MixedSalon...in When We Were Orphans when Ishiguro allows his style to recede so that the story can take over, it sometimes feels like the Creamsicle has fallen off and you're left holding the stick ... Minor characters pop in and out of the story, dropping portentous hints that there's a great evil at play upon the world, with Shanghai as its nexus...things just keep getting queerer as the story goes on, until you start to wonder whether the world contained in the book is more fanciful than it seems...is less than a proper mystery because you couldn't have figured it out ahead of time, and it doesn't end with enough of a Kafkaesque, mythopoetic wallop to make the surprise worth wringing your hands over.
