The garden is enclosed by tall hedges, and at its centre is a circle of pale paving where a monument once stood and has since been taken away. Under a nearly full moon it looks like a pond. Richard Hadley sits on a little bench at its edge, in evening dress, beside a tired young woman who has just admitted that she likes the look of men in dinner jackets by moonlight. Then a string section that exists only for the two of them holds a long, expectant chord, and he asks her to dance. Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger by Kazuo Ishiguro has its share of chases, codes and corpses, but its heart is in scenes like this one: an empty plinth, an invisible band and two people deciding what they can afford to feel in the summer of 1938.
An Old Man Remembers Being a Fool
Richard tells the story decades later, as an old man with grandchildren to tell it to, and the gap between the narrator and his younger self is where much of the comedy lives. At the time he was a young man back from Canada with a bruised heart, a borrowed flat and no profession to speak of. Looking back, he cheerfully lists his beginner’s errors while making it plain that he regarded himself, even then, as rather dashing. The voice owes an obvious debt to Wodehouse, but it is also the familiar Ishiguro narrator with the edges sanded down: a man who never quite sees what is in front of him and who comes to understand his own story only long after it ends.
The plot of Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger by Kazuo Ishiguro is a chain of misadventures. A letter delivered to an old school friend leads Richard to a run-down hall in Spitalfields, home to something called the Society of Reincarnation Science, where an outraged poet is trying to write an insult on a critic’s forehead in indelible ink. The critic, who reviews verse under the pen name Napper, turns up the next day in a Devon village with the smudged letter still on his brow. From there the story moves to a grand seaside hotel full of suspiciously solemn “scholars”, and finally onto a new express to Inverness.
Ishiguro is very good at minor characters. A mournful hotel porter, asked to lift a guest onto his shoulders beneath a conference room window and wave a teddy bear tied to a skylight pole, complies with grave courtesy and offers to keep the bear safe afterwards. Sykes, a chauffeur with a boxer’s neck, gives Richard a guided tour of a rare agapanthus while explaining, very politely, how easily he could dislocate a man’s arm. On the train, a quarrelling brother and sister argue over his habit of singing at her, and whether the nation needs to sing together to be ready for what is coming.
A Nation Rehearsing in Song
That argument in the dining car is the novel’s thesis put as comedy. In this England people sing to each other in lobbies, pubs, corridors and train carriages, and their songs say what manners forbid. It recalls the music hall tradition the opening pages celebrate, where private feeling was performed out loud for a room of strangers. The device is risky, and the lyrics are intentionally creaky, but it gives Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger by Kazuo Ishiguro a lightness no straight spy novel could manage, and it turns faintly ominous as the book goes on. The passengers singing on the express to Scotland sound, by the end, like a country getting ready.
Under the jokes runs a darker current. The scholars in the hotel are a secret circle of British Nazi sympathisers, and Miss Lambert has been gathering scandal for them in order to infiltrate them. Her recurring image is of a child lifting stones in a garden and finding horrors beneath, and her distress is less about any single blackmail victim than about what she has learned of the empire and the class that raised her, of dear old England itself.
Where Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger Holds Back
That distress is also where Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger by Kazuo Ishiguro is most frustrating. Ishiguro raises the question of what Miss Lambert discovered and then declines to show it, so the book’s moral weight rests on hints. The same reticence keeps its heroine at a distance. Christine Lambert is brisk, funny, brave and always on the move, yet she is seen entirely through Richard’s adoring and unreliable eyes, and readers never get much closer to her than he does. Its middle section, set at the Devon hotel, relies heavily on notes delivered by waiters, coded rendezvous and lengthy hiding, and the train finale cheerfully abandons plausibility for slapstick. Readers should know that there is lethal violence on the train, fascist and antisemitic talk, blackmail over a man’s sexuality and the shadow of war, all handled without lingering.
The Songwriter Behind Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to Guildford with his family at five. As a teenager he wanted to write songs, and he spent a gap year travelling through North America sending demo tapes to record companies before turning to fiction. Music has never left his work, and in 2024 Faber published The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, a collection of his lyrics for a jazz singer he has worked with for years. Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger by Kazuo Ishiguro reads as if that songwriter finally got to stage his own show, with an orchestra on call and a cast that sings on cue. He also drew the illustrations that open each part.
It is his first novel since Klara and the Sun in 2021 and marks a return to the 1930s of The Remains of the Day, though the mood here is closer to a matinée than a requiem. Readers who loved Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro will recognise the narrator who understands less than the reader. The Remains of the Day is the obvious companion, a sombre view of the same aristocratic flirtation with Berlin, and Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, the 1936 novel behind Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, offers a similar mix of train-bound espionage and English comedy.
After the Last Page
Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger by Kazuo Ishiguro is out on 9 March 2027, and this review is based on an advance copy, so the finished text may differ. It is a lighter book than its author’s masterpieces, and it holds its heroine and its darkest material at arm’s length. But its final pages, set long after the adventure, turn a caper into a reckoning with what a generation gave up when it stopped singing to each other. The empty circle in that walled garden, gleaming like water, is the image that remains: a space where something once stood, and two young people dancing on it anyway.