Cannonball #29: When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
by Caroline
I’m typing and deleting and retyping ideas here as I reach for an analogy to suit this book. It is one part I Am the Cheese, Robert Cormier’s shocking novel of a boy’s series of psychological . . . revelations? But the other part, I’m not sure of — I think Ishiguro is going for the measured feeling of a detective novel, the kind of detached logician embodied by Sherlock Holmes but also represented by wave after wave of Poirots and Lynleys and Morses and alikes over the years.
Ishiguro does not succeed with this book. It is a little too baffling to be fully realized or sucked into, the tone too antiseptic, the narrator too unreliable. Christopher Banks, a British expat raised in Shanghai until the disappearance of both of his parents, becomes a successful and somewhat famous detective in London before deciding he needs to return to Shanghai and find his parents after many years have passed. He doggedly insists they are still alive after twenty years and even more bafflingly is convinced he is going to play a huge role in preventing the involvement of China and Japan in both the Sino-Japanese War and the impending Second World War.
In the meantime, he has somewhat adopted a young orphan girl, and has a skittering ongoing friendship with an orphaned adult woman in London. These two characters are supposed to bear significance but are only outlined and hinted at, and they end up acting as tools for Christopher’s various instincts and strange beliefs about his life and his mission as a detective. I will not say more because the events are confusing enough to read for yourself, let alone to have spoiled in advance by a review.
I don’t know, as usual, Ishiguro writes beautifully and I found the book compelling if not that rewarding. Will it stay with me the way the other three books I’ve read have? No. And in fact, it feels like a rehash of the tone of Remains of the Day mixed with the political subtexts of both Remains and Artist of the Floating World. The raw materials of Ishiguro’s story are exciting and fresh — he purports to write “international novels,” and does so, repeatedly, more successfully than any author I can think of — but something about When We Were Orphans made me feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied. And Christopher Banks absolutely made my skin crawl.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
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