PanThe Brooklyn Rail...there is a delicious Ishigurian irony to the possibility that the author concluded this all on his own, and decided that the answer lay in proactive plotting –– a scenario all the more believable given what a disastrous piece of advice this appears to have been. Presiding over this plot-driven narrative is the first-person narrator, Christopher Banks ... It is clear that part of Ishiguro’s mission here was to deconstruct the older and closure of classic detective stories, but that is no real consolation at the novel’s end, since it has been clear from the very beginning ...When We Were Orphans is a failure. Plot and suspense are sacrificed to the psychology of the main character precisely as the psychology of the other, not unimportant characters is sacrificed to ploy and suspense.
