When We Were Orphans

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 338 pp

For the San Jose Mercury

By now the talented English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro might have us conditioned to expect the unexpected, but in fact his last three books have a good deal in common. The typical Ishiguro protagonist is a stiff, deluded man who stumbles wide-eyed through a mysterious world attuned to its every nuance yet unable to piece together even its most obvious outlines until it’s too late. He’s repressed, compulsive, surprised by his own emotions and a garrulous if unreliable narrator.

In Ishiguro’s best-known book, the deservedly acclaimed Remains of the Day, our hearts are broken by the tale of a butler whose twisted notion of duty helps blind him to the prospect of love. In The Unconsoled, Ishiguro’s next novel, a pianist finds himself lost in a nameless, dreamlike city to which he’s evidently come to give a performance.

In Ishiguro’s latest, the central character plays out his misguided sense of duty in what appears to be the Kafkaesque landscape of his own imagination. The result is an extraordinarily crafted failure of catastrophic proportions, one all the more frustrating because inside this self-defeating narrative lurks a pretty compelling work of fiction. It’s not even hard to find.

When We Were Orphans is the story of Christopher Banks, an English child growing up in pre-World War One Shanghai whose father is in the opium trade. Young Christopher, called Puffin by those who love him, lives in the International Settlement carved out of Shanghai by the colonial powers, and his best friend, Akira, is Japanese.

As an adult Christopher becomes a successful detective, and his life’s work is solving the mystery of his parents’ disappearance, a mystery that haunts him during his young manhood in England. During this time he meets the beautiful Sarah Hemmings, who later provides the pretext for his war-time return to Shanghai to find his parents.

Despite the intervening years, Christopher (who narrates his own story) is certain they are still alive, but from the outset there is reason to doubt his grip on things. He pretends to enjoy as jokes the ridicule others seem to heap on him, and he is shocked to learn that as a schoolboy he was regarded as a lonely outsider. That he should be a detective is fitting; he is forever trying to divine how he should act and then reporting himself pleased at his great verisimilitude in imitating normality.

Ishiguro’s grip on the mechanics of narrative structure is, as usual, admirable. He has an exquisitely developed sense of how and when to reveal things, and how to accomplish his emotional ends in the most refined possible way. It’s all the more puzzling, then, that Ishiguro’s story seems to go off the rails about midway through, when the author, as if chained to his own lunatic narrator, can’t stop himself from following the guy right off a cliff.

Ishiguro seems to have fallen victim to what might be called the fabulist heresy, and either because times have changed or because the author’s own commitment to the strategy seems unsure, all the emotional power of what should have been a devastating story is drained off into a tepid brew that might be called magical surrealism.

Like The Unconsoled, it’s impossible to read this book without thinking of Kafka, but in this case a more recent work of fiction comes to mind: Tim O’Brien’s 1979 novel of Vietnam, Going After Cacciato, which is another battlefield excursion into the surreal.

The problem is that hearts still break, something Ishiguro of all people must know. It may once have been news that reality is an ever-shifting ether of mysterious forces we can neither understand or control, but by now it’s almost a piece of cultural cant. Yet no matter how alienated the novel-reading classes may feel in, say, Wal-Mart, they still ache with love for their children and sense, off in the distance, the scary thunder of their own mortality. People all over the world still, at this late date, suffer and yearn and experience, now and then, bliss, which is why novels with purely epistemological agendas probably strike most grown-up readers as masturbatory.

When We Were Orphans offers the full panoply of what used to be called objective correlatives, including marriage, warfare and even suspense. But it’s hard to care. The only characters we really believe in are seen only fleetingly, and the narrator we are forced to live with is so dotty or distant or both that it’s difficult to grant him enough humanity to feel what he feels, however much he’s been through.

In fact, we can’t figure out whether he’s been through it or not. If the happenings in this book are supposed to be real, than When We Were Orphans is a bizarre and extended lapse by a writer known for his excruciatingly precise control. If they’re not supposed to be real, then where are the cues to what’s really going on, aside from the inherent implausibility of what’s presented?

When a film version of The Remains of the Day appeared, the critic Vincent Canby observed that the butler’s story was really that of the patient and deluded working people of England whose elites were often Nazi sympathizers. Along these lines, When We Were Orphans can be read as a parable of English colonialism, with Christopher playing out the desire of Ishiguro’s adopted land to cope with both its colonial heritage and the loss of the colonies in which it was enacted.

But the magnificence of The Remains of the Day arises from Ishiguro’s consummate skill at gradually revealing, during the foolishness of the butler’s quest to visit a former co-worker, the profound sadness of an emotional cripple who has thrown away love. Christopher’s quest, in When We Were Orphans, has the same potential, but the great sadness here is that it wasn’t realized.

Daniel Akst is the author of St. Burl’s Obituary, a novel.