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Title: When We Were Orphans : A Novel by Kazuo Ishiguro ISBN: 0-375-72440-0 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 October, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.25 (162 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Stinging 'Catch 22' black farce highlights Western blindness
Comment: The book sets itself up as a mannered English detective novel, with the protagonist (Christopher Banks) as an older, educated voice reviewing his childhood in Shanghai. He takes himself very seriously, and the prose is always measured and careful, controlled.
Ishiguro also wrote The Remains of the Day, and likewise many will find it stifling. L. read it and got annoyed at the way this older voice was always apologising or justifying or condescending to the actions and thoughts of the child.
Still, definitely not a totally self-aware character, and some of the effect is to deliberately tell us something about the older character by the way he narrates the younger.
If you're looking for places to exclaim, "Holmes, that's brilliant," at the deductive prowess of someone described in the book as a celebrated detective, it doesn't really happen. But somehow you don't seem to notice because of all the tangents describing people and places.
There's also the (seemingly) central mystery to carry you along. Gradually you realise that the persona's parents both disappeared, and this is the big case he's setting himself up to solve.
Ishiguro doesn't let him (or us) just get on with solving it though - there are other people and issues distracting him. Still, it does appear that finally he's about to crack it.
Up til now you may have just thought this was an OK novel in terms of presenting characters and something of the nature of how life unfolds, often without our control. More than a mere detective novel, but we'll take that too.
Then the whole thing just departs - and makes it, in my opinion, a stand out book. If you haven't read it yet and you want to get the effect, don't read on.
He goes back to Shanghai, but there is invasion/civil war in China. The Europeans are still there in their safe section, while the Kuo-min-tang are putting up the only resistance to Japanese invasion. Banks is suitably disgusted by the way the Europeans callously enjoy their dance parties while bombs are landing on the populace around them. They ignore any responsibility or compassion.
Meanwhile, he's getting closer to solving the case! He thinks he may have found where his parents are hidden, and sets out to find them. This is complicated by a romantic sub-plot, but more so by the fact that this house is behind the battle line. The narration, along with the narrator, becomes more and more fevered and dreamlike/nightmarish. We are wanting him to solve this case 'against a backdrop of the Japanese invasion of China', but (unlike the context of a thousand other novels set in violent times) the invasion refuses to remain a backdrop. Rather inconveniently for our hero and us, minor characters keep getting in the way, can't they just go off and be dealt with and let us/him get on with it. Don't they realise how important this is - this is his big case! The central plotline of the book. But while we agree with him, we get increasingly uncomfortable with the way he forces Chinese characters - still subservient to Europeans - to risk (and lose) their lives to enable him to fulfil his (our) quest.
By the time he finally gets to the house, THE house, where he can be reunited with his long lost parents, the house has been recently shelled. Instead of finding his parents, he finds a very recently injured and orphaned girl with the corpses of her parents. The irony is thick, as we can't feel sorry for him in the light of what's just happened in this house, and doubtless in a thousand others. He loses it, and starts trying to comfort the girl, "Don't worry, I'm a celebrated detective, I can solve this crime." He insanely pulls out his magnifying glass and starts looking for clues. This is brutally effective farce.
But this is what we do. Real people and suffering in real life serve as a mere 'background' for the dramas of our own lives. I remember a med student coming back from working overseas with some desperately poor, but the way she narrated it, they were merely interesting experiences. It was a novel holiday.
Likewise, for us it was a novel thing to hear her relate her experiences.
Ishiguro, for my money, really captures something of our British Raj approach to the darkies (or whoever), and the drippingly unconscious condescension even when we're speaking well of them.
A very clever way to use a convention to make such a powerful statement.
He does solve the mystery later, but by this time we're all a bit numb, and it's all much more in perspective.
And very strong that what we're getting into perspective is something that in the west would be something any individual could use to claim utter precedence on sympathy - the disappearance of their parents when they were only a child.
We were interested in what happened to them, and we wanted Banks to find them, but, like him, by the time we do we don't really care nearly as much. We know it's not that important. Or if it is, we're just ignoring a whole heap of much more important things constantly, merely because they happen to poor people.
Rating: 4
Summary: Elevates the detective story to literature
Comment: It will be intriguing to see whether Ishiguro's new novel will translate to the screen as successfully as his best-known work, The Remains of the Day. One thing they unquestionably share, however, is a depiction of pure Englishness that no Englishman could do more than aspire to. The author, a Japanese national who has spent much of his life in the UK, captures those elusive quintessences of Englishness - snobbery, class, self-deprecation and imperial arrogance - far better than any living writer to the manor born.
"Orphans" is the story, told in the first person, of a brilliant English detective (in the Sherlock Holmes mode), raised as a child in Shanghai between the wars who returns to England when his parents mysteriously vanish. Shanghai was an international settlement at the time, and the protagonist's childhood friend is Japanese. Ishiguro draws on his own experience of growing up in a foreign culture, and all the tensions that entails. The bulk of the book is set in adulthood, with flashbacks to childhood, as the narrator sets out to solve the ultimate crime - the abduction of his own parents. The story unfolds on multiple levels: we quickly realise that the self-proclaimed Great Detective is, to use a modern phrase, "in denial" of the realities of his own powers, his parents' all-important honour, and even his popularity as a schoolboy.
The plot is intricate and beautifully put together. Building towards the climax, clambering through the ruins of Shanghai as it is torn apart by warring Chinese and Japanese, the reader is drawn further and further in. What had started out as seemingly innocuous and realistic ends up veering to surrealism. Surely the detective doesn't really believe what he's telling us he believes, as the bullets whistle through the debris? Read and find out.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Highly Original Character Study
Comment: I have read and loved everything Kazuo Ishiguro has published, but my favorite works still remain THE REMAINS OF THE DAY (which I think is perfect in every way) and THE UNCONSOLED. Even though I didn't like WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS quite as much as the above mentioned two, I still thought it was a masterpiece and a book every lover of great literature should definitely read.
WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS explores much of the same territory as do Ishiguro's other works, i.e., memory and the reliability of memory, though in a completely different and totally original way. The narrator of WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS is Christopher Banks, a man who was born in Shanghai and lived there until one day his father, and then his mother simply vanished from his life and he was sent back to England to be raised by his maiden aunt. Set in 1923, Christopher is now a graduate of Cambridge with one abiding obsession: to become the world's greatest detective and solve the riddle of his parents' disappearance.
If we believe everything Banks tells us, he has already had a very illustrious career by the time he sets out to find what happened to his parents long ago in Shanghai. But, can Banks be trusted? Are his memories, both recent and those of the more distant past, to be relied upon? Or is he living in a world of his own making, deluding himself and attempting to delude us as well? It's hard to say, for, after all, this isn't Kafka who's writing...it's Kazuo Ishiguro and, to his great credit, Ishiguro is far more nuanced and subtle than Kafka ever was.
Christopher Banks is not so much enigmatic as he is infuriating. Just when we think we're able to figure him out, just when we think we know who he is, Ishiguro spins the novel in another direction and we're not sure anymore. The only person who seems sure of just who...and what...Christopher is...is Christopher, and since we can't rely on a thing he says, we're more than a little "at sea." But that is all a part of this book's charm.
And then there is Sarah Hemmings. Now there is a character who is truly enigmatic.
Christopher does finally travel from England to Shanghai in an attempt to solve the disappearance of his parents. And, in some ways, he does solve it...but in other ways he does not. Or, has he simply been leading us on a merry chase instead? Has he known the answers all along? The answers to these questions are in the book, but it wouldn't be fair to give even a hint of them here.
WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS might seem to be something of a mystery or detective novel but it isn't at all. Not in the least. Christopher Banks is more of a mystery than is the kidnapping of his parents. And, as I said above, the theme of this book, like all of Ishiguro's books, is memory and its reliability. It is Christopher's memories that we need to be concerned with, not any clues as to the resolution of the kidnapping that might or might not be strewn throughout this book (and it gives nothing at all away to tell you that they aren't strewn throughout the book...there is no figuring out this one ahead of time). Plot, however, takes a backseat in WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS. The plot is simply a vehicle to showcase the character of Christopher Banks and help us get to know him.
I know many people who, even though they liked Ishiguro's other books, do not like WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS. They seem to feel it's too nebulous, too open-ended, too needing of individual interpretation. Those are precisely the reasons why I loved it. It is very, very different from anything else Ishiguro has ever written, with one important distinction. It is filled with Ishiguro's trademark, highly controlled, perfectly nuanced prose. Even if you don't like the story, I think the book is worth reading simply for the prose alone. There are few authors who can write as well as Ishiguro, and I'm not talking about plot right now, I'm speaking of prose. Ishiguro writes prose the way Debussy wrote music and everything is as pitch perfect in WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS as it is in THE REMAINS OF THE DAY.
People who need a neat and tidy ending will probably be disappointed with WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS, but those who love a beautifully written character study that is a little offbeat, will find just what they're looking for in this book. Ishiguro doesn't write "beach reads." He writes literature that will endure. To think that his books are going to be "easy" is simply being naive. WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS is a beautiful study of a man affected by a childhood trauma and the lifelong effects of that trauma. Although I preferred other Ishiguro works a little more, I still loved this book and would recommend it highly.
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Title: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro ISBN: 0679731725 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 September, 1990 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro ISBN: 0679722661 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 September, 1989 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro ISBN: 067972267X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 September, 1990 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro ISBN: 0679735879 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 October, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Blind Assassin : A Novel by Margaret Atwood ISBN: 0385720955 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 28 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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