REVIEW #28: WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS – A FORENSIC SEARCH FOR THE PAST

When We Were Orphans
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber and Faber 2000

          A FORENSICALLY EXAMINED LIFE

It is twenty-four years since Ishiguro published this novel and I have only just discovered it. Fortunately, unlike music, great novels never go out of fashion, even when they are situated in a particular historical time and place. Like The Remains of the Day, this novel is infused with the politics and power plays of Shanghai with its mixture of War Lords and the lucrative opium trade, bubbling beneath the surface of the middle-class respectability of the International Settlement where the protagonist grew up. Though he was to be resettled in England after the disappearance of his parents, Christopher Banks would be unable to cut his ties to Shanghai.

Despite establishing his life in Kensington after completing school and his degree at Cambridge, and throwing himself into his rather eccentric choice of career as a detective, there was a dark nugget of curiosity that sat in a corner of his mind and could not be dislodged. He needed to discover what had become of his parents. Having been enamoured with the work of the great detective, Inspector Kung, during his childhood, and in light of his parents disappearance, it was not altogether surprising that Banks chose a career as a detective. Many of his childhood games as detectives with Akira had foreshadowed this.

Being an introspective character, well-suited to the plodding work of a detective, the reader learns a great deal about the way he grinds away at the everyday incidents of life and his interactions with others in a peculiarly paranoid, almost pathological, manner. Somehow it is endearing, positioning the reader as one who needs to be protective of his sensitive nature and not judge him too harshly, as he seeks to find acceptance in London society in the 1920’s and to build a reputation as a detective, in order to give him a sense of self-worth. It is also the characteristic that enables him to recall, in extraordinary detail and with admirable frankness, the memories of his childhood that keeps those first seven years as vivid in his mind as his daily life in what was really his ‘adopted’ country of England. After all, living in  England was a culture shock after his childhood in Shanghai. Though tightly enveloped within the safe confines of the International Settlement, Banks had a Chinese amah and was surrounded by the signs, symbols, language, architecture, art and all manner of Chinese cultural influences. Moreover, his best friend was Japanese, so there was a fascinating interplay of cultural differences which impacted on their play and communication, making his childhood an atypical one for a British boy.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the novel was his return to Shanghai as an adult with the express purpose of putting his detective skills and his lifetime of research into discovering what may have happened to his parents. Hopeful of finding his parents, Banks sets out on his greatest challenge ever in the highly charged atmosphere of Shanghai without any language to communicate with the locals, but armed with his theories and a determined optimism that he would be able to solve this case that had changed his life.

Some of what he finds does not surprise him, but Ishiguro takes us into a world that blurs the edges of reality with the surreal, in his gruelling search and then, just for good measure, we are treated to an insightful psychological analysis of those adult ghosts from his childhood when he discovers the fate of his father, mother and ‘uncle.’ Against the disappointing human weakness of these key figures in his life, Ishiguro juxtaposes the goodness and straight-forward kindness of Banks’s adopted daughter and he leaves us with a sense that it is possible to find a quiet contentment in life, despite the failures and disappointments of the past. I haven’t even mentioned the parallel life of his friend, Sara, who hovers in the background, then comes to the fore as an undulating friendship that is perhaps founded mostly on their both being orphans and the way that has set them adrift in the world without an anchor and the attempts of both to find something to which they could anchor their lives. The whole political and social milieux of Shanghai is another thread that adds to the complex carpet of ideas and relationships that makes this novel another magic carpet ride with Kazuo Ishiguro.