When We Were Orphans
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Amazon.co.uk Review
"... I've worked hard over the years to check the spread of crime and evil wherever it has manifested itself."Christopher Banks, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, When We Were Orphans, has dedicated his life to detective work but behind his successes lies one unsolved mystery: the disappearance of his parents when he was a small boy living in the International Settlement in Shanghai. Moving between England and China in the inter-war period, the book, encompassing the turbulence and political anxieties of the time and the crumbling certainties of a Britain deeply involved in the opium trade in the East, centres on Banks's idealistic need to make sense of the world through the small victories of detection and his need to understand finally what happened to his mother and father.
This new novel, however, is the deliberate antithesis of the classic English detective story--the hermetic country-house worlds of Agatha Christie, the classic "locked room" puzzles in which order and sanity is restored at the story's end. Ishiguro mimics the functional style and clipped speech patterns of the genre, ironising its reliance on melodrama and stereotype, while developing a narrative of subtlety, great emotional depth, and political and cultural acuity: what we get is a negative image of classic detective fiction, in which the solved crimes are mentioned in passing and the real mystery is played out in the psychology of the detective himself. The act of detection, Ishiguro suggests, is one we all perform on our own past, struggling to marshal clues and evidence whilst trying to construct the story of ourselves; the one mystery Banks seems unable to solve is his own.
If Ishiguro's concerns as a writer remain broadly the same as in previous novels such as his Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day--the complexities, instability and elusiveness of memory, dramatised through a first-person narrator--this new book shows how flexible and powerful the form has become for him. Banks' quest is both deeply personal and resonantly emblematic of us all:
...for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.
When We Were Orphans is an astonishing book, rich and profound on many levels, and one that will live clearly in the memory of all who read it. --Burhan Tufail --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction.' --Sunday Times
'Ishiguro is the best and most original writer of his generation, and ''When We Were Orphans'' could be by no other writer. It haunts the mind. It moves to tears.' --Mail on Sunday
'His fullest achievement yet.' --New York Times Review of Books --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
'Ishiguro is the best and most original writer of his generation, and ''When We Were Orphans'' could be by no other writer. It haunts the mind. It moves to tears.' --Mail on Sunday
'His fullest achievement yet.' --New York Times Review of Books --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I must say it feels terrifically disloyal to give anything by Ishiguro less than 5 stars. His four previous novels are all utterly perfect, but there's something not quite right about "When We Were Orphans."
It is this. Whenever Ishiguro's previous novel, "The Unconsoled," was published in 1995, he suffered a terrible critical mauling. Now that the book is more widely accepted, the current edition of the paperback dares to make askance reference to the controversy that dogged it. One would like to think that Ishiguro, a supremely accomplished novelist with surely no lack of self-awareness, would have let it be and allowed the book to come into its own in its own time.
Unfortunately he expressed deep dismay that so few readers initially had "got" "The Unconsoled." He didn't intend it to be obscure, he said. He explained the themes. He said that he would write it again, perhaps less opaque this time: more accessible.
And that is what he has done and "Orphans" is the result. It's a supremely well-written book but, well, so uncalled-for... It's almost impossible to read Christopher Banks's narrative without thinking fondly of Ryder, the narrator of "The Unconsoled." The same inability to understand why things are happening, the same obsession with parents... As a result, oddly, I was at variance with most of the reviewers of the hardback edition in finding the closing section the most interesting part of the book, simply because it doesn't rehash the last book and enters new territory.
It should be read, but not before you read his others.
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Although I usually like Ishiguro, I found this book disappointing, lacking coherence, its purpose muddy. The first half of the book is suspenseful, tautly constructed, and realistically presented, as we learn of Christopher Banks's history and of the ironies of his parents' disappearance. Once he arrives in Shanghai, however, the book splits into two seemingly disconnected halves-the first half realistic, the second half absurd. In the first half, Banks has been revealed as intelligent and sensitive, but in the second half he suddenly and cruelly abandons his own adopted, orphaned daughter, leaving her in England while he searches for his missing parents. He believes (strangely) that somehow if he can find his parents, he'll be able to avert World War II. His search for them is expedited more by an inordinate number of extraordinary coincidences than by the detective work for which he is supposedly world-renowned. The plot stumbles, and the suspense is compromised.
Since Ishiguro has dealt in past novels with the idea of imperfect memory and/or with characters whose deluded visions of themselves are presented ironically to the reader as facts, one cannot help wondering, while reading the second half, whether Banks really is a great detective, whether he really is doing all the absurd things he presents to us as real events in Shanghai, and whether the author is deliberately showing him in a surreal, rather than real, world. If this is the author's intention, it is by no means clear--there are too few clues in the first half to cause the reader to actively question the view of reality presented there. In addition, it is not accompanied in the second half by any heightened sense of introspection or by any change from the realistic tone and style of the first half. Neither Banks nor the reader learns anything significant on any level other than that of plot.
Ultimately, I found myself haunted by the drama of Banks's search and by his need to resolve the mysteries in his life but frustrated--and annoyed--by his ultimate lack of change and by the unresolved mysteries with which the author leaves us. The author made me feel like a pawn, the victim of literary trickery. Mary Whipple
17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
To understand this book, you may need to first read Ishiguro's earlier work, "The Unconsoled". Although "Orphans" looks on the surface like a straightforward detective novel, I think to believe this would be to misunderstand its purpose. The journey is the point, not the destination.
And what a journey, with so many themes - the experience of losing parents, a "given" romance which somehow never really takes off, a detective story, a devastating depiction of the effects of hand to hand combat during the fall of Shanhai.
I did not find the prose style overly "poetic" - on the contrary, I thought the narrative had great pace and moved the reader on from one page to another with increasing urgency.
As ever with Ishiguro, the book raises more questions than it answers. For example, why did Banks take guardianship of Jennifer, only to abandon her to go to Shanghai? What was the "final answer" to the worlds problems to which only Banks could have had the answer? Why was this linked to the fate of his parents?
A book which hangs on in the mind long after the reader has finished it, and definitely one of the year 2000's essential reads.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Thoroughly Enjoyed.
I actually brought and read this book for a course I take and Uni, not as a pleasure read. That said, I really enjoyed reading it in preparation for my class, I found the novel... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Monday!
Slow Boat to China
I'm a sucker for novels set in pre-war Shanghai when China was in the middle of a long-running war involving Communists, Nationalists, warlords, Japanese invaders and European... Read more
Published 7 months ago by John Fitzpatrick
Implausible
The book develops well over the first half. The story of Christopher's young life, becoming an orphan and the a detective, is engaging. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Michael H. Jones
When were orphans - why did Ishiguro bother?
I read this book twice (second time it was that or a Tom Clancy) and couldn't get the hang of it on the second read. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Lanarkian
A big disappointment.
I didn't like this book. I never felt particularly enthralled by it as it developed, but stuck with it because I hoped everything would come together at the end in some grand... Read more
Published 8 months ago by JOhn
Too many inconsistencies and improbablities - but still an enjoyable...
This is a rather strange novel. It is an easy book to read and get into the story but there are so many inconsistencies and improbabilities that the reader is ultimately left... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Nigel Mc
Didn't ring true
This story just never really became believable to me. I never identified with any of the characters. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Dunfermline woman
Frustrating
Sorry to say, reading this was a waste of time. As others have said, I kept hoping that it would get better - there were good possibilities - but it just didn't hang together. Read more
Published 12 months ago by katiewoky
Excellent
I strongly feel that the key to "getting" Kazuo Ishiguro is to understand that he often uses a flawed narrator. Read more
Published 14 months ago by JimmyBob
This doesn't really make sense, does it?
Stylistically I was not a fan of the book. The way the narrative is informed by reflecting on his childhood was not gripping for me, it's a style that is rarely employed well, in... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Mr. Omnibus Biscuit
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