From Cover to Cover
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Call me cussed, but before I read the Booker winner every year, I like to read the also-rans. And so it was that I picked up the paperback edition of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, When We Were Orphans. Before I had actually read his Remains of the Day, I remember a friend describing Kazuo Ishiguro as a somewhat effete version of Amit Chaudhuri. I don’t know whether Chaudhuri would be pleased with this left-handed compliment; but Ishiguro’s prose is, um, all about evocation and description without too much of making things happen. I agreed somewhat when I read Remains of the Day, which, though, I must concede, is a classic. In Remains..., Ishiguro does manage to use just a sliver of a plot the consummate butler taking a solitary drive through the local provinces to create a many-hued monologue on pre-war English society. So, when I picked up When We Were Orphans, his latest, and a most prominent almost-there at this year’s Booker sweepstakes, I was prepared for a virtuoso display of form and a fairly casualand reluctant treatment of content. And I wasn’t entirely disappointed. For the book is a brilliant combination of words put end to end, where every syllable fits snugly into the well-assembled design. To use Ishiguro’s own description: “Words are like the twine that keep slats in a sunblind together ... otherwise parts (of the story), like slats, would fall and scatter all over the floor.”

One is dazzled by the telling, but somewhat dissatisfied with the tale. The protagonist, Christopher Banks, rises to be one of the most successful detectives in 1930s London. However, in spite of all the accolades and success, one case continues to haunt our young Sherlock (when he’s not chasing a will o’ the wisp named Sarah Hemmings over the geography of London city) the serial disappearance of his parents in Shanghai when he was a young boy. Banks realises that all his success is meaningless until, unless he solves this one mystery. And so he must return to Shanghai one last time. Are his parents still alive?

The narrative floats back and forth, between a thirties London where Banks moves from social soiree to soiree, drawn to the mysterious La Hemmings like a moth to a star; his early childhood in Shanghai, with his Japanese friend Akira (very imaginative choice of name, that); and finally Shanghai again, in the late thirties dark, gloomy, unhappy, and ravaged by poverty, opium and war. The humour is understated and subtle: “The chauffeur had for some time been steering us through tiny alleys quite unsuitable for a car, sounding his horn repeatedly to get pedestrians out of our way, and I had begun to feel ridiculous, like a man who has brought a horse into a house.”

Ishiguro’s description of Banks’s childhood is flawless, with tender care for the development of the bond between Christopher (Puffin, as his parents called him) and Akira. Akira’s continuous use of “old chip” instead of “old chap” one day, and reverting to “old chap” the next day as if he had always been saying it that way, will endear him to all readers. One also likes Banks’s mother’s disarmingly ethical stand in her crusade against opium the very product that pays her husband’s salary. One also is moved by the passages involving Banks and his adopted daughter Jennifer, a young girl who has lost her parents in a drowning incident. Especially when Jennifer says: “When you’re at school, sometimes, you forget. Just sometimes. You count the days until the holidays like the other girls do, and then you think you’ll see mother and papa again.”

The sense of loss of an orphan can only be shared by somebody else who also lost his parents young. But the sense of all human mortality imbues these passages. The gentle description of the tender, somewhat hesitant moments between the two, filled with pure feeling, is possibly the sweetest triumph of the book. Unfortunately, the best part is soon over, and the worst is literally saved for the last. The unlikely finale of the story involves Christopher moving through the dirt, devastation and squalor in Shanghai in search of the truth which, when it is discovered, seems overly convoluted, coincidental and preposterous. This is where the weakness of When We Were Orphans lies.

The last fifty odd pages are made almost painful for the reader in quest of a complicated, twisted and completely absurd denouement. Parts of the book are glorious, but as a whole, Ishiguro’s latest work leaves the reader vaguely dissatisfied, as if an unusually lyrical piece of music has somehow ended abruptly, and on a jarring note.

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