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Genre is widely acknowledged to be a flexible rather than a fixed concept, and responsive to the changing circumstances of historical context. A current interest in the overlap between literary and speculative fiction, as exemplified by Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant (2015), indicates a movement away from literary realism into less conventional territory. As with all matters to do with genre, the boundaries are indistinct. James Wood argues that 'everything flows from the real, including the beautiful deformations of the real; it is realism that allows surrealism, magic realism, fantasy, dream and so on' (Wood 2004: ix), but others, such as Doris Lessing, argue that everything flows from the fantastic: The current mode of "realistic" fiction of the last 200 years is the aberration and that fantastic literature is the mainstream which has never run dry and still flows freely' (qtd Wolk 1990: 26). As far back as 1948, John W Campbell phrased this view even more succinctly when he wrote: "'mainstream literature' is actually a special subgroup of the field of science fiction -for science fiction deals with all places in the Universe, and all times in Eternity, so the literature of the here-and-now is, truly, a subset of science fiction' (qtd Roberts 2006: 56). For later writers and critics, there was a need to distinguish sf from, what Samuel R. Delany termed, 'mundane realism'.
In his most recent work, Ishiguro controversially deploys speculative fiction as a way of understanding time, history and human interconnection. Ishiguro insists on a continuity of English history and habitation, at one point writing that 'the view before them [Axl and Beatrice] that morning may not have differed so greatly from one to be had from the high windows of an English country house today' (Ishiguro 2016: 91). However, Ishiguro's England in The Buried Giant is remote from both the present day and mundane reality, inhabited as it is by ogres, pixies, decrepit chivalry and a dragon called Querig.
Axl and Beatrice, the elderly Briton couple at the centre of The Buried Giant, are living in a hollowed hill not long after the time of King Arthur. Their cave-like room is hidden within the warren, far from the light, and they are separated from their small community. Something great...