoner in Colditz during the Second World War. The quotation is from a 1995 series called The Living Dead by the documentary film-maker Adam Curtis. Curtis is fascinated by the myth of the tribeless society but does not believe in it. For over thirty years his films have guided viewers through the mist to the cairns of Britain’s buried giants, in the Middle East, the Caribbean, and in Ireland. He refers to himself as a journalist, though his films are also works of history – the common denominator being that the stories are everything. And his stories are often about when myths of tribelessness do not hold – a nagging sense, the return of things repressed. As Axl says, ‘Our memories aren’t gone for ever, just mislaid’.7 The episode of The Living Dead featuring Colonel Storie-Pugh is called ‘The Attic’, and begins with Curtis’s monologue: ‘Britain is a country haunted by its past. It is possessed by the memory of a golden age, a time long ago when this country was the most powerful on earth.’ Because, of course, his core period is not that of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, but of the Cold War. That is, his stories are told not at the beginning but at ‘the end of history’, and behind them lies not a dark-age blank, but everything, the deep pool of English history, which is like the pool in George Orwell’s Coming up for Air:
It was a small pool not more than twenty yards wide, and rather dark because of the boughs that overhung it. But it was very clear water and immensely deep. […] At some time this pool had been connected with the other, and then the stream had dried up and the woods had closed round the small pool and it had just been forgotten.8
The thrill is that you cannot see the bottom, and if you swam down you would pass Pip and Magwitch, and Peter Bell, and the Vicar of Wakefield, and Cobbett and Hogarth, and King Lear and his Fool, and if you kept holding your breath past Chaucer and Malory, you might even meet a real knight, like Sir Gawain.
But I’m becoming mistified. Curtis will not allow the memory of a golden age or the myth of the tribeless society to stand. ‘The Attic’ posits that we are – or at least in 1995 were – in a mist co-created by Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, and examines ‘parts of Britain’s history that did not fit into [the] dream’, such as the assassination of Airey Neave by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in 1979. The thesis of the episode is voiced most clearly not by Curtis but by Patrick Cosgrave, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher: ‘We’re living in her version of Churchill’s version of British history.’ ‘But it’s a dream’, says Curtis from behind the camera, and uses Tony Benn as the countervoice of that form of tribal identity known as class division:
Her vision was of a Great Britain that had always respected authority and discipline. A hierarchical Britain. A Britain where people did what they were told and where the benefit was that you could hold your head up in the world. It is a view of history. It’s not by any means the only one, because it’s a view of history that’s only really been in the interests of a tiny minority of powerful people.
Curtis’s fullest expression of his own view of history is Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021), which might also be his best series about buried giants. He begins in London in the 1950s, with the dismantling of the British Empire: ‘What had […] not gone away was the fear and hatred, inside the minds of many of the British, of the others, the people the British had ruled over, who were now coming to what they had been told was the homeland.’ One who came, in 1957 from Trinidad, was Michael de Freitas, whom Curtis shows in a later interview lamenting the realisation that ‘we weren’t wanted’. De Freitas worked in Notting Hill as an enforcer for the infamous slum landlord Peter Rachman. Rachman was born in Poland and, Curtis explains, found himself in a Siberian labour camp during the war,
where he watched people survive by killing each other and then eating the human flesh. […] he ended up after the war in London, stateless and a complete outsider. That horror meant that Rachman judged nobody. For him, the differences between right and wrong were luxuries for the privileged. […] Rachman’s property empire was a brutal and violent one.
He gave his name to Rachmanism, ‘The exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords’ (OED), a term coined, incidentally, by one Harold Wilson, in the Guardian in 1963, the year before he became prime minister. But Curtis’s interest is in the story beneath, which touches on what today get called ‘virtue-signalling’ and ‘luxury beliefs’, though he avoids these terms. ‘De Freitas saw something deeper’, he says. Rachman
was doing something that polite English society completely refused to do. He was giving people on the very margins of society – prostitutes and black immigrants – somewhere to live. His empire shone a harsh light on the hypocrisy of the nice people at the top of English society who would never think of themselves as racist, but wanted nothing to do with the people he was moving into Notting Hill. […] De Freitas decided that there was a fear in England that went far deeper than just the working-class racism, that behind the polite veneer of the middle classes there was a hard ruthlessness and a suspicion of others. De Freitas gave it a name. He called it Englishism. It came, he said, from both an anger and a melancholy at the loss of their empire.
(A highly Ishiguran quality.) Episode One ends with a glimpse of something that will prove important – anti-immigration marches in 1968. In Curtis’s archive footage we can just make out a banner, which protests against Harold Wilson’s Race Relations Acts.
In Episode Two de Freitas is reintroduced as Michael X, saying ‘the people of pale pigmentation are people who are so barbaric’. I need to rely here on some outside explanation from the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro–Latin American Biography:
Michael’s involvement in radical politics began in 1965, when he heard the African American activist Malcolm X speak in London. Malcolm asked Michael to accompany him to a speaking engagement in Smethwick in the English West Midlands, a community then riven by racial divisions. The local Conservative MP had won an election with the slogan, “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.” When Michael was asked his name by a reporter, he responded, “Call me Michael X.” […] Michael X soon founded the Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS), the acronym of which is Jamaican slang for “ass.” […] He used his skills as a hustler and his charm with women to procure financial support from many notable patrons, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Michael organized the first Notting Hill Carnival with the LFS [London Free School] that year, [and] converted to Islam[.] […] In 1967 [he] became the first nonwhite person charged and imprisoned under the 1965 Race Relations Act. […] He was accused of advocating the killing of white men for touching black women and for stating that white men were soulless[.] […] [In 1970] Michael and some followers were involved in an incident the media referred to as the “slave collar affair.” They lured Marvin Brown, a Jewish businessman, to Black House, where Brown was beaten, tortured, forced to wear a spiked slave collar, and led around by that collar in an extortion attempt. [Michael] and the men involved were arrested. [His] bail was paid by John Lennon[.]9
Curtis describes what I would call the folly – frivolity, even – embodied here in John Lennon. It didn’t matter that de Freitas was (like Malcolm X) a hustler and a pimp:
Many of Michael X’s supporters were the young white radicals who had moved into Notting Hill, into the very houses that he and the gangster Peter Rachman had run ten years before. Because Michael X was an outsider, the white radicals believed that he could see the system for what it really was. Like all revolutionaries before them, they had tried to appeal to the white working class and get them to rise up against the system. But no one seemed to be interested.
On the 1967 imprisonment, Curtis contrasts de Freitas with ‘The MP Enoch Powell [who] had also made a speech at the same time, violently attacking immigrants. He wasn’t charged, and he carried on being an MP.’ This rather elides de Freitas inciting violence with Powell using ‘violent’ rhetoric (a permanently important distinction), but I will return below to Powell. Curtis closes by saying that de Freitas had ‘set out to confront’ his society, ‘and change the structure of power’, but ‘had unleashed violence that was lurking underneath’; that is, in the symbolism I am taking from Ishiguro, had threatened to wake a buried giant.
Jumping now to the final two episodes of Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Curtis presents another ‘imaginary version of England […] One that still haunts the country today.’ This England is older and deeper than the Churchillian idea of empire from The Living Dead, and less concerned with power than with peace. Importantly, however, it is another tribeless society. ‘At its heart’, says Curtis, ‘was a vision of a natural order in the countryside outside the cities.’ He is talking about the British folk revival of the Edwardian era, led by figures such as the collector of folk songs, Cecil Sharp. ‘His aim was to create a new kind of English nationalism […] The innocent rural people and their culture. […] an England where villagers lived in harmony and safety’. At the risk of condensing too much, the pay-off of this comes at the end of the series when Curtis reaches 2016. His thesis on Brexit is that ‘thousands of those who had been marginalised by the new global economy […] came to believe in that Romantic idea of England as a special place’. And he says of Donald Trump during his first term that ‘he was doing nothing to get rid of the corruption’. Curtis closes with the following (remember this was 2021): ‘although Donald Trump is gone, and the Brexit deal done, what they both reveal is that underneath Western societies there are enormous pressures building up that will not go away.’ In other words, in his role as cultural seismograph, Curtis detects post-2016 tremors – the stirrings of the buried giant – even though Brexit and the first Trump presidency did little of what they promised.
The two most important dates in Curtis’s Emotional History of the Modern World are 1968 and 2016. What was the myth of tribelessness – our equivalent of Querig’s mist – that held during this period? Enoch Powell’s speech, referred to above, was of course the ‘Rivers of Blood’, but Powell was fired from the shadow cabinet by Ted Heath and consigned to the back benches. De Freitas might have set out to ‘change the structure of power’ in Britain, but in 1971 he returned to Trinidad, leaving Notting Hill to become rich and cosmopolitan, home eventually to the ‘Notting Hill set’ around David Cameron.
‘The giant, once well buried, now stirs’, says Wistan at the beginning of his own rivers of blood speech. Do you feel this to be the case? Or is talk of tribal hatred inflammatory, hyperbolic, and irrelevant to the ‘modern’ Britain created by Tony Blair? New Labour became associated with the statement of tribelessness, ‘We’re all middle-class now’, the attendant hope being that we’re all post-racial too. But do we go about our days believing in the tribeless society, or just trying to believe in it for the sake of an eternal peace? Do some have the luxury of believing in it and others not? Does the celebration of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, and identity politics constitute a helpful panacean mist, or does it actually foreground the potential for tribalism? If we have been in a mist, where did it come from? The third and final part of this essay is about another essay – a forgotten essay, I should say in the Curtis style. It is about the origins of another mythical Britain, not the capital of a powerful empire, or a peaceful village, but having in common with those that it is ostensibly a tribeless Britain, or, as the title of the essay has it, ‘The Classless Society’.
