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As Ishiguro slowly reveals, the trio are unknowing participants in a nightmarish government scientific and social program.

The creeping horror at the center of Ishiguro’s science fiction is surrounded by the tensions of growing up in this literary page-turner.

Rarer still, the novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is made a Companion of Honour, a select group which is limited to 65 people at any one time.

Suddenly, Merchant and Ivory were household names, and two subsequent Forster adaptations, “Maurice” and “Howards End,” as well as their screen version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day,” cemented their reputation as impeccable filmmakers.

This was not the case as recently as the 1990s, when butlers for the most part reflected the archetype popularized by characters like Hudson, from the TV show “Upstairs, Downstairs”; Carson, from “Downton Abbey”; or Stevens, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “The Remains of the Day.”