...with When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro appears to have found his synthesis, not only in its expansive yet finely modulated narrative but also in the way it bends the hallucinatory world of its immediate predecessor toward the surface verisimilitude of the butler's story ...seem like another deft postmodern exercise, a historical novel that's not concerned with the life of the past so much as with its literary assumptions. Yet Ishiguro stops just short of parody, and though he won't let his readers surrender to the genre, he doesn't condescend to it either ... The orphan's life is never fully his own, but seems instead as secondhand as the form of this novel itself, so brilliant in its tireless echoes of earlier texts. When We Were Orphans goes much farther than even The Remains of the Day in its examination of the roles we've had handed to us.
...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.
...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.
In When We Were Orphans, the manner has, I think, become a problem. Again, the book has many virtues: it is surely developed and extended; it is full of ingenious variation; it builds to an admirable and satisfying climax. Its virtues, in short, are all architectural ones ... The single problem with the book is the prose, which, for the first time, is so lacking in local colour as to be entirely inappropriate to the task in hand. One can't only admire a book's structure ... Ishiguro's avoidance of phrasal verbs is a major problem here - it gives his narrator a circumlocutious, cautious air which isn't really very helpful ... Of course, there are splendid things in it; the games and huge terrors of a Shanghai childhood. Or the horrific descent into the lawless slums as Banks searches for his kidnapped parents, only partly marred by the way the prose will not budge an inch from its superb, unfeeling immaculacy.
In his new novel, Ishiguro has written a bizarre mystery story that is also a rumination on the limits and powers of memory ... Banks is much like The Remains of the Day's Stevens; both men speak in crisp, stodgy voices, and they are both, the reader comes to realize, unreliable narrators ... Ishiguro, through Banks, may be placing us inside the head of a slightly delusional man walking through a somewhat off-kilter China, a man who causes the reader to question if what he says and sees is to be trusted ... It's as if Ishiguro wanted to write a detective story, with its suspense and intrigue, but ultimately felt the genre too lowbrow and thus tried to turn the novel into some multilayered experiment ... While it's not fair to fault Ishiguro for not writing something as brilliant as The Remains of the Day, it is quite fair to say that this book is a disappointment.
This narrator, Christopher Banks, is a prominent English detective whose ratiocinative skills are severely tested by mysteries lodged in his own haunted past ... The disturbing climax, set in an unsettled urban hell far from the placid environs of the International Settlement, leads to a bitterly ironic revelation of what was sacrificed in order that Christopher Banks might live, and the chastened realization that he is one of those (unconsoled?)... Elegiac, meditative, ultimately emotionally devastating, and the purest expression yet of the author’s obsessive theme: the buried life unearthed by its contingent interconnection with the passions, secrets, and priorities of unignorable other lives.
Despite some contrived events and a tendency to rework the characterizations and themes of his previous books, Ishiguro's latest novel triumphs with the seductiveness of his prose and his ability to invigorate shadowy events with sinister implications ... The crisis here is nothing less than averting WWII, which shares priority in Christopher's mind with the disappearance of his parents in Shanghai in the early 1900s, when he was nine years old ... While the novel is mainly an introspective account of the protagonist's emotional dislocation, Ishiguro shows a new mastery of narrative tension, notably with Christopher's Kafkaesque experience during the Japanese invasion. In the end, Christopher understands that his vision of reality was distorted.
