When We Were Orphans

Kazuo Ishiguro

Editions

Review

Ishiguro is a writer like no other.  He is perhaps most famous for his third novel, Remains Of The Day pbk £5.99, with its emotionally purblind butler, which was made into a successful film.  Since then, he has produced two further novels that show a deepening of his talents.  The Unconsoled pbk £7.99 is an extraordinary book that reads like the anxiety dream of an eminent musician in some Eastern European city, and reactions to it ranged from the enthusiastic to the baffled.  At first sight, this novel seems more conventional.  Set in the 1930s, it is narrated by Christopher Banks, an apparently successful English detective who, like Ishiguro himself, spent his early childhood in the Far East.  As war approaches, Banks travels to Shanghai on a quixotic mission to save the world from descending into barbarity.  He believes that he will accomplish this by solving the puzzle of why his parents suddenly disappeared when he was a boy there.  The details of how one outcome will bring about the other remain uncertain (as indeed does much else in this book), and gradually, as the investigation entertainingly continues, the reader learns to mistrust Banks and his fatally flawed grasp on truth, and to read between the lines of his narrative.

It is not easy to summarize the strengths and the attraction of Ishiguro’s work.  Perhaps it is enough to celebrate the memorable subtlety of his writing as he explores the problematic territory where reality, illusion and self-deception overlap.  Once you have read them, neither When We Were Orphans pbk £7.99 nor The Unconsoled will ever quite go away. - review by John Wyse Jackson (Seán)