Rating: ****
Tags: Parents, Literary, Death, Shanghai (China), Fiction, Asia, Shanghai, British - China, Dystopia, Mystery fiction, Science Fiction, China, History, Detective and mystery stories, Private investigators, Private investigators - China - Shanghai, British, Psychological, Parents - Death, Missing Persons, Psychological Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General, Lang:en
Summary
British writer Kazuo Ishiguro won the 1989 Booker Prize for
The Remains of the Day, which sold over a million copies in
English alone and was the basis of a film starring Anthony
Hopkins. Now When We Were Orphans, his extraordinary fifth
novel, has been called “his fullest achievement
yet” (The New York Times Book Review) and placed him
again on the Booker shortlist. A complex, intelligent, subtle
and restrained psychological novel built along the lines of a
detective story, it confirms Ishiguro as one of the most
important writers in English today. London’s Sunday Times
said: “You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it
is extending the possibilities of fiction.”The novel
takes us to Shanghai in the late 1930s, with English detective
Christopher Banks bent on solving the mystery that has plagued
him all his life: the disappearance of his parents when he was
eight. By his own account, he is now a celebrated gentleman
sleuth, the toast of London society. But as we learn, he is
also a solitary figure, his career built on an obsession.
Believing his parents may still be held captive, he longs to
put right as an adult what he was powerless to change as a
child, when he played at being Sherlock Holmes — before
both his parents vanished and he was sent to England to be
raised by an aunt. Banks’ father was involved in the
importation of opium, and solving the mystery means finding
that his boyhood was not the innocent, enchanted world he has
cherished in memory. The Shanghai he revisits is in the throes
of the Sino—Japanese war, an apocalyptic nightmare; he
sees the horror of the slums surrounding the international
community in “a dreamscape worthy of Borges” (The
Independent). “We think that if we can only put something
right that went a bit awry, then our lives would be healed and
the world would be healed,” says Ishiguro of the illusion
under which his hero suffers. It becomes increasingly clear
that Banks is not to be trusted as a narrator. The stiff,
elegant voice grows more hysterical, his vision more feverish,
as he comes closer to the truth. Like Ryder of The Unconsoled,
Ishiguro’s previous novel, Banks is trapped in his
boyhood fantasy, and he follows his obsession at the cost of
personal happiness. Other characters appear as projections of
his fears and desires. All Ishiguro’s novels concern
themselves with the past, the consequences of denying it and
the unreliability of memory.It is from Ishiguro’s own
family history that the novel takes its setting. Though his
family is Japanese, Ishiguro’s father was born in
Shanghai’s international community in 1920; his
grandfather was sent there to set up a Chinese branch of
Toyota, then a textile company. “My father has old
pictures of the first Mr. Toyota driving his Rolls-Royce down
the Bund.” When the Japanese invaded in 1937, the
fighting left the international commune a ghetto, and his
family moved back to Nagasaki.When We Were Orphans raises the
bar for the literary mystery. Though more complex than much of
Ishiguro’s earlier work, which has led to mixed
reactions, it was published internationally (his work has been
published in 28 languages) and was a New York Times
bestseller.