When We Were Orphans (Paperback)

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.

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.

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