Roopa Unnikrishnan

Roopa Unnikrishnan Writes

New York Post
October 1, 2000

When We Were Orphans
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
336pp; $25

Reviewed by Roopa Unnikrishnan

Read purely as a story, and not as the stylish novel it is, Kazuo Ishiguro's
"When We Were Orphans" is about an orphan's search for the truth about his
parents' disappearance. However, to describe it as that would be to do the
book a disservice. Like his previous novel, "The Remains of the Day", this
is a book about personal discovery and gradual transformations.

As you follow the young detective Christopher Banks, narrator of this memoir
through his diary entries, you are struck by the unreliability of this
guide. Memories and interpretations are contradicted by other characters,
and in other cases you follow an event and are startled by Bank's obviously
invalid interpretation. The reader's suspicions of his faulty perceptions
are confirmed time and again. As he embarks on his quest to "solve the
problems of the world," you get an almost visceral sense of his misplaced
self-importance. You feel some contempt and considerable pity for this
incomplete human being. I found myself reminiscing about other fictional
narrators -- especially those of Salman Rushdie and Vladimir Nabokov -- who
are often unreliable but strangely sympathetic.

Christopher Banks lost his parents when he was a boy of 10 in Shanghai, was
taken to London and grew up believing his privileged upbringing was the gift
of a wealthy aunt. He cannot shake the belief that he must somehow go back
to Shanghai and take care of unfinished business -- find his parents, who he
believes to be alive, and complete his mother's mission of eradicating the
hold of opium on the natives. Interestingly he believes he would do the
latter by simply solving the former mystery. In a sense they are linked, but
not in the simplistic way our hero imagines they are. Banks' childlike
beliefs are drawn from partially interpreted memories, and it sometimes
seems he can hardly bare to fully understand what those events mean. He thus
falls in love with the duplicitous Sarah Hemmings, saves an unnamed Japanese
soldier who he convinces himself is his long-lost friend Akira and
tenaciously uncovers the truth, more by dogged determination than by
brilliance of any sort.

Ishiguro guides us through 28 years of Banks' life skillfully, jumping from
one reminiscence to another. You are often left wanting to follow some
thread or question another, as "something fishy" is left uninvestigated and
as events are partially recounted. Through Banks' journey across London,
Shanghai, a murder mystery and a potential love affair, the reader is a
hostage taken by hand through one surprising turn after another. The author
is most skillful as he describes his unraveling hero's walk through the
war-torn Chinese countryside. If there is one aspect of this book that
follows the time-honored rules of storytelling, it is that the last 30 pages
clarify the questions that have been set up in the first 300. Once again,
Ishiguro has given us a gently thought-provoking piece of literature.