Kazuo Ishiguro's Fourth Novel Is One Literary Trick After Another. By Gregory McNamee DOTTING THE RIVER valleys, hillsides, and plains of Central Europe lie dark, ancient towns. Burdened by the weight of an often terrible history, those towns are full of museums, libraries, cathedrals and coffee houses, full of people who speak many languages and are familiar with complex ideas. From such places have come great artists, philosophers, composers and writers. From such places have also come holocausts. To one such shadowy city a man comes. He's quickly enfolded in the unsettling anonymity of a large hotel, one with a low ceiling with "a definite sag, creating a slightly claustrophobic mood," one that feels for all the world as if it belongs in the pages not of a modern novel but in one of Franz Kafka's nightmares. This is no ordinary hotel. For one thing, the head porter, an elderly man named Gustav--as in Mahler, a composer from another gray Central European city--takes the time, in the first pages of Kazuo Ishiguro's fourth novel, The Unconsoled, (Knopf, $25) to deliver a soliloquy on the art of carrying bags from one floor to another. Gustav tells our narrator that in this unnamed town there are many hotels, which "means that many people in this town at some point or other have tried their hand at portering. Many people here seem to think that they can simply put on a uniform and then that will be it, they'll be able to do the job. It's a delusion that's been particularly nurtured in this town. Call it a local myth, if you will." You will be forgiven if, at this point, you begin to think not of Kafka but Stephen King, who has conjured up hotels populated by even more shadowy employees. Ishiguro's novel yields no ax-wielding Jack Torrances. Indeed, The Unconsoled is almost without action of any kind, save for the occasional trip to the buffet or stroll around the city park. In its first pages, we learn that the citizens of this town--we never know its name or location--are preparing hurriedly for "Thursday night," an event led by one Mr. Brodsky, a mysterious presence in that grand hotel. The stranger, a pianist, coincidentally has come to the city to deliver a concert. As he's drawn into the strange goings-on around him, however, Mr. Ryder--for that's his suggestive name--begins to realize that "clearly, this city was expecting something more than a simple recital." Strangers approach him to ask for small favors that turn out to be vastly complicated, and Mr. Ryder's life begins to spin out of orbit as he attempts to fulfill their requests. This is not the first time such things have happened, Mr. Ryder notes. "People need me. I arrive in a place and find terrible problems, and people are so grateful I've come." The spin turns weirder when it develops that Mr. Ryder has been asked to come to the city not only to play the piano, but also to help guide the community out of a deep crisis. Ishiguro never reveals the exact nature of that crisis, but it seems to have something to do with the city's inability to produce artists of any real stature. Just how Mr. Ryder is supposed to help occupies much discussion in this talky novel. At this point think not of Kafka or King, but of a committee meeting. The Unconsoled is set in an unidentifiable time. As it unfolds, that time becomes ever shiftier, and the narrative takes on a dreamlike quality that James Joyce might envy. Ishiguro is sly about all this, and he does not show off his narrative tricks except subtly. When Mr. Ryder goes to the movies for an evening's relaxation, for instance, we think we're in familiar territory when the movie turns out to be 2001--until, in the place of Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, the astronauts are Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner. That cast suggests we're in the country of nightmares, indeed. Ishiguro's characters, too, are people most of us would not encounter in real life. The central figure, Brodsky, is, as one player remarks, "in a world of his own. I must say he was a sad sight. The morning light made him look rather feeble. There was a droplet on the end of his nose, his eyes seemed so far away, and he'd quite forgotten the page he was holding." The bearer of a grave and unspecified wound, Brodsky is the Fisher King in Ishiguro's latter-day grail epic, a man so otherworldly that he has never been to the zoo, but so worthy of respect that the city is building a statue to his recently deceased dog. For his part, the mysterious Brodsky is a man of few wasted sentiments. "He's dead," he says of the unfortunate pet, "and that's it." The real subject of The Unconsoled seems to be death, not only of lapdogs but also of the artful world and of memory itself. Ishiguro's characters cannot remember what has passed from scene to scene. Mr. Ryder finds himself unable to recall the pieces he's decided to play in recital. "Each, I remembered, contained sections of great complexity," he sighs, "but when I tried to think further about these passages, I found I could recall almost nothing." He's not the only one with a faulty memory. Even at the moment when Mr. Ryder is to address the crisis in public order, he's reminded that "in all this excitement certain people will forget to concentrate." Mr. Ryder, in other words, has come to an amnesiac, urban world full of sound and fury, a world not unlike our own. For all his good intentions, he changes nothing. Still, at the end of The Unconsoled he leaves the gray city faintly hopeful that on his next stop things will turn out right, will go off just as planned. The Unconsoled is not for readers with a short attention span or impatience for slowly unfolding details. It's beautifully if somewhat perversely written, and invites constant reading between the lines: Is not, for instance, Mr. Ryder's ambit like that of a successful author on tour, someone like Kazuo Ishiguro himself? In a recent interview, Ishiguro remarked that he wanted with The Unconsoled to produce a novel that could never be translated into film, a medium for which he seems to have little fondness. He thought he'd written such a novel with his splendid Remains of the Day, a book full of interior monologue and quiet inaction. That book, of course, became a prize-winning film, starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. You can bet that somewhere in Century City a writer has taken Ishiguro's dare and is concocting a script even now. That scriptwriter will have a hard time of it. This discursive, uneventful novel, so full of literary tricks, is at heart a long rumination on the darker passages of the human mind. Not even Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner could pull it off.

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