When We Were Orphans

I love Ishiguro's `The Remains Of the Day' and am fascinated by China and Chinese history, so this book should have been right up my alley. Unfortunately, I just couldn't seem to get into it. This might have been because of my own inability to empathise with Christopher, the central character. Having said that, as you would expect from Ishiguro, the book is beautifully written. The attitudes and expressions of characters come across as historically accurate (contrary to the current trend where historical characters always seem to possess 21st century values). Suspense is maintained throughout as Ishiguro cleverly keeps us from knowing any more than the narrator about what has happened to his parents. There were also interesting parallels in the latter half of the novel to Conrad's `Heart Of Darkness' as the search moves through the war-torn area of Shanghai and Christopher not only has to search physically but also grows in self-awareness. While it didn't grab me at first reading I'm not really surprised that others love it. I'm prepared to give it a second chance at a later date and may well change my rating.

Christopher Banks is a young boy when his parents disappear, one after the other, under mysterious circumstances, while they are living in Shanghai. Christopher is sent back to England to live, where he grows up, with the mystery of his parents' disappearance constantly erodes his grip on reality. The story is told in a first person narrative, and almost from the start, Ishiguro tips us off to the idea that Christopher may not be telling us the whole truth, that he may not be able to grasp the whole truth. Christopher's story and the way he tells it is fascinating. Ishiguro is able to navigate seamlessly from time frame to time frame. Christopher achieves some notoriety in London (or at least he thinks he has) as a private investigator. He returns after many years to Shanghai, to finally try and solve the mystery surrounding his parents' disappearance. He believes he knows what happened to them, even before arriving back in Shangha. It is his misguided beliefs that lead him into an almost Kafkaesque spiral into unreality and delusion. This section of the book must be read as at least a partial deluded episode because much of what happens is implausible. The book, and Christopher, ultimately return to reality and we understand at least part of the truth of Christopher's life and what happened to his parents. I thought this was a brilliant work, not as a detective novel, but as a character study of someone who has been fooling himself his entire life.

If this book were written by anyone other than Kazuo Isagura, editors would have covered the pages with scrawled notes like "inconsistant," or "what??" or "whose style is this supposed to be?" and sent the manuscript back to him with "FIX THIS" written large in red ink. If I told you the plot of "When We Were Orphans" you would probably do as I did and run out to buy it. You can call "When We Were Orphans" great or god-awful, and you could probably back up your argument either way.
It has a terrific plot. It is just very hard to find. The characters are so remote and unemotional that they remind you of those dreams you have when you've slept too long. Suspense builds when Christopher Banks, the main character, returns to Shanghai and everyone thinks he's about to rescue the parents who vanished twenty years before. Why do they think this? Why does Banks behave as if he also expects to find them after all this time? The novel then swings into full-on realistic mode with Banks searching through buildings shattered by bombs as the Japanese army advances on Shanghai.
I'm one of the few who actually prefered the weird "The Unconsoled" to the hallowed "Remains of the Day." The surreal landscape of the former was interesting until it became frustrating, annoying, and finally, dull. "Orphans" suffers from much of the same irritations. Parts of it take off with terrific writing and blazing images, only to be shanghaied (sorry) by some pretentious experiment in something. I did finish the book but felt like I'd been had.

My previous experience of Ishiguro is the peerless Remains of the Day, which is one of the best books I have read. Like Stevens in "Remains", Banks (the principal character of this novel) is a damaged person, damaged by childhood loss rather than by Stevens' obsessive sense of duty. However, unlike Stevens, Banks seems to be recovering, reaching out but attracting, unsurprisingly, other damaged people, an orphan socialite as an object of desire, and an orphan adoptee. Banks's halting steps towards reconnection with the world are riveting, conveyed as they are in the careful and beautiful prose that is this writer's trademark. Perhaps we are headed for a believable denouement, where a subtle but satisfying resolution (from within) redeems Banks somewhat, much as Stevens bantering gave us hope for him at the close of Remains. Perhaps this will take the form of Banks coming to terms with his loss, and seeing that his fascination with detection is a attempt to "save" his parents in a way he could not do as a child.
Well, no. The resolution of the mystery of Banks's parents' disappearance is fairly unbelievable, and I mean unbelievable in ways that cannot be explained by the unreliable narrator device. The babblings of consular official Grayson and the uncertain identity of the soldier whom Banks rescues merely add to the confusion that permeates the last third of the book. However, if Banks has "lost it" as he wanders through the Shanghai war zone, he seems to have completely regained it by the last chapter, where there is a balanced and sensible look at the future by the principal character, in a world that confirms the surprising resolution of the plot and therefore, to some extent, confirms Banks's memory. A narrator of variable unreliability, perhaps? Or is it "all a dream", right down to Banks' Sherlockian detective exploits?
**SPOILER(?)**
Or perhaps the publisher called up one day and said "Look Kazuo - I don't care how you end it - I need to see the ms by next Thursday". Cue Uncle Philip.

A very good book, nominally about a detective's search for his long-lost (abducted) parents, but actually, in true Ishiguro fashion, about the malleability of the past, the irresistibility of momentary whims, and the disjuncture between a man's subjective world and the course of events unfolding around him. In this last respect, the book is more like Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World, set against the backdrop of post-WWII Japan, than The Unconsoled, which might as well be set in Oz, for there IS an objective reality here, and I was relieved when it ultimately reasserted itself -- the unrelenting surrealism of The Unconsoled not being something that should be repeated. At the same time, I am among those who found The Unconsoled to be the most brilliant of works, and consider When We Were Orphans a tentative if necessary foray into a different type of story-line. Ultimately it will be The Unconsoled that I will read again and again, because my fascination with that book is so unrelated to how it ended, and because Ishiguro's outlandish creativity flowered more completely in that longer, less inhibited work.

In WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS Kazuo Ishiguro introduces the reader to 1930's England and the life of Christopher Banks, a celebrated British detective. While Christopher finds success rather easy there is one case that has remained baffling, the kidnapping of his parents in Shanghai, China. Alternating between his adult life in England and his childhood in Shanghai, Christopher travels back to China to settle the mystery that has been plaguing him for decades. What follows is a tale of false assumptions and important clues that leads him to the truth of his parent's disappearance. During the dawn of the Second World War Christopher is a witness of the fighting between the Japanese and Chinese while reuniting with his childhood friend, Akira.
I found the sections regarding Christopher's childhood in Shanghai to be the most captivating. I wanted to learn more about the International Settlement and those individuals living inside. Unfortunately, I found the remainder of this book to be slow and lacking conviction. Towards the end I lost sympathy for the characters and was rightfully disturbed by several obvious plot holes (not to be discussed here in fear of giving away the plot). While the premise of WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS is good, Ishiguro demonstrated poor execution that ultimately distracted from the quality of this novel. I really wanted to like this book but I felt let down.

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of five. He was awarded the OBE in 1995 and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1998. "When We Were Orphans" is his fifth novel, was first published in 2000 and was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize.

The story is set in the 1930s and is told by Christopher Banks. Born and raised in Shanghai until the age of nine - when, within a few weeks of each other, both his parents disappeared - Banks then moved to England, to be raised by an aunt. Now grown up and based in London, Christopher is working as a high profile and very successful private detective. His celebrity has eased his way into fashionable London society, though some - such as Sarah Hemmings - are initially a little resistant to his appeal. Fashionable society, however, isn't Christopher's main concen : although it's been many years since his parents disappeared, the case is still (apparently) open and unsolved. Christopher has taken it upon himself to complete the investigation - "When We Were Orphans" sees him not only move forward with the case, but also look back on his childhood memories of Shanghai. Obviously, his parents feature prominently in these memories - but his friendship with a Japanese boy called Akira was also very important to him. As the book goes on, however, it becomes clear - though unfortunately not to Banks himself - just how unreliable his memories are. Ultimately, the investigation leads to his return to Shanghai - where he hopes to close the case. The trouble, of course, is that while his investigation may uncover the truth, the truth may not be quite what he is expecting...

While I wouldn't say "When We Were Orphans" is entirely flawless, the flaws are only very few and far between. The details on how Christopher conducted his investigation were a little scant - but, as the book wasn't written as a thriller, that's pretty easy to brush off. The style of writing was also occasionally a little formal - there's a few chaps and fellows here and there, what ho. However, given that the story was being told by a Cambridge graduate in the 1930s...somehow, to me, the language added a touch of authenticity. There were one or two questions left unanswered - particularly in relation to Akira. (I'd have given anything to find out what happened to him after Christopher left Shanghai). Overall, though, I'd absolutely recommend this book - very readable, and one that I just couldn't put down.

Having just finished this novel, I'm having trouble pinpointing my thoughts. I still find The Remains of the Day one of the more perfect novels of our generation. Oddly, the "love" story between the narrator and Sarah could come straight out of Remains: Christopher stifles so many urges for her that we cannot help but think of the butler in Remains. As Christopher reads her final letter, we could practically imagine ourselves in the pages of Remains in a similar scene. Add to this side plot the detective element as Christopher turns his detective skills to the mystery of his parents' disappearance and you have several threads to follow in this complex novel. The novel seems to have two distinct parts. The first half or so is the leisurely recounting of the narrator's childhood and his parents' disappearance. The second half turns into a fast paced chase through war torn Shanghai as the quest winds down.
As a detective story, we learn from the beginning to question Christopher's trustworthiness as a narrator. For example, he remembers himself as a "normal" student, and is somewhat taken aback when he meets an old friend who describes him as an oddball. There are at least twenty instances when the narrator questions his own ability to remember correctly. Like Remains, we take in the whole book through this narrator's eyes, so we have to learn to see through this filter.
There are a few coincidences that are hard to believe towards the novel's end. I think that these take away from the force of the novel as a whole. In short, this novel has beautifully written prose, but as a whole, I found it slightly disappointing even as a big fan of Ishiguro's. Still, I think Ighiguro fans should read it -- perhaps I'm being picky -- Ishiguro is one of my all time favorite writers and this is a terrific book in parts. It just seemed a bit disjointed by the end. Give it a try and then read his other four books.

Memories of the distant past influence what people do, feel and choose in a mysterious and complex way. Kazuo Ishiguro, like many other great writers, has done a noble attempt to deal with this and other issues in "when we were orphans". Christopher Banks, a child living in the international quarter of Shanghai, is taken away to London at the age of 10, after the mysterious disappearance of both his parents. He becomes a detective, and goes back to Shanghai many years later, on the verge of the Sino-Japanese war, to solve the secret of their disappearance. The first part of the book, which I find to be the most beautiful part, the personality and mindset of Christopher are meticulously constructed through the memories of his childhood. In the second half, this construct, including those "blind spots" created by his childhood trauma, is set in action. And there's the big problem of the book. It's not the frustration that the reader feels with the partial blindness of our hero - that's to be expected and it complements the first half just perfectly well. It is the absurdity of the events that take place in Shanghai and the improbable behaviour of the characters there that marred the book for me. It's a pity - the recreation of the "good old chap" atmosphere in London is phenomenal, and the build up is just great. It's a shame that such an anti climax follows. One word as to remarks such as "begins slow but gets much faster so hold on to it", that I read a lot everywhere. As in music, so in literature - the slow "adagio" movement or introduction preceding the fast "allegro con brio" can be much more interesting and emotionally effective than the following fast-paced part. And this is the feeling I had with Ishiguro's "When We Were Orphans". If the issue of remembrance and actions (or non-actions) derived from it is of interest - I strongly recommend "The Assault" by the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, which deals in a deeper and more thoroughly convincing way with the question of how traumas we live through in childhood affect the way we behave, the choices we make and the way we see the world as adults.

'When We Were Orphans' is part Kafka, part Edgar Wallace, part Durrenmatt, and all Ishiguro. As in his previous novels, the prose here is flawless. No one can paint a dream landscape quite as effectively as Ishiguro (Shanghai in the late 1930s is a fit counterpoint to the chaos of the narrator's mind), while at the same time peopling it with sympathetic, if disturbed, characters. One clue to understanding Christopher, the central charcter and first-person narrator of the book, is to think of him as an extension of his childhood reading, which would have included generous helpings of detective novels and thrillers, along with classics such as 'Great Expectations,' the name of whose hero, Pip, may have suggested Christopher's nickname, Puffin. There is certainly a Dickensian irony in the supposed resolution to the story, which has Christopher the unwitting recepient of a villainous benefactor's largesse. The best way to approach the book may be as Christopher's desperate attempt to make sense out of the tragedy of his childhood by casting himself as the Great Detective (a figure who does not exist outside of books) and his uncle (who was ultimately guilty of loving Puffin's mother from a not-too-discreet distance) as the arch-villain and architect of his unhappiness. The result is a difficult, but rewarding novel that blurs the lines between fantasy and fiction while exploring the question of obligation, both to family and to those we chose to love.

The narrator in the book is Christopher Banks, an English boy born in Shanghai at the beginning of the 20th century. As a small child, his parents disappear and Christopher is shipped to England. There he pursues a career as private detective with the ultimate aim to go back to Shanghai to solve the disappearance of his parents. This all sounds like your average detective novel, but there is more to it.
Already in England you get the idea that something is not completely right with Christopher: he is too much of a name dropper, claiming to be in contact with very famous people when he is only a young detective. Things get worse in Shanghai and it seems that Christopher is not-too-slowly but very surely losing his grip on reality in a town which is at that moment surreal itself because of the attack by the Japanese army (the year is 1937). The main problem was that I had the idea that Christopher was losing his bearings, but that I was not sure of it. This left me with a rather unsatisfied feeling after finishing the book.

Christopher Banks, the progagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, is a man with only one mission in life: he wants to become the world's greatest detective so he can find his kidnapped parents. But were they really kidnapped? And did other, relevant events really unfold as Banks relates them?
The central question in this highly entertaining and very different sort of story is: Can Christopher Banks, as a narrator, be trusted? He can be, insofar as he is truthful when reporting events as he sees them. Those words are the key to understanding this book, "as he sees them." For Banks knows no other way to tell us his story than as he sees it, even though as he sees it may not be quite the way others would see the very same thing.
When We Were Orphans, like all of Ishiguro's novels, is complex and multi-layered. Many of the book's ideas are symbolic and much lies below the surface. Although extremely entertaining this book is definitely not "beach" reading. It is as cerebral as anything Ishiguro has previously written and it takes an intelligent and austute reader to catch all of the author's meanings, especially in only one reading.
I've read all of Ishiguro's books and all are completely different. What they do have in common is absolute excellence in every respect. They are all the master work of a master writer. None should be missed.

The book sets itself up as a mannered English detective novel, with the protagonist (Christopher Banks) as an older, educated voice reviewing his childhood in Shanghai. He takes himself very seriously, and the prose is always measured and careful, controlled.
 
Ishiguro also wrote The Remains of the Day, and likewise many will find it stifling. L. read it and got annoyed at the way this older voice was always apologising or justifying or condescending to the actions and thoughts of the child.
 
Still, definitely not a totally self-aware character, and some of the effect is to deliberately tell us something about the older character by the way he narrates the younger.
 
If you're looking for places to exclaim, "Holmes, that's brilliant," at the deductive prowess of someone described in the book as a celebrated detective, it doesn't really happen. But somehow you don't seem to notice because of all the tangents describing people and places.
 
There's also the (seemingly) central mystery to carry you along. Gradually you realise that the persona's parents both disappeared, and this is the big case he's setting himself up to solve.
 
Ishiguro doesn't let him (or us) just get on with solving it though - there are other people and issues distracting him. Still, it does appear that finally he's about to crack it.
 
Up til now you may have just thought this was an OK novel in terms of presenting characters and something of the nature of how life unfolds, often without our control. More than a mere detective novel, but we'll take that too.
 
Then the whole thing just departs - and makes it, in my opinion, a stand out book. If you haven't read it yet and you want to get the effect, don't read on.
 
He goes back to Shanghai, but there is invasion/civil war in China. The Europeans are still there in their safe section, while the Kuo-min-tang are putting up the only resistance to Japanese invasion. Banks is suitably disgusted by the way the Europeans callously enjoy their dance parties while bombs are landing on the populace around them. They ignore any responsibility or compassion.
 
Meanwhile, he's getting closer to solving the case! He thinks he may have found where his parents are hidden, and sets out to find them. This is complicated by a romantic sub-plot, but more so by the fact that this house is behind the battle line. The narration, along with the narrator, becomes more and more fevered and dreamlike/nightmarish. We are wanting him to solve this case 'against a backdrop of the Japanese invasion of China', but (unlike the context of a thousand other novels set in violent times) the invasion refuses to remain a backdrop. Rather inconveniently for our hero and us, minor characters keep getting in the way, can't they just go off and be dealt with and let us/him get on with it. Don't they realise how important this is - this is his big case! The central plotline of the book. But while we agree with him, we get increasingly uncomfortable with the way he forces Chinese characters - still subservient to Europeans - to risk (and lose) their lives to enable him to fulfil his (our) quest.
 
By the time he finally gets to the house, THE house, where he can be reunited with his long lost parents, the house has been recently shelled. Instead of finding his parents, he finds a very recently injured and orphaned girl with the corpses of her parents. The irony is thick, as we can't feel sorry for him in the light of what's just happened in this house, and doubtless in a thousand others. He loses it, and starts trying to comfort the girl, "Don't worry, I'm a celebrated detective, I can solve this crime." He insanely pulls out his magnifying glass and starts looking for clues. This is brutally effective farce.
 
But this is what we do. Real people and suffering in real life serve as a mere 'background' for the dramas of our own lives. I remember a med student coming back from working overseas with some desperately poor, but the way she narrated it, they were merely interesting experiences. It was a novel holiday.
 
Likewise, for us it was a novel thing to hear her relate her experiences.
 
Ishiguro, for my money, really captures something of our British Raj approach to the darkies (or whoever), and the drippingly unconscious condescension even when we're speaking well of them.
 
A very clever way to use a convention to make such a powerful statement.
 
He does solve the mystery later, but by this time we're all a bit numb, and it's all much more in perspective.
 
And very strong that what we're getting into perspective is something that in the west would be something any individual could use to claim utter precedence on sympathy - the disappearance of their parents when they were only a child.
 
We were interested in what happened to them, and we wanted Banks to find them, but, like him, by the time we do we don't really care nearly as much. We know it's not that important. Or if it is, we're just ignoring a whole heap of much more important things constantly, merely because they happen to poor people.

When We Were Orphans tells the story of Christopher Banks, a young boy whose parents disappear under mysterious circumstances while they live in Shanghai. When they disappear, the ten-year old Christopher goes back to England to live with an aunt. There in England, the mystery of his parents' disappearance causes Christopher to live in a world of delusion. When he grows up, Christopher works as a private investigator, finally returning to Shanghai several decades later in order to find his parents.

World War II is threatening to destroy Shanghai as the Japanese invade China, and Christopher deludes himself into believing that he can somehow right the world by saving his parents.

The reader, at first believing every world of Christopher's narration, quickly realizes that Christopher does not (and perhaps, cannot) tell the truth. In a truly postmodern narrative, Ishiguro crafts another unreliable narrator, just as convincing and heartbreakingly confused as Stevens in Remains of the Day.

For people who haven't read anything by Ishiguro, I would recommend reading Remains of the Day before delving into When We Were Orphans. The former touches on many of the same themes and issues, but the plot is tighter and less convoluted. However, When We Were Orphans is an intoxicatingly troubling read that never totally resolves itself; readers expecting a coy and satisfying conclusion may well leave disappointed. But that's the trouble with postmodernist narratives.

In slightly Dickensian fashion, Ishiguro builds a sad tale around a nine-year-old British boy in Shanghai at the beginning of the century whose father, working for a firm whispered to have had something to do with the opium trade, disappears one day. His mother disappears then some days later and Christopher is sent to English to be raised by an aunt. As a grown man he develops into a rather celebrated detective and it is then that he decides to return to Shanghai to solve the unexplained disappearances of his parents. He returns during a period of great upheaval in China (during the conflict with Japan in the early 1930s) and searches for and finds his boyhood friend, Akira (in some unbelievable circumstances), and also finds, meets, and is disappointed by Inspector Kung (the man who had headed his father's disappearance case). 
Ishiguro is the master of understatements (his wonderful "Remains of the Day" won the Booker Prize) and yet this novel left me with such despair. This boy is orphaned and yet does not mourn the loss of his parents. He returns to China during a period of almost anarchy and confusion and seems strangely oblivious to it all - his focus so intense on his particular goal. What makes this book worth reading is the exquisite prose of Kazuo Ishiguro. He has a patience in his writing that allows the reader to absorb what is being said at different levels. A beautifully written, heartrending novel.

Regarding instances of the unreliable narrator being, well, unreliable, I got pretty tangled up. I began wondering if when Banks evinced unreasonable anger or impatience with others it was a clue that his delusions were taking over. For instance:

When the gentleman who escorted him back to England after the disappearance of his parents mentioned, years later, that Banks had been a `sniveling' child for the whole trip, Banks' reaction was to become very cold to the man - because his own recollection was that he had been quite stoic.

When two separate times former classmates remembered him as a lonely oddball he became irritated and assumed the former schoolmates were confusing him with someone else, since his recollection was that he'd been popular and well-adjusted.

When Banks made his return to Shanghai I became confused as to what he was remembering correctly and what was part of his delusion. It seemed unlikely that over 20 years later, everyone he encountered remembered as though it were yesterday the kidnappings of his parents and that he was there to finally solve it. In fact, there was the man from the Embassy who was constantly asking his advice on putting together the `Welcome Home' ceremony for them. No one questioned Banks' assumption that not only were his parents still alive after all this time, but that they were still being held in the same house - it was just a matter of locating that house. This was an instance where Banks became strangely irritated with the would-be celebration planner.

Banks had a fit of quiet rage that puzzled even himself when he was talking to Sarah at one point while generally he was oddly tolerant of her. And regarding Sarah - It bewildered me when, just as he uncovered a vital clue as to the supposed whereabouts of his parents, he considered dropping everything when she invited him to run off to Macao with her. Was he seeing Sarah's invitation as an opportunity to at last abandon his life-long delusion? (Although ultimately he wasn't able to do that.)

When the officer in charge of the Chinese command station didn't move quickly enough to escort Banks practically into enemy lines, Banks was bizarrely furious. Again, it was perplexing that an officer in this position would even consider deserting his post to do such a thing in the first place, not to mention that once again a stranger seemed to know all about Banks' parents, that Banks had returned after 20 years to find them, and he did not question Banks' belief that the parents were still being held in the same place.

When he believes he has found Akira who, although in tremendous pain, helps him find the house, Banks again displays impatience and anger that Akira is not taking the mission seriously enough.

I began to wonder if the keys to understanding exactly when Banks was slipping into his fantasy world were 1) when he became irrationally angry and/or 2) when someone, without being told, fully understood, supported and sympathized with his mission as well as revering him as a great detective.

To see if this idea holds up, I guess I would have to actually re-read the book from beginning to end. It seemed clear to me that the soldier he decided was Akira was simply going along with the whole `Yes, I am your dear childhood friend!' in order to get out of enemy territory. I think that since Banks and the real Akira had constantly enacted invented dramas as kids, he needed `an Akira' to help in this present real-life drama/invention.

On the other hand, there were other scenes where, just as I was positive Banks was twisting reality, something or someone would actually seem to corroborate what he was saying.

Overall I was left deeply puzzled. I kept expecting there would be some final scene where someone would sit down and force reality onto Banks - or was the whole narrative reality the entire time? Again, I suppose I'll just have to re-read it with an eye toward seeing if my `clues' hold up!

This tale is mostly set in Shanghai, familiar enough for most readers from Ballard's autobiographical 'Empire of the Sun'. Ishiguro's novel is also concerned with biography. Christopher Banks, his anti-hero, is one of the most deluded characters that you'll ever find in fiction, with his tragedy reflecting that of Oedipus. Not that the method which Banks uses for introspection is psychoanalytic in any way, for you never get the impression that Banks is fuelled by sexual desire, despite his on/off relationship with Sarah Hemmings (another one of the orphans of the title). Part of Banks' character seems forever trapped in an 'innocent', desexualised state of childhood.
When he is still young in Shanghai, both Christopher Banks' parents are kidnapped, his mother some time after his father. His father's company, Butterfield and Swire, then ship Banks 'home', to England - but Christopher still regards the International Settlement in Shanghai as his home. Despite this, Christopher makes the very best of settling into England and English society. But he can never leave the fate of his parents behind... He continues the detective games he'd played with his Japanese friend Akira in Shanghai, imagining himself to be the illustrious Inspector Kung, always on the point of discovering his mother and father. These fictions continue into adult life, with Christopher becoming a fully-fledged detective.
There is some unease to be had from such a character, an air of disbelief and unreality. Surely such heroes as Lord Peter Wimsey and Campion only ever existed in fiction? Perhaps this is why his peers sometimes shatter Banks' illusions, because they can always see that he is maintaining a facade. However, there are plenty of people who humour Banks, making him believe in his own myth - that by solving the mystery of his parents' disappearance, he can somehow avert the impending catastrophe of World War II. Now, to a modern day audience, this conviction appears to be quite absurd. But no more absurd, surely, than resurrecting Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes to fight the Nazis?
Ishiguro in no way camps up the figure of the English detective. Banks is not presented as some grey-haired Miss Marple or little grey brain-celled Hercule Poirot - Banks takes himself far too seriously to equate himself with such parodies. In some ways though, his young machismo does resemble that of Richard Hannay. In the final third of the novel, Ishiguro conspires with the reader to hope for Banks' success, and you collude in this despite your better judgment. It is here when the narrative is most gripping, most telling. In this way, 'When We Were Orphans' resembles the narratives of Graham Greene, partly 'entertainment', and partly exposition of the grotesques of British colonialism. Perhaps there's also a dash of Waugh's black humour, although Ishiguro never lets us entertain anything as much as a belly laugh.
For the British, this is an especially grim tale. Banks' father does work in the despicable opium trade, after all. In the early part of the twentieth century, the British government had a rather different attitude to drugs control, one that still affects us today (heroin is derived from opium). In English literature, there are plenty of examples of the wretches seduced by laudanum (such as the heroine of Joanne Harris' excellent 'Sleep, Pale Sister'), but such characters are usually English. What Ishiguro does here is to allow us a glimpse into how the Chinese suffered from the opium trade.
At school in England, Banks strives to be more English than the English, which becomes a key part of his identity. He is never a truly unpleasant British colonial, but he very much believes in the dream of empire. His Japanese friend, Akira, has a more overt struggle with his cultural heritage. Banks' desire to be fully British in the multi-cultural city of Shanghai makes him turn to Uncle Phillip, a friend of his parents. What Ishiguro seems to be saying here is that nurture is very much stronger than nature. Those born in the Victorian era will never fully shake off Victorian hypocrisies concerning the 'innocence' of both women and children.
It may seem to some that Ishiguro's resolution is far too fabulous to be believed, like something from the Arabian Nights. However, if you look into the history and the narratives left by the inhabitants of the International Settlement of Shanghai, you'll find much fact which echoes Ishiguro's fiction. Chinese merchants in Shanghai set up an Anti-Kidnapping Society in 1912, for reasons related to this story. According to research by Robert Bickers, it is very hard to find data about the Inspector Kungs of the Shanghai Municipal Police, as Banks discovers when he returns there in 1937 (whilst the records of British and Irish SMP officers are very easy to come across). It is also quite instructive to compare Banks' voice with the imperial memoir left by the acting commissioner of the Shanghai Police of the time: Maurice Springfield's 'Hunting Opium and Other Scents'. Jardine, Matheson and Co. was a real company which 'made its fortune in opium smuggling'. Huang Jinrong, the police chief of the French concession, is widely acknowledged to have been in cahoots with Du Yue-sheng, a notorious triad king.
But why should we care about events in Shanghai a century ago? It could be that Ishiguro is determined to repeat the success of 'Remains of the Day'. The setting is very cinematic, and you can almost see Kristin Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes inside the gramophone shop. But the image which most resounds throughout this novel is that of the blind (ha! ha!) being held together by its thin twine. What happens when the 'twine' ('tradition' and 'heritage') snaps? It could be that Ishiguro is examining a much more modern topic: English nationalism. With recent devolution, some English politicians have raised this issue (for better or worse, it's hard to tell). But what are the implications for the future if we are all orphans now?

Although I usually like Ishiguro, I found this book disappointing, lacking coherence, its purpose muddy. The first half of the book is suspenseful, tautly constructed, and realistically presented, as we learn of Christopher Banks's history and of the ironies of his parents' disappearance. Once he arrives in Shanghai, however, the book splits into two seemingly disconnected halves-the first half realistic, the second half absurd. In the first half, Banks has been revealed as intelligent and sensitive, but in the second half he suddenly and cruelly abandons his own adopted, orphaned daughter, leaving her in England while he searches for his missing parents. He believes (strangely) that somehow if he can find his parents, he'll be able to avert World War II. His search for them is expedited more by an inordinate number of extraordinary coincidences than by the detective work for which he is supposedly world-renowned. The plot stumbles, and the suspense is compromised.
Since Ishiguro has dealt in past novels with the idea of imperfect memory and/or with characters whose deluded visions of themselves are presented ironically to the reader as facts, one cannot help wondering, while reading the second half, whether Banks really is a great detective, whether he really is doing all the absurd things he presents to us as real events in Shanghai, and whether the author is deliberately showing him in a surreal, rather than real, world. If this is the author's intention, it is by no means clear--there are too few clues in the first half to cause the reader to actively question the view of reality presented there. In addition, it is not accompanied in the second half by any heightened sense of introspection or by any change from the realistic tone and style of the first half. Neither Banks nor the reader learns anything significant on any level other than that of plot.
Ultimately, I found myself haunted by the drama of Banks's search and by his need to resolve the mysteries in his life but frustrated-and annoyed--by his ultimate lack of change and by the unresolved mysteries with which the author leaves us. The author made me feel like a pawn, the victim of literary trickery.

It is difficult not to think of Ismail Merchant, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and James Ivory when reading this book. Merchant Ivory's films are consistently exceptional in there own right, while never dismembering the book you may have so enjoyed. But to think this is anything less than a brilliant piece of writing would be unfair, and to suggest this is a ready-made screenplay is absurd.
Mr. Ishiguro is a magnificent writer. He need not be shrill to make a point, nor profane to shock or maintain the reader's attention. The cadence of this novel is leisurely, and being such it produces widely disparate understandings amongst readers. I enjoyed parts of all the 6 reviews I read, as I was not the only one who wasn't precisely sure when I had found solid ground when reading this work. I believe if read a second time the truth would be very apparent. That a second effort may be required is yet another testament to the writer, and in no way insulting to the reader.
The protagonist suffers painful events as a child. There is no reasonable way they could not cause terrible damage, and then leave their scars. Mr. Ishiguro explores this gently, just as the victim may not overtly manifest outrageous behavior. His careful treatment of Christopher is not vague or deficient, it reads as being appropriate, and exposes the results of his traumas with the time and care they need.
"Threads" are often used to describe the storyline of a work. In many books I would suggest they are more like mooring ropes. In this book threads is being generous, for the first person narrative is not written deceptively, but can be construed differently by a group of readers. I think this is great. It's quite rare to read a contemporary work that does not hammer away at a tired theme, disclose the end when the prologue has barely been passed, or just insult the reader by presuming we are encephalitic illiterates. (Not trying to showboat, just loved the sound of those two words)
It took what was probably the most jarring event to finally convince me I wasn't lost. And the event was much closer to the end than the start. What is real, and what is not will be decided by how carefully you read, and how cautious you are with the limitations of first person narrative. It is not a method that allows for much independent verification. However, I never felt frustrated, as the writer is so good and the read so enjoyable.
I wish I could say more, but I would ruin what the book will be for you. I can say you will enjoy the read immensely.

When We Were Orphans is a delightful mixture of Ishiguro's early and late styles of writing. Following on from his experimental The Unconsoled, it works with elements of chance and random selection as a way of propelling the story. But it also incorporates his masterful style of writing about a character who confesses nothing but shows everything which he used in his first three novels. This mixture of style is bringing his fiction past new boundaries and while the effect feels strange you also feel that you are presented with a rich picture of a person's identity. Many people have criticized the central character of Christopher because they feel his profession isn't believable. This would be true if his profession weren't simply an artifice to his prime motive as a character. That is to rediscover his parents and homeland. The result is that you discover a solid identity can't be re-gained but is perpetually created within the movement of history. Rather than view Christopher's profession as a narrative trick, think of it as a performance of which the character is unaware.

This is one of the most complex novels I have read in quite a long time. There are bits and pieces that don't seem coherent at first, but then they make perfect sense. And that is how I was sucked into this fascinating novel. When We Were Orphans tells the story of Christopher Banks, a young boy whose parents disappear under mysterious circumstances while they live in Shanghai. Christopher is sent back to England to live, where he grows up and where the mystery of his parents' disappearance begins to erode his grip on reality. Christopher achieves some notoriety in London (or at least he thinks he has) as a private investigator. He returns after many years to Shanghai to finally try and solve the mystery surrounding his parents' disappearance. He believes he knows what happened to them, even before arriving back in Shanghai. It is his misguided beliefs that lead him into an almost Kafkaesque spiral into unreality and delusion. This section of the book must be read as a partial deluded episode because much of what happens is implausible. The book and Christopher ultimately return to reality and we understand at least part of the truth of Christopher's life and what his parents' outcome had been.

The story is told in first person narrative, and almost from the start Ishiguro tips us off to the idea that Christopher may not be telling us the whole truth, that he may not be able to grasp the whole truth. Christopher's story and the way he tells it is fascinating. Ishiguro is able to navigate seamlessly from time frame to time frame. I thought this was a brilliant work, not as a detective novel, but as a character study of someone who has been fooling himself his entire life. Some readers may find the narrative and the events confusing at times, I did, but I advise readers not to give up on it. This seemingly confusing story is actually an extraordinary, literary experience. When We Were Orphans is one the most thought-provoking books I've read. I recommend this beautiful, staggering novel.

The narrator in the book is Christopher Banks, an English boy born in Shanghai at the beginning of the 20th century. As a small child, his parents disappear and Christopher is shipped to England. There he pursues a career as private detective with the ultimate aim to go back to Shanghai to solve the disappearance of his parents. This all sounds like your average detective novel, but there is more to it.
Already in England you get the idea that something is not completely right with Christopher: he is too much of a name dropper, claiming to be in contact with very famous people when he is only a young detective. Things get worse in Shanghai and it seems that Christopher is not-too-slowly but very surely losing his grip on reality in a town which is at that moment surreal itself because of the attack by the Japanese army (the year is 1937). The main problem was that I had the idea that Christopher was losing his bearings, but that I was not sure of it. This left me with a rather unsatisfied feeling after finishing the book.

Although not the masterpiece "Remains of the Day" was, I found this a fascinating study of a man who slowly sinks into delusion--almost without the reader realizing it. The main character's detachment from himself is quite startling. The morning after he agrees to go away with a married woman who has fascinated him for some time, he describes himself as "rather excited". Or did the conversation with her really take place as he describes it to us? One is never quite sure. And what was REALLY going on at that wedding he attends? His search for his parents in the war zone is a dream--a nightmare--a harrowing description of what war means to a people whose slum is the battleground, being fought over block by block. My book club had mixed reviews for this one--the detachment of the main character from his own reality also distances the reader. But give it a try--you won't be neutral about this one.

Warning: this book is not what it seems. Ishiguro writes beautifully and his clean, sparse prose lulls one into the perception that he has written a conventional mystery novel with a conventional outcome following conventional plotting. And of course, it can be read on that level albeit with some considerable flaws as has been noted by some reviewers here. However, I suspect that many of the most severe reviews here come from those who never discovered the depth of the protagonist's fantasy world. In fairness, however, in what world, other than a child's mind and comic books, are "detectives" who fight "evil" famous members of society as they solve their "cases".
Christopher Banks lives his childhood fantasies well into adulthood, and the story he tells is essentially that fantasy. As an orphan who has lost his parents in a way that remains truly unexplained, Christopher's fantasies are all he has (to the point where he cannot accept classmates memories that don't match with the world he has created in his own mind.) For that matter, it is all that Sarah and Jessica (two other orphans who populate Christopher's real world). He is simply lucky enough to have sufficient funds that he can live that fantasy.
It is in the exploration of the interface between the real world and Christopher's fantasy world that the interest lies in Ishiguro's fable and a brilliant study it is.

Ishiguro's latest is a classic example of what separates a good book from a great book. His elegant, fluid prose establishes a lush, gorgeous setting in the same way that Wong Kar-wei uses lighting and primary colors to create a creamy, dreamy ambiance like dreams of the past after one too many cocktails.
"Orphans" impeccable prose is indisputable, but the author's stylistic excellence can only partially compensate for his shortcomings as a storyteller. As the other reviewers have noted, Ishiguro uses the device of the unreliable narrator to create a sense of confusion and surreality, but once it is created, he fails to do anything interesting with it. The climax of the story, which is the discovery that there really wasn't much of a story, leaves the reader feeling cheated rather than suprised.
Ishiguro's father grew up in Old Shanghai, and serves as the basis for the protagonist's playmate. As a setting, he captures the ambiance of decaying romance of the place. The history, however, upon which the worm at the end of the story turns, is flawed. The abduction of a British woman by an inland gangster would have never been tolerated by the Colonial authorities in the 1920s: the right people would be paid off, threats would be made and carried out, and such a matter would be promptly resolved. Moreover, a foreign woman wasn't so prized a trophy, considering all the impoverished White Russian princesses to be had for much less trouble.
Also, the most surreal chapters when, towards the end, Christopher is climbing through the war-devastated ghettos to reach his family's old home, where he thinks his parents are being held, is geographically impossible. The fighting described took part in the slums of the northern Zhabei district, far removed from the posh foreign mansions in which his family might have lived. The foreign areas never saw serious fighting.

Ishiguro shows his usual peculiar and highly refined style, almost unachievable, and the elegant and skilled language screens any other feature of the novel.

You cannot help noticing how unlike and arbitrary is the sequence of leading events, and how, despite the involvement of the main character as a detective, no investigative work or logical inferring are wrought out in the pages, and all information, supposed to come out from thorough searches, are simply dropped in from out of the context.

So, the unlikelihood of the events fades into apparently delusional states, by which Ishiguro seems to stretch a weak fabric, far more than its breaking limit, in order to connect powerful and meaningful chapters by a pacing thread and to frame them in a historical dimension.

Self-introspection lives out of unaccomplished goals, and when an accomplishment is however forced, the result is a weak structure, which is by no means a fundamental flaw or shortcoming, because, after all, the whole novel, and what it leaves you, is just a memory.

I almost liked this. It was boring in the beginning, engaging in the middle, and strange at the end. I like Ishiguro's use of an unreliable narrator, and I like his writing style. I also enjoyed the way the timeline ebbed and flowed, based on the narrators stream of consciousness.

There was just too much that went unfinished, and the answer to the mystery at the end wasn't satisfying at all, certainly not enough to justify the super slow first section.

This was my first work by Ishiguro, and I would certainly try again.

What is real is not real, and what is true isn't. The reader becomes involved with the parallel lives of adults and children from the first page of this engrossing novel, set in Shanghai before the Second World War. The looming specter of the impending conflict casts its shadow over most of the action, but the primary focus is on Christopher and his search for his parents, kidnapped when he was a young boy. Christopher's self-delusion and self-absorbtion as an adult prevent him from seeing what is real and what is not: his interpretation of events is based on what he knows to be genuine, but proves to be not genuine at all. Mystery unfolds to present yet another mystery, and not until the last few pages does Christopher's unrelenting view of what he "knows" to be true reveal to him that his life so far has been built on mistaken, and tragic, assumptions. Another winner in this author's body of work.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of those rare writers who can verse about something he has never lived -- or something that is even far from his life. Something like that happened with his `The Remains of the Day", and here in his "When We Were Orphans", one of the most beautiful books he has written.

The most important quality in "When We Were Orphans" is the precise prose he uses to create his characters and describe their actions. At the same time, Ishiguro's text is not self-indulgent. As a matter of fact, this novel is very readable, sometimes addictive, with the plus of being deep and meaningful. The writer has an assured quill extracting life from the darkest side of his characters.

"When We Were Orphans" is about Christopher Banks a very famous and respected detective in the 1930s London. Although he has solved the most intricate crimes, there is still one that haunts him. His parents mysteriously disappeared when he was a child in Shanghai. Now, he thinks it is high time to come back to China and resolve this case.

On the other hand, the world is walking towards to another war, and Banks feels it would be now or never to solve his parents missing. In this fashion, the prose moves from future to past, from London to Shanghai with charm and veracity. Ishiguro goes deep inside his characters' minds, hearts and souls, exposing, therefore, to his reader the most sincere form of narrative.

But, that doesn't mean the writer explains everything in the book. He leaves gaps that would be filled in by the readers. This is one of the most rewarding experiences from reading this novel. Ishiguro assures his place as one of the best novelists from his generation, and the ability to transfers feelings and senses from his characters to his readers -- and not many people publishing books nowadays are able of such device with so much brilliancy.

I enjoyed reading this book. It kept my interest the entire time . At one point during the last quarter, I began to question the sanity of the main character, Christopher Banks. I had read one of the author's previous novels, The Unconsoled, which is based completely in a surreal realm... one never truly knows or understands what is going on in that story. In this novel, however, the moment I was most impressed with was during Christopher's search for his parents in a war zone. Everything seemed like a nightmare...and as I was reading I found myself feeling anxious everytime he took a wrong turn or was diverted in some way-- A dreamscape from which he finally wakes up and realizes how he has been misleading himself. This sense of the nightmarish I felt was pulled off quite well. The story ends satisfactorily and with a surprise.

Christopher Banks, a well known detective living in England, reminisces about his childhood in Shanghai. He and his Japanese friend Akira enjoy long hours together of creative play, including creating a detective story explaining Christopher's parents' sudden disappearance. The newly-orphaned Christopher is sent to England to be raised by an elderly aunt. As an adult, he makes it a priority to determine the true story of what
happened to his parents.
WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS is a story of friendship, dedication, curiosity, human relations, betrayal, and a child's understanding of his parents' world. In addition, it's a glimpse into the fascinating life of Shanghai and the interactions of its British, Japanese, and Chinese population. The pace of the novel is outstanding. It starts out very leisurely. As the story develops, the action moves steadily faster. At the bittersweet ending, the novel softly releases the reader with much about which to think. A thoroughly satisfying story with a rich plot, this novel is fine writing, indeed!

The true beauty of this book lies in the fact that Ishiguro is an absolute master of the written word. The flow and lycicism of the book carries one along while the present recedes and you are back with the young Christopher Banks watching through his eyes as his story unfolds. All the emotions of childhood are so well captured - joy, laughter, fear, lonliness, boredom, fun, longing..., and we see these emotions change gradually as they shape the boy Christopher into the man Christopher. The story is haunting and fascinating - the way it is written captivating. The last third of the book became a little overdone and implausible as far the story went, but the words used never lost their power to enchant and captivate. The book was gloriously written but frustrating in that the depth of the last part of the story did not match well to the words used. This only happened towards the end of the book so, all in all, an unbelieveably beautiful book. Absolutely destined to be a classic.

A brief look at the available reviews shows that middle opinions are rare. You either have the taste for Ishiguro's works after "The Remains of The Day" or you don't. It seems that many reviewers somehow missed Ishiguro's "The Unconsoled" (1997) which marked the departure from his impeccably realistic early works to the thrill of unexpected ground loss when reality suddenly starts melting. I greatly admire the author's craft in creating the sense of hugely aberrant reality from a set of completely innocently looking steps.
The story starts slowly and picks up the tempo but very gradually. The narrative matter is very smooth, and each next episode is logically consistent with the previous one. Bothersome seeds are noticeable however here and there, usually in the overt obsessiveness of the main character with certain minor details. It feels as if the reader is forced to look at the world through his eyes and accept certain bents. Next time the reader notices a couple of hundred pages later, the entire world around the main hero is distorted. Even physical space and time are not the same. Effects worthy of science fiction remain completely unexplainable in "The Unconsoled", where a non-trivial highway drive is needed to get to the next room in the same hotel. In "When We Were Orphans" it also sometimes takes a very long time to get to a nearby point but this is because the path goes through an urban battleground, so the laws of nature are formally preserved, yet the eery feeling of irreality lingers on. By the end of the story the stream of events gets truly hectic and you can only guess whether there will be a resolution, which can never be taken for granted with Ishiguro. In comparison with static and observant earlier works, here the author makes the hero go through a bit of action.
Overall "When We Were Orphans" is more mature and less romantic work than "The Unconsoled" (and very different and not directly comaparable to "The Remains of The Day"). It is very intriguing whether Ishiguro will be able to make another step in the same direction (it does not feel that the theme of a confusued man in confusing world is exhausted) or will come up with something altogether different. I would not attach too much importance to the merits of the plot (or lack thereof) or to the message of moral responsibility in judging the novel. It is first and foremost a beautiful construct, made of everyday words and crisp sentences, yet almost as powerful in its abstraction as classical instrumental music.

It is 1915, Shanghai. A ten-year-old English boy living in the international city, has his life shattered by the sudden disappearance and supposed murder of his parents. He is whisked off to England, attends a boys school and builds a successful life as a celebrated detective. He returns to Shanghai in 1937 to solve his parents' murder, but as the Chinese and Japanese are fighting each other, the reader learns that Christopher's life is a sham and all is not as it appears. So we are suddenly confronted with an unreliable narrator. What does the reader do? Kazuo Ishiguro is never content with surface events or just writing a clever mystery. It doesn't really matter that the plot is not entirely believable. There is a master storyteller at work here, grappling with larger ideas. I will not give away the story, but I guarantee that reading it is a treat. You will not be able to put it down.

I was very impressed by Kazuo Ishiguro's beautifully crafted "Remains Of the Day" and had high expectations for "When We Were Orphans". Unfortunately, Mr. Ishiguro's attempt at writing a mystery is only a pale shadow of his previous work. The unreliable narrator voice that was so effective in "Remains of the Day" left me confused and frustrated in "Orphans", possibly because the narrator's perceptions are naive, inconsistent, and illogical. How can this possibly be a peek into the mind of a great detective?

At some points, the events of the story became so surreal that I suspected Mr. Ishiguro would eventually explain it all with the revelation that the narrator was actually (a) insane, or (b) a young child, or (c) dreaming. But the story continues to plod along with no major surprises until its preposterous conclusion.

The writing itself is competent and professional: every paragraph, taken individually, is very polished, and the author does an admirable job of presenting the stark contrasts of pre-WWII Shanghai. But the story as a whole is ultimately disappointing. If you're in the mood for suspense, pick up a Ken Follet. If you want a subtle character study, re-read "Remains of the Day". But don't waste your precious reading hours on this.

Much like Kubrik's misunderstood film, Barry Lyndon, which for many was too slow, too filled with uncompacted eventfulness--for such observers, help for the dying child did not come too late, but too slowly, which, however, was the case too often then--, and too languid, Ishiguro has served up a gentle yet sublime masterpiece that is intended to soothe and haunt our jaded expectations. Through his incredible use of language, he carefully weaves a tapistry, which provides clarity and understanding for others in another time and therefore for ourselves in our own. I am disappointed in the many reviews here criticizing the book's lack of plot twists and surprise. This is a book about life, the lives of many of us, and such is not filled with those every day. Rather we proceed through this existence uneventfully, for the most part; among other things, what Ishiguro wants to convey, I believe, is that the little details and observations, we all could make, are what would provide the depth and richness to a life lived well.
Of course, he goes farther. The exploration of Christopher's inner depths, his reluctance to commit himself to Sarah, his out-of-stepfulness with his assigned society are carried through by Ishiguro. Meaning no offense to the author, but after reading his other works, I believe it is his own outsiderness that makes him qualified (not uniquely, for there are others, thankfully) to be such a careful observer of England and the English. I am thankful for this work and look forward to the next.

In When We Were Orphans, as in Remains of the Day, Ishiguro handles the psychology of memory with genius. He also is able to convey atmosphere as few writers can; one can almost smell where his characters are.
Towards the last third of the book, there are some strange and unexplained thoughts on the part of the main character - such as why exactly he is convinced that his parents would still be alive when they've been kidnapped for about 20 years...But if the last third of the novel is a bit weak, the two-thirds that come before are fantastic.
Spoiler:
The comment about another reviewer about the "mistake" Ishiguro made in having the main character find his childhood friend was incorrect. Christopher Banks merely *wanted* to find his friend, and *believed* that he had found him - but that it probably was not him is made clear eventually.

Ishiguro's most recent novel is certainly not my favorite, a distinction reserved for A Pale View of Hills. However, it was a fascinatining read nonetheless. Presented in a more straightforward manner than his other stories, one could fall into the trap of reading it at face value.
There's much more beneath the surface, however. From the beginning, the narrator's perceptions seem to differ from reality, starting with his belief that he fit in at school, and building to the delusion that he might find his parents, still alive in war-torn Shanghai twenty years after their abduction. It's a theme that Ishiguro has used with respect to the narrators in Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled, but here it is elevated to a new level.
My biggest complaints are these: First, that the ground he treads here has been explored by him in the earlier novels, and second, that Christopher's delusions of his mission's importance seem almost too extreme to be believable.
Like all of his work, it is a novel that must be savored. Take time with it, absorb it. It's worth the time.

I believe Ishiguro's "Remains of the Day" is one of the greatest achievements in modern fictions. In contrast, "Orphans" had all the ingredients for another masterpiece, but the end product is unsatisfying, a major disappointment.

The narrator - Chris Banks - is certainly sympathetic, and we the readers root for him to succeed in solving the mystery, to find the peace for his troubled soul. Ishiguro, with his virtuosic touch, gradually reveals the true depth and extent of the damage that Bank's shattering childhood experiences had inflicted on his psyche. Most of the characters, the setting of pre-war Shanghai, the Mystery itself - are all rendered so masterfully that they feel powerfully authentic.

However, a few contrived and formulaic plot twists and a painfully weak ending work to seriously undermine the overall impact of the book. It is perhaps a bit like listening to an orchestra filled with world-class musicians who are unfortunately playing without a conductor. That said, reading Ishiguro's second-rate works is a far richer and rewarding experience than reading, say Dan Brown's best efforts. I'll wait in hope for Ishiguro's next work to be a masterpiece worthy of his genius.

Simply put, a brilliant book. Most novels (rightly so) are like rivers--you jump on and ride the waves, coast through the shallows. WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS is like a still pond. You take your boat out in the middle and (to borrow Thoreau's metaphor) plumb the bottom with a measuring stick--to see if it's solid, to see how far down it goes. In the end, the plot's a simple thing: lost-and-found parents, as it were. But the emotional consequences? The ways the narrator prefers blindness, or a kind of myopic sight, to clarity? Devastating. Beautiful. Words escape me, as his parents do him. I found my time with the narrator to be like my time with any good friend--I never know the whole story, only pieces, more and more as time goes on. I put them together, decide which memories are red herrings, which events are important--all the while listening for the whole that escapes me. Ishiguro's talent reminds me of Jane Austen's: precise, beautiful, small (this is not the right word--not small-minded or country-headed, but rather compact, exacting. The Mona Lisa, not the Sistine Chapel). This novel's rather like a beautiful miniature he's building up, one stroke at a time.

A ridiculous detective novel. A *well-known* detective childishly believed that after 20 years he can come back to Shanghai to save his missing parents in the specific house. After 20 years?!! And the most stromg weapon of the detective is his magnifying glass. A magnifying glass?!
I *GUESS* that Ishguro wants to make the cynic and pompous and paranoid part of Chris Banks gradually known by readers. But is it so? I doubt. The personality of Banks is unnatural and contrived and without any logic. Sometimes normal, sometimes childish, a lot of time getting paranoid. Even So, I still think Ishguro's skill far from mature to fulfill it.
Then, Ishguro has not enough ability to handle such a theme in such an enviroment. Set mainly before the WW2 in Shanghai, the stories indeed acrosses more than 50 years, and scenes sparsed in different places in Shanghei and England. On the whole this novel is a bad mixture of war, detective, crime, family, traitor, sex, gang, communists..., and trying to write everything results in nothing.)
The whole story is never, never persuative. The writing style shattered (on purpose), and without structure. Many scenes apparently deliberatly contrived. Yes, some sections worth read, for example the childhood live. But most of this book it is a waste of time.
Some scenes are quite ridiculous and make me laugh and very angry. Laugh at the author who simplified the scenes and human in Shanghei; Angry about myself why struggling to finish it.
Oh, what a amazing "magnifying glass", what a welcomed Christopher Banks, how naturally the lieutnant followed him without hesitation. These plots exists only in comics. My last question, it is one of the shortlists of Booker?!

It will be intriguing to see whether Ishiguro's new novel will translate to the screen as successfully as his best-known work, The Remains of the Day. One thing they unquestionably share, however, is a depiction of pure Englishness that no Englishman could do more than aspire to. The author, a Japanese national who has spent much of his life in the UK, captures those elusive quintessences of Englishness - snobbery, class, self-deprecation and imperial arrogance - far better than any living writer to the manor born.
"Orphans" is the story, told in the first person, of a brilliant English detective (in the Sherlock Holmes mode), raised as a child in Shanghai between the wars who returns to England when his parents mysteriously vanish. Shanghai was an international settlement at the time, and the protagonist's childhood friend is Japanese. Ishiguro draws on his own experience of growing up in a foreign culture, and all the tensions that entails. The bulk of the book is set in adulthood, with flashbacks to childhood, as the narrator sets out to solve the ultimate crime - the abduction of his own parents. The story unfolds on multiple levels: we quickly realise that the self-proclaimed Great Detective is, to use a modern phrase, "in denial" of the realities of his own powers, his parents' all-important honour, and even his popularity as a schoolboy.
The plot is intricate and beautifully put together. Building towards the climax, clambering through the ruins of Shanghai as it is torn apart by warring Chinese and Japanese, the reader is drawn further and further in. What had started out as seemingly innocuous and realistic ends up veering to surrealism. Surely the detective doesn't really believe what he's telling us he believes, as the bullets whistle through the debris? Read and find out.

It pains me to give anything written by Ishiguro, the author of the superb The Remains of the Day, a paltry three stars. But this book does not deserve better. It has redeeming qualities, admittedly, but not enough to make up for the flaws.
The book tells the story of Christopher Banks, who was effectively "orphaned" as a young boy when his parents disappeared while they lived in Shanghai. He is then sent to England, becomes a well-known detective there and eventually returns to a war-torn Shanghai to try and solve the case of his parents' disappearance. The book is well enough written, the characterisation is good (as is to be expected of the author), it reads easily enough and the end (in terms of the fate of Banks' parents) unexpected. But Ishiguro made a few crucial mistakes in this book, the worst one probably being devoting a fairly lengthy passage to Banks' progress through the ruins of war-torn Shanghai to get to the house where he believes his parents are being kept by kidnappers. This sort of action sequence simply does not suit Ishiguro's style of writing- he should stick to what he does extremely well, which is writing about people, and particularly emotionally scarred ones. Another "mistake" is the (to put it mildly) unlikely scene where Banks chances upon his childood friend in Shanghai. And lastly, I found it extremely odd that some people seem to expect Banks to in some way ensure world peace and stability by solving the case of his parents' disappearance. This is never adequately explained, and it is as if Ishiguro had something else in mind with the book initially and failed to re-write the earlier chapters when things panned out differently.
But the book is still worth reading- an unsatisfactory book by a great author is still better than most.

The narrator and main character of this novel presents himself as a brilliant detective in the mode of Sherlock Holmes. His task is to uncover the mystery of his parents disappearance years before in Shanghai. There is an air of unreality from the very first page, stemming from the narrator's simultaneously self-aware and self-deluded consciousness. We don't believe for a moment that he is a "detective"; that is, he models himself after a fictional detective and his way of being a detective seems entirely literary. Ishiguro designs each sentence to reveal this paradox of the clueless detective, who never perceives himself the way everyone else sees him. He is almost autistic in his social skills!
The novel can be either tedious or spell-binding, depending on one's perspective.

If "The Remains of the Day" and "When We Were Orphans" are enough to establish a trend, Ishiguro likes to tell his stories through narrators preoccupied with their own delusions of grandeur. When "Orphans" opens, Christopher Banks is on his way to minor celebrity among London's country-club set for his miraculous and unfailing detective work. He'd dreamt of becoming a great detective since childhood, when his father disappeared without explanation from Shanghai's International Settlement. To deal with the pain and uncertainty of the situation, he and his friend Akira (also an expat, from Japan) would spend hours playing great sleuths who would track down the villians and find Christopher's father. When Christopher's mother also vanishes from their house, he returns to England and the guardianship of his aunt, boarding school, and London's upper crust. And like the rest of his circle, Christopher Banks makes a fast and easy transition from school into an immediately successful career.
Ishiguro omits the details of the crimes and their resolutions (this isn't a detective novel), but with each solved case Banks, the narrator, gains more self-confidence until he achieves an outright smugness. By the time he returns to Shanghai to investigate the mystery of his parents' apparent kidnapping 20 years earlier, he is baffled to encounter characters that prioritize the Sino-Japanese war (and the early rumblings of a world war) above his familial mission. While it's understandable that a detective who lost both parents to mysterious circumstances in his childhood would stop at nothing to put his oldest, most personal case to bed, his inability to differentiate a private - or at most, local - affair from a global crisis illustrates his profound self-absorption. Of course, it's not entirely his fault. His high-society friends watch the war's devastating pyrotechnics like they would a fireworks show: entertaining eye-candy to pass the time of cigarette breaks before returning inside to the various ballrooms of Shanghai's International Settlement. Meanwhile a bureaucrat from the British embassy - confident Banks will get his man - sees the occasion as an excuse to plan yet another expat gala event.
Like the butler in "The Remains of the Day," Christopher Banks is ruled by a misguided ambition that distracts him from a clear view of the human relationships around him. In the case of the earlier novel, Ishiguro makes the butler so sympathetic and his voice so believable that you are drawn into his delusional world. As ridiculous as it sounds, you put down "The Remains of the Day" nearly convinced that the polish on the boss's silverware influenced the outcome of the Second World War. The dilemma that book poses is a personal one: even if the butler played as big a role as he imagined, was the job worth the price of growing old alone?
In "Orphans," however, Ishiguro explores a broader cultural question: What will it take to get Westerners to outgrow their condescending colonial worldview? Here Ishiguro doesn't want you to see the world through Banks's eyes. The point, in fact, is that you recognize Banks's blind and uncaring arrogance, and through your dislike of the character experience Ishiguro's critique of the British colonial attitudes that survived the fall of British colonial politics. "Orphans" doesn't offer the kind of reading pleasure served up in "The Remains of the Day," and Banks isn't exactly an inviting companion with whom to spend 335 pages. But through the novel and its hero, Ishiguro gave me much more to think about after I turned the final page.

This is a little strange detective story.
Christopher Banks is one of the most celebrated detectives in 1930s England. He solved many incidents. One day he decided to return to Shanghai. He grew up there but his parents' sudden disappearance (kidnapping?) made him go back to England. After returning to Shanghai, the famous detective seems to become incompetent. A reader might wonder why he can't recover his parents. I think it's because, in fact, he's not a conventional detective, but he's an 'artist' who wants to help the world. He believed earnestly the world would collapse unless he recovers his parents. So the exaggerated description of his struggle becomes comical and surreal. Just like Ryder, the protagonist of Ishiguro's previous novel, 'The Unconsoled,' Banks does not have the power to solve the problem. Changing the world is beyond his power. So his struggle is a kind of nightmare, not a realistic investigation.
But once the reader realizes it's not a detective story but a kind of love story, the novel will move him deeply. And the reader, too, will become an 'orphan' in this real world. Too poetic, but I love the novel.

I had really looked forward to reading this book - many people had recommended it to me, and the premise of the story was an interesting one.
This story is a first-person narrative about a detective who returns to Shanghai to find his missing parents. He becomes caught up in the Japanese occupation, to the point that he is involved in actual battles, travelling through destroyed streets with a man he believes to be his childhood friend. The impression i get is that Ishiguro is trying to portray a man losing his grip on reality - the story becomes bizarre about 1/2 - 3/4 of the way through. However, part of me thinks that maybe it is just bizarre. Full stop.
I enjoyed the beginning of this book, and i quite like Ishiguro's style. However, i just feel that he literally loses the plot. Which is a shame, as this could have been quite a good book, as opposed to a potentially good book.

Kazuo Ishiguro is known for his superior prose and very subtle portrayals of emotional dysfunctional individuals. Words like 'elegent' are used to describe his novels. Sad to say, 'When We Were Orphans' falls short compared to his other works.
From a 10,000 ft view the story is interesting enough. A young British man reflects upon his childhood in 1920s Shanghai. During his childhood his parents mysteriously disappeared. So as fate would have it, he uses his professional skills (he is a private investigator) to unravel the mystery by returning to Shanghai right before WW II. The mystery is unraveled in the end (..and it is a surprise).
But where the story fails, and fails miserably, is the failure to engage the reader. The narrative is told without any emotion; at times it is like reading a newspaper. In the end I lost all sense of compassion despite the rather surprising end to the mystery.
Beyond the main story there are some interesting aspects to this novel. Ishiguro expertly captures the feel on 1930s Shanghai, especially for those (wealthy) foreigners living there. And some of the minor characters are rather memorable.
Bottom line: a disappointment overall, but probably merits a look by Ishiguro fans and/or those interested in 1930s China.

I know there's a stereotype of the uptight British, and apparently it exists for a reason. Ishiguro's Christopher Banks is just such a character. Although he narrates the story, and we follow him through the course of several years, we never really KNOW him. He remains distant, cold, and never fully fleshed out. Therefore, I found it difficult to give myself over to the story and Banks' plight. Banks' romantic interest is equally cold and elusive, and their relationship (or lack thereof) seemed rather empty.
The exotic Shanghai setting seems the ideal backdrop for the mystery that unfolds. But the mystery unfolds so damn slowly! There's all this mucking around in the middle of the novel, and then, quite suddenly, we're presented with a hurried conclusion that fails to satisfy. You never really understand on what level the disappearance of Banks' parents affects him. Everyone's emotions, as well as the prose, seemed stilted. Not my cup of tea, old chap.

What if you lived a life of a lie? Getting into Kazuo Ishiguro's mind is difficult, but he must have read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Like Pip, young Christopher was supported as a gentlemen by an endowment that was not quite what he thought. What happens when your life is no longer what you think? The life of Sarah Hemings is not what he thought either. Like in "The Unconsoled", Christopher enters into a lost world of rear entries, mysterious passages, unfamilier, and disappearing landmarks. People appear and disappear in a nightmarish experience while he is trying to reach his goal. Beyond the maze lies the truth -the unobtainable truth. Or is the truth is far from previous belief? When our truths become unsubstantiated what do we do? What do we do when our core beliefs about ourselves are proven unless. What Christopher does is... But that is the story. You will think for this book for a while. Writers - this book is a good example of the use of movement through time - compressed time and expanded time.

After five years, Ishiguro has as last produced a new novel. The protagonist is Christopher Banks, an English detective who moves through the elite of London society, enjoying much respect. Through flashbacks, however, we learn that Christopher's past is a most unusual one. As a boy he grew up in the International Settlement in interwar Shanghai, where his father worked for a British trading company, complicit in importing opium to China, and his mother was a morally upstanding lady who abhorred the opium trade. There, Christopher led a rather sheltered existence with his Japanese playmate Akira.
When his father disappears, the two children begin to play a different game -- that of being detectives who will root out the evil forces and rescue Christopher's father. When Christopher's mother also disappears, the boy's world completely falls apart. Having lost both parents, he must also leave Shanghai and his friend to return to England and be raised by an aunt.
Thus the narrative jumps between the present -- Christopher as an adult detective in postwar London -- and his past as a child in Shanghai. When Christopher decides to return to Shanghai after so many years to search for his parents, the true story begins and the adventure is as much psychological as physical. After so long, will he discover his parents -- or himself?
Ishiguro's novels have been described by the term 'unreliable narrator', in that the reader must struggle to discern the narrative from 'the truth', as the narrators are constantly engaged in repressing their memories and self-deception. In an interview, he rejected this interpretation of his latest work, describing it instead as a 'postmodern' work. He has tried to depict reality not only as it appears - but as it is - to the confused and troubled narrator. Yet it is questionable to what extent he succeeds - and many may finish the book troubled by its simplistic denouement.
The first half of the book (while Banks is in London) is slow, but the pace picks up in the second half, where Ishiguro begins to employ more readily his favourite brand of symbolism, such as the repeated imagery of looking through glass with distorted vision that then comes into focus. Unfortunately, humor -- so important in Remains and The Unconsoled -- is strangely absent from Orphans. I didn't so much as chuckle until page 213.
Thematically, 'Orphans' borrows much from 'The Unconsoled' -- the obsession with one's parents, the narrator's 'powers', the surrealist situations, the problem of differentiating between reality and delusion. Unfortunately, themes aren't all that's borrowed. Ishiguro also reuses several images taken directly from 'The Unconsoled', which makes one almost feel like he is plagiarizing his own work. Even worse, these images (such as the barrier blocking the protagonist's way), which were strong in 'The Unconsoled' seem watered down and trite in 'Orphans'.
In general, the style of 'Orphans' does not reveal the same attention to detail and smoothness characteristic of Ishiguro's first four novels, which made them all -- in their own way -- masterpieces. The characterization is very poor; all the main characters seem cardboard -- an utter contrast from 'Remains of the Day'. The disappointing style is somewhat tempered by the compelling theme. As before, it is a question of identity, but this time the painful struggle for identity made by those who have been orphaned.
Readers will find this book thought-provoking, but it is not up to Ishiguro's high standards, and ultimately it is unsatisfying. Concerned about the number of people who couldn't read or understand 'The Unconsoled', it seems Ishiguro has adopted a strategy of 'dumbing down' to his audience. This is unfortunate. To see Ishiguro at his best, I would suggest 'Remains of the Day' or 'The Unconsoled', and I would suggest reading them twice - at least - to see how carefully and masterfully he writes.

I have read all of Ishiguro's previous novels including the painfully frustrating Unconsoled. The first two-thirds of Orphans raised my hopes that Ishiguro had returned to previous form and had dispensed with exercises in never ending nightmarish dream states. Unfortunately the last third of Orphans sees a return to this tiring style, and more. I ultimately failed to enjoy this novel for the same reasons that I dislike horror movies where foolish characters enter repeatedly into darkened rooms, or reruns of "I Love Lucy" where every plot is based on a series of easily resolvable misunderstandings that somehow require 30 minutes to remedy. It should be noted that most or all of Ishiguro's novels do have elements of frustration. However, in his first three works, provoking a certain level of impatience in the reader seemed appropriate given the characters and story lines. Not so with Orphans, which exceeded the limits of my patience not to mention my interest. It's really too bad because the man has a golden pen and writes some of the most poignant prose I've ever read. If you liked his earlier work but didn't enjoy Unconsoled, stay away from this one and hope, like me, that Ishiguro writes something worth reading again.

I have picked this book in a library looking for something to read, and blurb kinda assured me (and which blurb doesn't) that this book is going to be a masterpiece. Trough the early stages of the book indeed it seemed as one, but as I have progressed with reading I suddenly beacme aware of poor writing skills of this particular author. After reading this book only thing that remained inside my memory is a vague memory of early 20th century shangai, that, and a indistinguishable feeling that i have lost something, somwhere. Troubled by the disapperance of his parents, young detective Christopher Banks, tries to discovers their fate, assuring himself that the finding will change the world. It is quite obvious that Banks is loosing his touch with the reality, and this absence is presented in relatively harsh stile of writing by Ishiguro. I mean it is to obvious. There are no diferent levels of reading in this book, as some try to assure you, it's a straight story from page one to page trhee hundred and fifty two. I give this book for stars only becouse story is indeed good, and captures some feeling inside you that you have thought long gone, for that, and for the love that will rise toward Shangai, and hatred which you'll feel towards the corupted politicians and opium sellers. But if you don't fall to such things skip this book. This book, is in fact a school example to average writing.

A boy grows up in Shanghai between the world wars. Then his parents are apparently murdered for running afoul of the establishment and its involvement in the opium trade. The boy fulfills his lifelong dream of becoming a great detective, returning to Shanghai, and re-opening the case. Having recently seen "A Beautiful Mind", I was sure that the narrator was psychotic, which was the only way the book really made sense. Unfortunately, in the last chapter, which has a very different feel than the rest of the book, ends are tied together and it becomes impossible to maintain the psychotic theory. Absent the last chapter, I thought the book was extremely well written, and therefore quite readable despite the absence of any characters you can relate to. A chapter on Japanese/Chinese fighting in the slums of Shanghai reads like a nightmare - literally.

I found this book rather disappointing. You know, you read the little synopsis on the back, think, "That sounds cool," read the little editorial blurbs, such as,". . .pushes the boundaries of the novel," or something. And I'm keeping this in mind as I'm reading. . .realizing, right, the narrator is not who he seems to be. But I was hoping there'd be more of a breakthrough or moment of realization, and there really wasn't. I got to the end and thought, all that just to find out his mom loved him all along? Geez. I wanted more detail re his career as a detective, more evidence of his skill or train of thought as a detective. I was never sure if I liked the narrator or not, he seemed pretentious and effete. . .I suppose that was intentional, but it didn't make for a very likeable guy. The best parts were his reminiscences about Akira.

I've been trying to figure out why some reviewers thought "When We Were Orphans" wasn't as good as Kazuo Ishiguro's much-loved "The Remains of the Day." After "Remains," we clearly have high expectations of Mr. Ishiguro. But perhaps the difference between the two works is one of immediate accessibility.
Both books look at the way certain mental processes affect people. "Remains" concerns a moral sense of rightness and self-denial in a setting we can visualize and understand. "Orphans," I think, demands more from readers. Its overriding theme is the foggy, shifting filter of memory, and this filter takes us into murkier, more complex territory, where we're required to deduce how events have shaped the protagonist's thoughts and motives.
When he was still a kid, Christopher Banks, the protagonist, suffered a huge trauma. His parents were kidnapped, and he was then unwillingly plucked from his home in the International Settlement in Shanghai and sent to live with an aunt in England. Being sent away from everything familiar and comforting would have been hard enough, but being sent away must also have silently conveyed that his parents were forever and irretrievably lost.
Christopher copes with this by deft acts of self-deception, and we are constantly left to inquire how much of Christopher's memories and perceptions are real. His memories (like all memories) are of what he told himself had happened, rather than uniformly what actually happened. He believes what he seems to need to believe. Here, Mr. Ishiguro brilliantly, and subtly, portrays Christopher as an unreliable narrator, wrapped in a reassuring cloak of illusion.
He and his boyhood friend, Akira, for instance, create an impossible scenario where Christopher's father is cared for by his kidnappers as if they were his servants. He recalls a happy boat trip to England, and a smooth merger into English life, when in truth he was a miserable loner, endlessly upset by the loss of his parents, and largely made fun of by his English school chums.
When he's in his mid-thirties, Christopher decides to return to Shanghai, find his parents, and liberate them from their kidnappers. Although the plan is futile to the point of being ludicrous, what seems to be going on in Christopher's mind is that he had continually rejected the idea of the permanence of his parents' loss and was trying, on some unconscious level, to put right a world gone completely topsy-turvy that caused him vast pain. Thus, when the effort to find his parents takes a dramatic turn, the events that follow seem natural to Christopher, even as they bring anguish to the reader.
There is much more to this book. Events in the world at large partially mirror Christopher's situation. When Christopher returns to Shanghai, it is 1937. It is the eve of World War II, and the world seems to be teetering on the verge of collapse. The Japanese have attacked China, shells are falling, and soldiers are fighting hand to hand. Yet within the International Settlement, the inhabitants lie to themselves about the seriousness of the situation and their own safety, and the parties and entertainments continue unabated. The British lie to themselves about their role in the Chinese opium trade and about its devastating effects. (Beyond, of course, the Western allies lie to themselves about the policy of appeasement.) In the midst of this, it is highly problematic whether England as a leader, and even democracy itself, can survive. One character, in fact, Sir Cecil, seems to be the personification of good British intentions gone awry and dissipated abroad in temptation. These are issues which Mr. Ishiguro puts out for readers to contemplate for themselves.
The "relationship" stories also command attention. Christopher is both drawn to and wary of an attraction to Sarah Hemmings, a young woman who comes and goes in his life. She's an orphan like him, who desperately wants to attach herself to someone who makes a difference, who improves the world, and so fills out a hollow in her life. And there is also young Jennifer, an orphan whom Christopher serendipitously finds and takes in as his ward. They come to love each other in a father-daughter way that delicately seeps around them.
The writing in this book is as surpassingly controlled, elegant and poignant as we might expect from Mr. Ishiguro. The episodes that relate to Christopher's childhood are particularly true, alive and touching. And the ending is most satisfying. I think Mr. Ishiguro ranks with the best writers I've ever encountered, and I give this book five solid stars.

"When We Were Orphans" has a plot like a third-rate TV mini-series, full of implausible developments, improbable coincidences and loose ends. Ishiguro seems to be trying to make some point about the nature of evil - but quite what it is just doesn't come across. Much that would help us to understand the story is simply glossed over and hence the reader is simply left with too many unanswered questions - though do we care enough about the characters to want them answered?. Christopher Banks is the kind of emotionally constipated, self-deceiving character that Ishiguro seems to specialise in. The growing relationship between himself and Sarah Hemmings simply does not convince. Having read and very much enjoyed Ishiguro's earlier novels, I am extremely disappointed with this novel.

It's not just a case of Christopher Banks being an unreliable narrator. Kazuo Ishiguro is an unreliable author, and I mean that as a compliment.

Think of the book as a musical ... no one walks out of "Rent" complaining that the narrator was unreliable as people don't break into song. It's a convention.

Ishiguro has created a world in which detectives really are celebrated, where police and governments are eager to work them, and where there are enough celebrated detectives that it is possible to bump into a few at a party (the best sort of party, of course). This isn't Bank's unreliable narration: it's the given milieu of this fascinating novel.

I suspect readers are flummoxed coming to this after "Remains of the Day," rather than coming to this after the even more absurd and dream-like "The Unconsoled." Characters in this book are absolutely not going to behave the way people would in our world, and I, for one, are delighted ... there are thousands of books making the attempt to recreate reality (more or less effectively), so it's a treat to read an incredibly beautifully-written book that has no intention of trying.

It's a fantasy, set in a world that only ever existed in books. Enjoy it for what it is.

Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan in 1954 and emigrated to England at age 5. A graceful, deliberate writer, the shifting, elusive boundary between inner and outer reality and the power of self-delusion animates his unusual, character driven novels.
Cultural displacement and youthful trauma contribute to the character of Christopher Banks, the narrator of "When We Were Orphans." An English boy born in Shanghai at the turn of the 19th century, Christopher lives a protected, idyllic life in the Foreign Settlement until first his father, then his mother vanish mysteriously when he is 10. Shipped off to the English "home" he has never seen, to live with an aunt he has never met, Christopher studies Englishness and works to fit in, guided by his single-minded vocation to become a "great detective" and eventually solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance.
The book opens in 1930, with Christopher satisfactorily established in his detective career, looking back on his post-Cambridge start. Correctly English, reserved and self-possessed, he notes with irritation the inaccurate memories of old schoolmates who remember him as an "odd bird" at school, "since my own memory is that I blended perfectly into English school life." Indeed, he has always prided himself on his quick assimilation of mannerisms, turns of phrase and other trappings of Englishness. But the first cracks in the reliability of his narration have appeared.
Social advancement attests to his vocational success. He tells us of triumphant cases but we never see him at work or know what his cases are about. Instead the increasingly distinguished events he attends provide the proofs of his success. The most socially grasping socialite in London, a woman who routinely snubbed him in his early years, now seeks his society. In a quickly regretted moment of pride and vengeance, Christopher snubs her. Apologizing, he learns she, too, is an orphan and she explains that what he views as her ruthless social climbing is actually "ambition."
"When I marry, it will be to someone who'll really contribute. I mean to humanity, to a better world. Is that such an awful ambition? I don't come to places like this in search of famous men, Christopher. I come in search of distinguished ones."
All of this, inevitably, is leading to Christopher's return to Shanghai. It's 1937. The world is on the brink of war and the Japanese are invading China, which is already torn by civil strife between nationalists and communists. Christopher leaves behind the orphan girl he adopted and pursues his greatest triumph - the rescue of his parents from their 20-year imprisonment and the saving of the world from evil. Does he somehow think finding his parents will end the prospect of world war? And who is the odd English official who follows him around seeking Christopher's advice on where to hold the party celebrating his parents' return?
Like an opium dream (and opium is the scourge of relations between Europe and China), the boundaries between fantasy and reality become hopelessly blurred as Christopher plunges into the maelstrom of the Shanghai underworld, political factions and history. Between blunders, rages and mysterious meetings, Christopher recalls the world of his youth.
Even as a boy he understood that his comfortable, idyllic life was a thing apart from the reality of Shanghai. Warned against leaving the foreign compound, he catches glimpses of the misery of homeless, opium-addicted Chinese. In his own home, long periods of cold silence between his parents ripple the placid surface of his existence. Though his father earns a comfortable living with a company that supports the opium trade, his mother is an avid crusader against it.
In the recollections of his youth, Christopher seems on solid ground. His father remains a blurred, remote figure but his mother emerges as a vibrant, fierce and gentle person. In the unsettled time between his father's and his mother's disappearance, Christopher plays detective with his best friend Akira, a Japanese boy whose brief brush with life in his native country leaves him in terror of being sent back. It's Akira who inspired Christopher to his life's pursuit yet his search for his boyhood friend is surprisingly desultory and haphazard.
Memories, though blurred by time or skewed by a child's perception, provide the rational background for an increasingly irrational present. Yet, what seems delusion is often unexpectedly confirmed by an outside source. The overall impression is a Kafka-like confusion. What is true, what delusion? We expect a book to tell us, to fit the big picture into a manageable frame, to leave us with a sense of wholeness and completion. Ishiguro leaves the reader wondering. Is he saying we are all products of a big picture no one can accurately see? Or of our own unreliable narration? You decide. The journey is worth the uncertainty.

When I recently finished reading this newest book from Kazuo Ishiguro, I must admit, I was disappointed. Having read all of his other novels, I found this somewhat alarming.
The first problem with this book is that the plot doesn't flow like Ishiguro's other works. There are too many points that seem inserted for suspense which seem to cheapen the reading. Second, it fails to achieve the expected high in psychological awareness of Ishiguro's other works.
Perhaps Ishiguro is simply trying to expand his style to include more physical, less emotion-driven, plots, but he fails to convince that his heart and talent are fully at work.
While this book is certainly readable, and perhaps enjoyable, its interest and literary value are below what a devoted reader of Ishiguro would expect.

Perhaps no writer at work today has the combination of discipline and skill Kazuo Ishiguro displays in "When We Were Orphans," and perhaps we should be thankful for that. Ishiguro's books are like ice sculptures--awe-inspiring in their mastery and technique but never quite present in all their dimensions. Unlike "Remains of the Day," "Orphans" gets you somewhat emotionally involved with the main character, and invokes a kind of grief at his losses and loneliness. However, Ishiguro seems to lose confidence in his creation toward the end and indulges in some theatrics that dispel the fragile magic. But Ishiguro's sheer mastery of mood and atmosphere -- and the exotic but not exoticized setting -- make "Orphans" well worth reading.

I couldn't make the connection between the rave reviews on the dust jacket and the writing within. Since the book is loosely a mystery, I wasn't able to toss it aside -- naturally, I wanted to know what happened to Christopher's parents. In the meantime, though, my reading was peppered with exclamations of disbelief and disgust as I forged my way through the book. I never did decide whether the tepid writing and unnecessarily obtuse timeline were more frustrating, or whether it was the ridiculous behavior of the narrator, whose decision-making abilities bordered those of a squirrel. I found the ending to be trite, and many of the characters hollow. Overall, not a positive impression of my first Ishiguro.

What a disappointment! After reading Remains of the Day, I couldn't wait to read this lastest novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. When We Were Orphans doesn't begin to approach the quality of Remains of the Day. While it tries to be a detective novel, When We Were Orphans fails even at that. Instead, it details the pathetic life of a boy (he stays a boy even as a man) whose parents made a mess of their lives. At the age of nine, Christopher Banks finds himself uprooted from Shanghai, the only home he has known. Because he loses both parents through mysterious circumstances, he is packed off to England to live with his aunt. As an adult, Banks becomes a detective and weaves a fantasy about the circumstances of his parents' disappearance. This fantasy follows much the same type of storyline that he pursued in play when he was a boy in China. At the end of this book, this fantasy becomes entirely unbelievable to the reader. Finally, even Ishiguro tires of it and wraps up the story in a few pages. He jars Banks into reality with the true story of his parents' demise. The reader will be glad, too, to be jarred awake as this plodding and dull novel finally comes to an end.

This high standard detective story about an English sleuth searching for his lost parents in Shanghai in the early 20th century turns into an international political thriller. His father works for an opium trader; his uncle is a double agent entangled in the communist resistance; he himself had a Japanese schoolfriend who fights now in the Japanese army.

The detective's adage is 'combat evil', combat 'those busy conspiring to put civilization to the torch'. But, 'the evil ones are much too cunning for ordinary decent citizens.'

He is confronted with dirty Western politics: 'their refusal to acknowledge their drastic culpability.'

The naive thought that they 'could shame these companies into giving up their opium profits. We thought we were dealing with fellow-Christians.' But the West 'wanted the Chinese to be useless. They liked them to be in chaos, drug-addicted, unable to govern themselves properly. That way, the country could be run virtually like a colony.'

The story is written in the author's characteristic cool, clever, indirect suggestive style. But he looses his temperament in the endgame, where he hovers on the edge of an improbable melodrama.

A very worthwhile read.

A London detective named Christopher Banks returns to Shanghai, where he spent his childhood until the mysterious disappearance of his parents. Starts in the spare, ruminative mode of The Remains of the Day, then, in Shanghai, moves into a far wilder space, familiar to readers of The Unconsoled, where the narrator's memories seem strangely mapped over a city--in this case, a city at war. The opening sections feel a bit thinner than the very best Ishiguro, but only slightly (and that's a very high standard); this is a brilliant, challenging, beautiful and deeply weird novel.

An early quote I love: "`Of course,' he said eventually, "a lot of young men dream of becoming detectives. I dare say I did once, in my more fanciful moments. One feels so idealistic at your age. Longs to be the great detective of the day. To root out single-handedly all the evil in the world. Commendable. But really, my boy, it's just as well to have, let us say, a few other strings to your bow.'"

The actual prose is good, no doubt, but I found there were so many problems with this book:

-A celebrated detective? How? Why? It would have been nice if the author provided a little more background on just how and why Banks became a "celebrated" detective.

-To reiterate another review, why was Akira's English so bad, whereas many of the Chinese speakers seemed to speak fluent English? Okay, I LIVE in China, and trust me, VERY few Chinese can speak English that well, and now English is mandatory in most schools.

-There was a war going on and Banks still insisted on finding his parents in some fabled house he thought they might have been taken to, what?, like 20 or 30 years before? What "celebrated detective" in the world would believe that the abductors of his parents would keep them in the same place for over 20 years?

-Banks basically yells at various Chinese police and soldier officials to take him to the house, even though it is in a dangerous zone and a war is going on. I would have told him to go to hell, but apparently, the Chinese officials were not busy enough trying to survive and somehow made time to accomodate the demanding, boisterous, monolingual Englishman.

But other than that, it was good.

If you have ever recalled a particularly detailed dream that made perfect sense to your sleeping alter ego but was completely incomprehensible by day, this novel will make a certain degree of sense to you in that it makes really no sense at all. Yet it manages to brilliantly recall a forgotten time and place - Bitish mercantile Shanghai from WWI through WWII, and illuminates history and politics that get little attention. This vivid sureal masterpiece is as challenging as it's predecessor The Unconsoled but far more satisfying as a narrative. Highly recomended.

This is the first Ishiguro I've read, and I can't wait to read the others. I picked it up by accident, and couldn't put it down till I'd finished it. Call me ignorant if you will, but I knew nothing about the author or the title and was amazed to see in the title page, after I'd finished reading, that it was published as recently as September 2000. I love reading inter-war literature; this man replicated that era of writing perfectly with his precise, vivid writing. The tale, as someone's noted before, is simple; like much of modern literature, the art lies in the telling. Where does imagination begin and reality end? Where does one time stop and another begin? The reader has to determine the answers for himself; like the best works of art, When We Were Orphans is what you make of it. There are plenty of loose ends -- who, for instance, is the mysterious Mr Grayson, and what dreadful thing that happened to Jennifer prompted her to seek refuge in the moors? There are no answers because the narrator hasn't found them himself. Yet it doesn't matter, because life doesn't provide all the answers all the time. I'd recommend this book for anyone who thinks modern English literature is all about playing with words and using 'spoken' English. This is English as it should be written, and I don't know of too many who can do it better. It's a brilliant book.

This is my first Ishiguro novel, and it certainly will not be my last. His clean and precise prose engaged me from the outset as did his skillful handling of the interwoven timelines and settings. The plot is intriguing, as are the characters, particularly the main character whom the story is centred on, Christopher Banks. Ishiguro truly is a master of re-creating the English gent of old.
I found the disparaging reviews interesting. Although they voiced some well-deserved criticisms, Ishiguro's book is, in the main, well thought out and beautifully written. I know I will be reading "When We Were Orphans" again.

After reading The Remains of the Day I became a fan of Kazuo Ishiguro. After reading When We Were Orphans, however, I realized that what worked in the previous novel -- an at-arms-length narration and storyboard structure -- does not work in this book. At times I almost got the feeling that it was specifically written to be a movie, for the structure reads almost like a screenplay, yet the dialogue is so weak, a total rewrite would be required. The plot is a most interesting one, but the execution is so flawed as to make one impatient for the end; not a feeling to have when settling down with a novel, especially one so eagerly anticipated.

My first Ishiguro's book and it's a solid 3 stars in my opinion. His mastery of English is incredible, but the plot and characters were too unbelievable and at times too infantile to want to care for them. I finished it and will definitely give Ishiguro another try, but this one just wasn't anything to rave about.

I've heard the Booker always goes to books that are one-off from the winning (or nominated) author's actual masterwork. This book is no exception. I think Ishiguro is a fantastically compelling writer - I want to read all of his books just to read what he's written, rather like I'll see even bad films by directors I love just to experience their whole oeuvre - and, while 'Orphans' isn't all that great shakes, it's definitely enjoyable and well-done. The unique style of his voice and his sure touch still makes for a good read.

"When We Were Orphans" is a typical Kazuo Ishiguro read. It may not be a "Remains of the Day" (in fact it really isn't...) but the unmistakable stamp of the author is present all over this book. The immaculate usage of the English language, the complex scenarios of presenting thoughts within thoughts, the sarcasm in the tone of the main characters and above all the ability to hold the reader's attention, even when things seem like they are getting out of hand...this book has it all !!
Even though the author attempts to stretch his (and as a result, the reader's !!) imagination a bit in the latter part of the novel, one cannot help admiring his usage of words, and that's what keeps one going. The ending of the book seems a little too cinematic, but it also brings in a sense of relief and closure for someone who wants answers to questions that the narrator has been searching for, for so many years.
As said before, this book may not be a classic, but it is definitely one that will stay in front, in my library. Definitely recommended for readers of good literature.

I just finished When We Were Orphans. I love the limpid beauty of Ishiguro's writing and the way he seems like an odd (and unique) amalgam of Kafka and George Eliot. I have been monitoring the NY Times Book Review, waiting for Ishiguro's next novel after having read and been mesmerized by the Unconsoled, which I had however approached dubiously, fearing it would be a long, confusing slog. Neither of these novels affect me that way. I think that is because Ishiguro writes with such intense and tender emotion for his brave, driven, thwarted characters. I also find both of these novels so visual and found myself imagining the scenes that might be filmed if they were made into movies. I am sorry to have to go back to waiting for the next one.

Having experienced Ishiguro's fine writing in Pale View of Hills, I knew that much would continue to be strong here, and it is. The descriptions of relationships particularly stand out to me, but the descriptions of places are also clear. Main character Christopher's boyhood friendship with Akira is charming. It is, however, part of what makes the book develop slowly enough to be a challenge at times for its pacing. More than two hundred pages are devoted to Christopher's growing up, in Singapore as a boy and in London as a young man, with the events causing his transition from one locale to the other playing an important role. The story builds up to the alluded-to and compelling need for Christopher to return to Singapore to resolve the issues behind his boyhood transition. In that ending third of the book, the pace picks up, there is both danger and opportunity, and the mystery of Christopher's parents' lives is brought to a conclusion. How many stars this is worth is puzzling. The pace is daunting at times, but the writing is lovely and the conclusion appropriate. It left me glad I kept reading, glad I read it, but not very motivated to return to Ishiguro.

I liked it the first time I read it; when I re-read it I was blown away. Ishiguro works in odd, subtle ways and I guess it took me a while to get it, but get I did. The setting is concrete, the narrative is clear, but they are only partly what Ishiguro seems to be writing about. The section on war-torn Shanghai as the narrator goes from blown-out underground room to blown-out underground room on his pathetic quest for his (obviously) long since deceased parents aches with archetypal suffering. What Ishiguro is exploring in this book, in a new and extravagantly original way, is the landscape, the buried and secret terrain, of the heart.

There are many good reviews about this great novel here, so mine will be brief. This is a great novel for many reasons: the writing is wonderful, and the story is fascinating. Christopher Banks, London detective, returns to Shanghai to solve the case of his life: the unsolved mystery surrounding the disappearance of his parents when he was a young boy growing up in Shanghai. The most powerful scene comes when he searches through a maze of destroyed apartment buldings as the Japanese and Chinese carry on horrific battles. The reader becomes clearly aware that Detective Bank's sanity is very questionable; what is fact, and what is fancy? Ishiguro's great novel is as memorable as Malraux's classic "Man's Fate." Christopher Banks is an unforgettable character.

I was simply amazed at how well written this book is/was. The protagonist suffers painful events as a child. There is no reasonable way they could not cause terrible damage, and then leave their scars. Mr. Ishiguro explores this gently, just as the victim may not overtly manifest outrageous behavior. His careful treatment of Christopher is not vague or deficient, it reads as being appropriate, and exposes the results of his traumas with the time and care they need. "Threads" are often used to describe the storyline of a work. In many books I would suggest they are more like mooring ropes. In this book threads is being generous, for the first person narrative is not written deceptively, but can be construed differently by a group of readers. I think this is great. It's quite rare to read a contemporary work that does not hammer away at a tired theme, disclose the end when the prologue has barely been passed, or just insult the reader by presuming we are encephalitic illiterates. (Not trying to showboat, just loved the sound of those two words) It took what was probably the most jarring event to finally convince me I wasn't lost. And the event was much closer to the end than the start. What is real, and what is not will be decided by how carefully you read, and how cautious you are with the limitations of first person narrative. It is not a method that allows for much independent verification. However, I never felt frustrated, as the writer is so good and the read so enjoyable. Like an opium dream (and opium is the scourge of relations between Europe and China), the boundaries between fantasy and reality become hopelessly blurred as Christopher plunges into the maelstrom of the Shanghai underworld, political factions and history. Between blunders, rages and mysterious meetings, Christopher recalls the world of his youth. Even as a boy he understood that his comfortable, idyllic life was a thing apart from the reality of Shanghai. Warned against leaving the foreign compound, he catches glimpses of the misery of homeless, opium-addicted Chinese. In his own home, long periods of cold silence between his parents ripple the placid surface of his existence. Though his father earns a comfortable living with a company that supports the opium trade, his mother is an avid crusader against it.

Ishiguro's prose is sweet stuff. It's too bad that this plot is somewhat thin and unrealistic. The story abounds with interesting characters, some fully realized, some hollow. His obvious study of period history serves him well, and his descriptions of British colonial attitudes rings true. What a treasure trove of novel material exists in the China between the world wars! We are given a glimpse of it in this story. Ishiguro is developing his craft and has a way to go yet, but his book is still an enjoyable reading experience. I look forward to seeing how he develops his plots. When he gets that aspect together, he's going to be in the big leagues.

Many readers found "When We Were Orphans" to be a beautifully conceived and complex tale of friendship, the bonds of family and romantic love set in an historically fascinating political and cultural time in British-Chinese and Chinese-Japanese relations. I would agree with that assessment, but with this caveat: the complexity of the tale is rooted in the fact that Christopher Bank's emotional development was so stunted in youth that as a man, he was incapable of experiencing true love, familial bonds and friendship. Did we read different books?! Is Ishiguro's mastery of subtlety purposeful, allowing readers to draw differing interpretations just as a piece of contemporary art conveys something different to every viewer? Or did the publisher leave too much on the cutting floor for the sake of making Ishiguro's latest a commercial success?
In my opinion, the author was at his personal best in making me feel as though I was an eager third "chap" along for the thrill & satisfaction of the forbidden adventure in Akira's house, a member of the shallow London society set marveling over the incomparable Christopher Banks and a supportive Dr. Watson along for the thrill & satisfaction of the final forbidden adventure through a disorientingly unfamiliar Shanghai outside of the International Settlement. Ishiguro's backdrops are gorgeous.
Nonetheless, I felt the story lacked momentum, depth and cohesion for want of character development.
Why did Christopher love Sarah, or believe he loved Sarah? I hoped to the end to learn something about this woman that would make me value her as a worthwhile human being. The "bus ride" conversation suggested there was more to her than her social-climbing persona implied, but if there was, we didn't discover it. I concluded that Christopher's attachment to her (when considered in context with his connections to the other important people in his life) had nothing to do with romantic love, but everything to do with her shared status as an orphan and all that imparted to Christopher's capacity for relationships.
Why in the world did Christopher adopt a daughter, and where was the evidence of a true paternal bond with her? I initially thought that entire story line was an afterthought, thrown in to create some tie to England to cause Christopher to return. In my final analysis, Jennifer existed simply to reinforce the fact that Christopher felt emotionally secure only with similarly abandoned persons over whom he could assume the role of protector, derived from his single source of self-esteem, being the great detective.
Why did Christopher behave so cruelly toward the driver and police officer he persuaded to help him on his incredible and dangerous search for his parents? It stood out as remarkable to me, as I could not find a cogent explanation for cruelty in Christopher's background and did not understand Ishiguro's two-time use of it here. Christopher's arrogance was in keeping with his general carriage when he was in detective mode, and his irrational behavior was understandable because he was so close to solving the mystery and was working under an artificial deadline conveniently presented to him by Sarah's offer, which he insincerely accepted knowing full well he wouldn't leave until "the case was closed," a fact that failed to cause him the inner turmoil a true lover would suffer. But the cruelty...?
Why didn't Ishiguro put his perfect prose to paper to describe the panoply of emotions Puffin surely experienced when he met the sought-after informant and finally obtained shocking, psychologically significant answers to life-long questions? I wanted the range of instant responses--rage, anguish and sorrow, toward both the messenger and the various parties involved--and the after-effects--comprehension, acceptance, forgiveness, introspection and yes, even change in Christopher's character.
The reunion with Akira was unsatisfying and sparse on detail of either man's feelings; the reunion with his mother was even more sparingly drawn. The denouement was unnourishing, yet by the close of the book, I cared so little for our Mr. Banks that I didn't hunger for more.
And perhaps there's the rub.... Have I allowed myself to become so spoiled by modern "literature" that I expect to be spoon-fed heroic characters and neatly tied-up endings and am disappointed and therefor criticize the author when I find nothing to admire about the protagonist and wish for a grand finale? Thank goodness Ishiguro didn't give us the much-discussed homecoming party. Thank you, Mr. Ishiguro, for making me think.

I'm guessing that Ishiguro must be on some kind of medication when he wrote this novel. The prose and narration, while top notch, could not compensate for the numerous glaring plot holes.
Reading this novel requires one to suspend his disbelief at the events unfolding. The most glaring one is how the protaganist, the renowned detective Christopher Banks, returned to Shanghai after 20 years, to find his missing parents, and for some reason, believes that they are still holed up in a slum house. He also stumbled upon his childhood friend after 20 years, Akira, in a war zone. These, and the way many other things come together for Banks strains credulity.
The bright spots in the novel is the little girl Jennifer who is adopted by Banks. Unfortunately, even this lone bright spot was only expanded on until the end of the novel.

The back cover promises a detective story spanning continents and epochs and what Ishiguro delivers is not only suspenseful, but a fully developed novel about family, identity, and the haziness of memory.

People have said that Ishiguro writes in the same voice in all of his books. But unlike the composed butler of "The Remains of the Day," Christopher Banks has a back story similar to Ishiguro's own, lending the reader a complex intimacy with the writer and his narrative voice. For a long time I pictured the protagonist as Chinese, despite his English surname. I had this peculiar sense that I was taking a journey with Ishiguro, that this narrator's story was his. (It isn't, as Ishiguro is Japanese, but he personally experienced moving to England as a child and received a wholly English upbringing.)

The narrator is flawed in ways we can relate to -- he employs a false modesty though it's clear he thinks highly of himself. Yet he draws the reader in because we know that the unsolved mystery of his past is the reason for his unstable sense of self. He is strongly distrustful and fiercely private, though he swells with pride at telling the reader about his accomplishments and recalling the romanticized memories of Shanghai that act as a sort of comfort blanket. He is likable but lost, and the reader is willing to accompany him on his inevitably world-inverting search for the truth.

The depictions of Christopher's prep school experience and attendance at elegant social functions collide messily with the scenes in which he's dodging grenades and plowing senselessly through a war zone in search of ghosts. We're frustrated by yet understanding of Christopher's myopic, idealistic impulses and desire for closure. And tragically he finds what he came for, solving the mystery of his parents' disappearance and shattering the rose-colored glasses of his childhood in one fell swoop, left wondering if in the end he'd rather not have known at all.

Ishiguro tells an intriguing story set against the backdrop of a lost time, a forgotten war, and a city that can surprise, delight and turn against you all at once. I highly recommend this book to fans of his previous work and to those who enjoy the literature of memory.

I was drawn to this book by generally good reviews, the author's prior work and the storyline. I found that I could not put the book down, but believed the plot to be too contrived. I understand that Dickens can get away with charaters popping back into a storyline at the most unexpected time, but when the protagonist in this book finds a long lost childhood friend in the middle of a warzone, it's a bit much. (Maybe he's not who he seems?)And while the narrator claims to be a great detective, there is no evidence of how he works. (Read A Conspiracy of Paper for a much better read about a London detective. Or read Empire of the Son about a boy's traumatic experience in wartorn China.) The narrator's mother also suffers a rather too purient and sadistic demise, and her ending is straight out of "The Other SIde of Midnight" by Sheldon (Do all traumatized women end up cared by nuns??) I enjoy this author's work and his mannered approach, but this isn't his best effort.

That was my thinking while reading Mr. Ishiguro's novel. I put it on my reading list because I had enjoyed his Remains of the Day and thought that a writer of his merit doing a detective story might be very interesting. And the first chapters were quite good and all through the book his descriptive language was very poetic and I enjoyed it. (Hence the 2 stars) However...
SOME SPOILERS BELOW
It was his characters I could not stand. As the story progressed (with large, odd leaps of time), the main character, Detective Chris Banks, believed after 20 or more years after his parents disappeared that he could find them after the local authorities 20 years ago hadn't found a clue?
And yes, as the author explained in a talk radio interview, Banks is not well in his beliefs, but I didn't go in expecting it, so when he started to basically have a temper tantrum 3/4 of the way through the novel because a helpful soldier was "hampering his case" by not going into the war zone with him to track down his parents, I really began to dislike Banks.
Then the final straw that broke the camel's back was when Bank's uncle explains everything in one of the last chapters. The author, in order to make the man ever the worse villain, gives the man lines like, "I pleasured myself thinking about her (Banks' mother) with him (a warload she was sold into slavery to)." I mean, PLEASE! I don't mind lewd material at all, but this was so heavy-handed in its use that I threw up my hands at that point.
I will be more careful the next time when considering Mr. Ishiguro's next work to read. I could have done without a "brilliant" delusional detective and his sadistic uncle.

This is the first Ishiguro book I've read, and while it contains the precise elegant prose I had anticipated, the story itself collapses under the strain of Ishiguro's awkward and inept use of the unreliable narrator. The unreliable narrator is a familiar narrative technique, perhaps more so in film (eg. The Usual Suspects, Memento) than in literature, and for whatever reason, many readers seem to have missed the obvious-and oftimes clumsy-clues Ishiguro provides. However, it's clear early on in this faux mystery that not all Christopher Banks tells the reader is entirely to be trusted.
The novel revolves around events in Banks's childhood in the International Settlement in Shanghai, a few years after the turn of the century. This is an idyllic time, as the days drift by while he plays with his Japanese neighbor Akira. In a bizarre turn of events, his father, who works for one of the large British opium importers disappears-kidnapped according to Banks (although we never hear of a ransom note). Soon after this, his mother disappears as well, also kidnapped we are told. When neither reappears, the boy is sent to England, where he tries to fit into British schools and society. This portion is rather interesting, as it no doubt reflects the author's own experience as a young boy transplanted to England. He continues his tale of growing up to become a famous detective by recounting certain episodes, and his developing friendship with a beautiful, but rather pathetic, society girl.
Banks is clearly not well adjusted-existing in a semi-delusional state where he is in many ways still a child. From his profession as detective to complete lack of sexuality, he is the epitome of self-repression. His adoption of Jennifer, an orphaned British girl living overseas, offers all kinds of possibilities but ultimately leads nowhere, leaving the reader wondering what purpose the subplot serves other than to reinforce the titular theme. When he abandons her to return to Shanghai in the mid-1930s to "rescue" his kidnapped parents, one wonders why he offered his guardianship at all. The scene in Shanghai upon his return is fairly well-wrought, with the International Settlement a small protected enclave as Japanese invaders try to capture the city from Chinese defenders, If you've read J.G. Ballard's memoir, Empire of the Sun or seen the film, you'll recognize the situation.
However, it is at this juncture that the novel starts slipping into the mire. For some reason, Banks seems to think his presence and the resolution of his parents' disappearance will somehow lead to a resolution of the Sino-Japanese conflict-and by extension, world tensions. While we understand at this point that he is deluded, for some reason Ishiguro has the characters around him reinforce this delusion, especially the embassy protocol official Mr. Grayson. At this point, we are confused-for in the first part of the book, Ishiguro uses the discrepancies between statements by supporting characters and Banks recollections to clue us in that his narration is not completely reliable. So, in the second half, when supporting characters apparently support his by now obvious delusions, it goes against the structure Ishiguro's established and renders the narrative a complete muddle. This gets particularly out of hand when in the climactic race to the house where he believes his parents are being held, he encounters Chinese soldiers who both know who he is and eventually agree to help him at the expense of their own orders and safety. At this point the novel loses any hope of redemption, and indeed, when the true circumstances of his parents are made known, it's a revelation worthy of 1950s pulp magazines, not a world-class author.
From the standpoint of pure use of language, the book is lovely and quite readable, what remains mystifying is how Ishiguro could have allowed his use of the unreliable narrator to slip its lead and destroy any sense of sympathy and interest we had invested in the characters and outcome.

Ishiguro's latest book expounds on themes with which he dealt in his earlier works. Consequently, When We Were Orphans is a complex and highly textured work of maturity. As such, it focuses on both Japanese and English cultural contexts, realism and surrealism, war and peace, action and passivity. The central character is confronted with his own inability to act effectively and deliberately as he struggles to learn what happened to his parents when he was a boy in Shanghai. In this way, Ishiguro emphasizes his own preoccupation with the dilemma Man faces as he attempts to to reconcile himself with his fate. The novel is full of suspense and engages the reader in feeling the frustration of the protagonist as he grapples with the dilemma of missing parents and a lost boyhood friend. The prose is deceptively simple, making this book an "easy" read, although one layed with meaning. At one point, the author lapses into a surrealistic account, which may perplex some readers, but this section is appropriate to the subject matter treated at the time and helps the reader understand the nature of the narrator's perceptions.

Having read at least a dozen customer reviews of 'Once we were Orphans', I am mystified that no-one sees it as the none-too-subtle political satire that it is. Why does everyone insist on reading this book so literally? Forget about Christopher as unreliable narrator, damaged child, delusional famous detective, etc. Christopher is England, once proud coloniser, now reduced to doing deals with the Communists, the Japanese, whoever, whatever it takes. His parents, mysteriously abducted years before, represent the golden age of colonialism. They have been snuffed out by emerging political forces: the rise of Japan, the internal struggle between Communism and anti-Communism, England's various humiliations in the theatres of war.
Akira, his loved/hated childhood friend, represents the formerly humble, yet always troublesome, Japan, who, when the going gets tough after they are reunited in Ishiguro's surreal Shanghai warzone, is a burden, and possibly, a traitor. Christopher sloughs him off without a second thought after being rescued and returned to the British Consulate.
Who is Sarah, his would-be lover, whom he also abandons at a crucial moment? I think she represents other British interests in the Far East that are expendable, even while they are tempting (commerce perhaps?). Christopher's ultimate allegiances are to his parents (political interests), who will serve his interests in the longer term.
Does anyone else agree with this analysis of this intriguing book?

Christopher Banks is an unusual detective in Kazuo Ishiguro¡¦s latest novel, When We Were Orphans. The story is not about Banks¡¦s investigation of a shrewdly planned murder or a cunning theft; he is attempting to solve the greatest mystery in his life: the disappearance of his parents when he was a boy in early twentieth century Shanghai. Certainly not a conventional adventure story, it nonetheless has the feature of a mystery tale ¡V one can never know the truth, or at least, a portion of the truth, until the last pages.
When the novel opens in 1930, Christopher Banks has become a renowned private detective in London. His first person narration begins innocently enough, with a classically correct, ¡¥realistic¡¦ fashion:
It was the summer of 1923, the summer I came down from Cambridge, when despite my aunt¡¦s wishes that I return to Shropshire, I decided my future lay in the capital and took up a small flat at Number 14b Bedford Gardens in Kensington.
This opening echoes that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle¡¦s A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story: ¡§In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London ¡K¡¨, and both narratives similarly give an impression of rational, orderly narrative to the readers, fitting for a detective novel. Indeed, our principal character Banks has mentioned reading about the ¡§foggy streets of the Conan Doyle mysteries¡¨. Banks¡¦s account is not unlike that of Dr. Watson, with a matter-of-fact style, and complete with the most ¡¥correct¡¦ English attitude.
¡§I¡¦d like to oblige you, Miss Hemmings. But unfortunately I¡¦ve already replied to the organisers some days ago. I fear it¡¦ll be rather late to inform them of my wish to bring a guest ¡K¡¨

Such a storytelling manner makes prominent Christopher Banks¡¦s ¡¥Englishness¡¦ ¡V a theme which is inevitably linked with the questions of identity and sense of belonging. In this quotation Banks is rejecting an unreasonable request put forward by Sarah Hemmings, an ambitious woman who aspires to join the upper class. In the course of the events they will become familiar and even intimate with each other. Sarah is to become a catalyst in prompting Banks to recall his childhood.
Banks¡¦s father, who works for a British company involved in the opium business, disappears when he is nine, and foul play is suspected. The young Banks and his Japanese friend, Akira, stage the missing father adventure time and time again in their role-playing games. However, Banks does not reveal too much about his feelings towards the supposed kidnapping of his father. ¡§I do not remember much about the days immediately following my father¡¦s disappearance¡¨, so he says. This nicely illustrates a continuous deliberate suppression of emotion in Banks¡¦s narrative. His true emotions are more subtly hinted at, or sometimes through the discrepancies between Banks¡¦s words and other characters¡¦ accounts of certain events. This gives rise to doubts about Banks¡¦s reliability as a narrator. After all, human memory is fallible, and this factor, coupled with a narrator who may have a tendency to distort his memories, readers are presented with the sometimes difficult but stimulating task of answering the question, what has really happened?
What happens after the disappearance of the father is certain ¡V his mother, a social activist against opium trade, also unaccountably disappears, apparently having been kidnapped. This shatters the boyish Banks¡¦s hope of living in Shanghai forever and he is sent to England, his ¡¥home¡¦, to stay with an aunt. His eventual return to Shanghai is at least partially prompted by, again, Sarah, who is to accompany her elderly statesman husband to Shanghai, which leads to the question of whether Banks is in love with her or not.
Flipping back to page one at this moment, one will find that such a ¡¥normal¡¦ opening has done nothing to prepare unwary readers for the developments in this later part of the story, beginning with Part Four ¡§Cathay Hotel, Shanghai, 20th September 1937¡¨. Without warning the world of reality, where reason inhabits, collapses. Very often the situation is incredulous or even outright ridiculous. Readers need to confront a different Banks here: his ¡¥logic¡¦ is so peculiar that there are moments when he seems to be on the verge of insanity. Hardly anyone doubts Banks¡¦s ability to rescue his parents, who are still believed to be in captivity somewhere in Shanghai, after almost a quarter of a century. Needless to say, Banks does not question the possibility of a satisfying conclusion. When his investigation brings him outside the International Settlement into the war-torn Shanghai, he rescues ¡¥Akira¡¦, but again, it is dubious whether that Japanese soldier is really Akira. It is near the end of his adventures in Shanghai that reasons seem to resuscitate and an appalling truth is revealed.
This change from ¡¥normal¡¦ to ¡¥abnormal¡¦ is exactly the most brilliant point about this novel. The transition is so smooth that one can¡¦t find the joints, rather like a successful surgery that leaves no scar. This shift should come as a great surprise to readers. Some may at first find this uncomfortable, especially for those who are expecting to see a cool Sherlock Holmes at work, and Ishiguro does raise such expectations in the ¡¥realistic¡¦ first part. Nevertheless the ¡¥absurd¡¦ part opens up possibility for readers to think about the way memory works, and readers are presented the psychological burden of a person with a traumatic childhood ¡V in the poignant closing paragraph Banks realizes that it is the fate of orphans to ¡§chas[e] through long years the shadows of vanished parents¡¨.

Overtly a detective story, When We Were Orphans is above all a psychological journey of a character who courageously confronts his past. With an ingenious plot and memorable characters, this is a novel of memory par excellence.

All of Ishiguro's fiction is about the disconnect between the narrator's reality and some "objective" reality, where the narrator's perceptions are rooted in a past that no longer exists (and may have been misperceived at the time). The disconnect is especially extreme in "When We Were Orphans". Indeed, it seems fair to ask if the narrator is really in any way the person he presents himself to be. Christopher Banks perceives the world with the eyes of a ten year old addicted to dime novel detective fiction. Is he in fact a detective and an adult? Or, is he rather in fact a ten year old? Or, was the trauma of his youth so extreme that he failed to develop thereafter? Do we all see the world, at least in part, through some kind of prism that distorts the reality that we experience? This certainly is one of the major questions asked in "Orphans". This novel bears some striking resemblances to J.G. Ballard's "Empire of the Sun", which also deals with an English child's experience in China (just before and during WWII)) and, in quite parallel fashion, with the relationship between that child and a Japanese "friend". Is this another deliberate comment of Ishiguro's on perception and reality?

Having read Remains and Artist (though the last one didn't exactly blow me away), I was curious about this one; the storyline sounded rather interesting. But for all of Mr Ishiguro's mastery of English (makes one think of Joseph Conrad) he simply doesn't pull this one off. So his Christopher Banks seems to be a couple of cans short of a six-pack, still his delusions have to face up to reality. Why do the other characters play along (believing his parents to be trapped in the same house for 18 years, or his pompous allusions about defusing the global crisis in the thirties that are never taken up)? For all the original idea, never comes even close to Remains - so read that one.

I admire Ishiguro for writing a risk-taking book, most unlike any I have read befire. Unfortunately, this novel fails in its objectives, except for itself being a unique piece of fiction.

The protagonist is an english detective, who appears to be completely delusional about his current circumstances, and who is willing to take these delusions to great lengths. Because of this, the plot eventually becomes irrelevant to reality. This is when the book shows its signs of brilliance, when the plot is recognized as meaningless and the major themes take over in a Chinese battle.

Unfortunately this brilliant culmination hardly makes up for the rest of the novel. Besides the poor/meaningless plot, the novel does not have a single character the reader cares about. The thematic sequence, during which the book finally seems to be about something, is all too fleeting. Soon after the plot returns even more absurd than before. It's a truly frustrating experience.

Kazuo Ishiguro's most recent novel, as with his previous four, brings to the forefront how much our past encroaches upon our present and steers the direction of our future. Charles Banks and the other central figures from Ishiguro's other novels, attempt to recover the past only to find that such attempts are always too late.
Nostalgia is an overarching theme in When We Were Orphans and time the literary convention by which the past and present mingle together. Ishiguro's sense of time and timing are a particular forte in his writing. Conversations amongst the elite at societal gatherings are slow and stuffy. Banks often leaves the hob-knobbing guests to engage in one-on-one conversations or seeks the relief of the cold evening air from claustrophobic dinner guests. Most of the novel takes place over the course of seven years in the adult life of Banks but so many pages are dedicated to Banks remembering assorted fragments of his childhood adding another twenty years to the novel. In contrast, in the second half of the novel, the reader is carried overseas from England to the Far East where Banks spends ten days unraveling the mysteries of his childhood. Shanghai of the present is an erratic place with a matching erratic pace. Ishiguro's timing has changed and effectively conveys a war-torn colony that has no patience for a Britain's sense of details and order. In a surrealistic scene that echoes Alice in her Wonderland, Banks navigates through a maze, in his case, an impoverished part of his homeland completely strange and unfamiliar to him. Banks' undefeatable optimism to recover his past sustains his journey through the bombed streets of Shanghai but in the end, as with all attempts to recover one's personal history to set it right, it is long gone. There is no recovery of the relationships with his missing parents. Instead, Charles Banks reconciles with the past by leaving his mother who is as much a stranger to him as he is to her at an institution, and redirecting his future toward an orphan who is grateful to have been found.

The edifice of memory, a mere construction. The "detective story" is not thrilling in the everyday sense of the word. It's almost as if we know, as readers, from the very beginning that this edifice will crumble, as so many memories are bound to. Time may be a healer, but it also makes us more fragile to the time-boundedness of memories, of our lives...

Set against the assault of Christopher's memories is his mother's final "beaten" memory-loss, where pain makes forgetting a less painful way out...these are delusions of different kinds...

Banks's "self" too is so "artful" that I felt, more often than not, that Ishhiguro had deliberately made him fictional. Further, the strangely "fictional" quality of the book moves in tandem with the bloody "realness" of the later portions - almost like cardboard cutouts against an underlying tension of a sick, "real" world.

The central "mystery" adds to this fictionality; the protagonist's self-delusions reify it; and the quality of a remembered childhood - that Banks refuses to grow out of - colours the narrative with an impending sense of doomed nostalgia....

It is BECAUSE the "mystery" so seductively promised fails to satisfy that this story works.... For me, it's the frustrated closure/s and the almost foolish hopes that render the book a masterpiece.

I read the 58 reviews already posted on the subject of this book with more than a little impatience. The readers' honestly expressed disappointments - the dislikable central characters, the lack of information about detectives, the lack of depth about the details of Shanghai - miss the point. The limitations are intended and deliberate. The narrator's authority is repeatedly announced as faulty by other characters; the narrator's oddness is self-described as the assumption of other people's behavior (smiles, gestures, and slang) in order to mask himself. He becomes a detective for unrealistic and naïve reasons; his work as a detective - from his "famous" successes to his wartime adventures -- are also unrealistic and naïve. Like Remains of the Day, the story is about someone who has learned manners in order to disguise an inner hollowness, and also like Remains of the Day, the narrator is someone who has learned to play a role in order to compensate for a lack of self-awareness and true identity. These emotions are genuinely felt by the writer, and described in subtle and moving ways. More, these are roles and behavior with a literary history mentioned in the text, not just the detective fiction of Conan Doyle, but also the adventure stories of Walter Scott and the coming of age novels of Charles Dickens. Throughout the book, themes and plot devices deliberately echo Dickens: the aunt from David Copperfield, the unknown benefactor from Great Expectations, the bachelor guardian and his attractive young ward from Bleak House. The book is beautifully written, carefully constructed, oddly moving, and yet does not succeed. What prevents the whole from cohering is that the specific political issues of Japanese-occupied Shanghai, the British collusion in the opium trade, and what it means to detect the truth, not to mention the art and science of detection, are more interesting to the reader than the writer's unreliable (tall)tale-telling orphan.

Not as good as Ishiguro's other works. His very best was Artist of the Floating World, followed by Remains of the Day. This book follows the career of a Shangai-raised Englishmen who becomes a detective. Like all Ishiguro's book, the narrarator has exagerated sense of formality. The sense of denial and the sort of "elephant in the middle of the room" truths that lead to great ending in Ishiguro's other books never materialize in this one.

I'm a sucker for novels set in pre-war Shanghai when China was in the middle of a long-running war involving Communists, Nationalists, warlords, Japanese invaders and European power in Asia was coming to an end so I grabbed this.

However, instead of being plunged into the mysterious East, I spent about 180 pages in middle-class London in the mid-30s during which Shanghai was recalled from patchy childhood memories by the narrator, a Lord Peter Wimsey-type private detective.

He was born in Shanghai and came to England as a boy after his English parents were apparently kidnapped and he eventually returns to solve the mystery.

In fact, the first half turns out to be better than the second when the book just falls apart.

There is no feel of Shanghai, characters have no personality and appear and disappear. The narrator loses all sense of reality and perhaps this is a deliberate ploy by the author but, if so, it is handled clumsily.

The plot becomes absurd. For example, for some reason that is never explained the narrator becomes certain that his parents are being held in a certain house years after disappearing.

He also conveniently meets his childhood friend, now serving as a Japanese soldier, who just happens to be about to be tortured or put to death by Chinese civilians.

The climax - in which the truth about his parents is revealed - is farcical and the ending, which I won't describe as I don't want to betray the "plot", is lame to say the least.

Finally, the dialogue must surely be meant to be pastiche with characters addressing each other as "old fellow", "old chap" and "my good sir" umpteen times in every sentence.

Ishiguro, as someone with intimate knowledge of English culture, while being in some ways outside of it, writes of an old world that has crumbled away and a new uncertain one that is slowly forming. He examines with great insight the trauma this has meant for those who belonged by class or by servitude to the elite of the old world. The Remains of the Day and his most recent book are a metaphor for what happens to such people when "the day is nearly over", or when they "become orphans".
These books are also scathing denunciations of how the old world of power and privilege created a class of irresponsible and greedy people who were at the same time self-complacent, uninformed and blind to the reality outside of their privileged cocoon.
When We Were Orphans is by far Ishiguro's most stinging condemnation of such an elite when it constitutes an empire that uses its power simply for self-aggrandizement, conniving hypocritically with despised "inferiors", in total disregard of the misery it has created or is an accomplice to. He uses the "surreal" mode to chronicle the horror that is the fate of the poor and the terrible cruelty that war brings to their lives, while the contiguous "international settlement" parties and drinks and gossips about internal love affairs, standing idly by while the world hurtles towards a catastrophe.
Even the most decent of this elite, like the protagonist, are essentially stunted, incapable of growing or of expressing their feelings and ultimately of taking responsibility for themselves and others. Christopher has chosen his life's work in accordance with his goal of "defeating evil", but in the end he has little to show for his life except "old newspaper clippings" that speak of insignificant, long-past cases he solved as a "detective". In fact, the events of his life force him to acknowledge that he has not only failed to "defeat evil", but has actually been dependent on it for the modicum of comfortable living he has enjoyed.
No wonder that a number of American readers are puzzled or annoyed with this book. The hands of the clock of their empire are still some way off from "the remains of the day". Nevertheless, it is a book whose sensitivity, subtlety and imagination gives us all a chance to look in the mirror before it is too late, to discover in time that we do not need after all to be orphans of some make-believe nursery world of luxury, but could develop into human beings who are capable of expressing feelings and perceiving the feelings of others, and taking responsibility for each other as members of a human family.
The world need not hurtle to catastrophe while we watch. Ishiguro's real message is that of the doomed Japanese soldier who at last understands and begs Christopher to tell his son "to build a good world".

I have never written a review before but felt compelled, in this case, in the hope of sparing someone else the torture of this book. The storyline becomes more preposterous as it progresses culminating in the last quarter of the book in a mishmash that seems to be either a dream or a hallucination. I forced myself to finish it since, after all, it is a mystery and I wanted to know the ending. However Ishiguro seems to insist that all is real by transitioning to a believable (albeit very disappointing) ending. In effect, he appears to be saying: "that's my story and I am sticking to it". When I finally put the book down, I felt I had been cheated of the time it took to read it.

Without a doubt the worst thing I have read this year....and I have read a few stinkers. kazuo Ishiguo seem to think hes the reincarnated James Hilton and while they both take there time and craft a slow complex and well written tale Mr. Ishiguos work is beyond plodding, beyond wordy...its just much a due about nothing. A thin tale with mountains of words is a good description. And the climax is expected long before it happens. Prepare to skim if this is on your book club list.

Unreliable narrator technique is not my thing.

I loved Remains of the Day, and picked up When We Were Orphans as soon as it came out. The novel uses the unreliable narrator technique, and I found it both irritating and at times confusing. Mostly irritating. I appreciate the author's dexterity, but I don't want to be part of his experiment ever again.

The beautifully woven words and the images it invoked was the reason I couldn't put the book down. I was enthralled, but there was something incredibly random and weak about the main character's development, and the ending just didn't measure up to the initial build-up. Of course, it's entirely possible that the author intended a somewhat bitter-sweet ending (or as I'd call it, the deflation of the plot balloon) that would leave the reader in postpartum depression, but I wish I hadn't followed the expectations built by the book itself.

Basically, the story of this book revolves about an English man obsessed by the disappearance of his parents in Hong Kong when he was a child. The result of this obsession is a journey into the confused memories of the protagonist, wherein lies the main interest of the story. Unfortunately, Kazuo Ishiguro doesn't have much of an idea how to make this book into the masterpiece it could have been. It begins slowly and continues in that vein for some time and when things finally start to get going, it becomes uninteresting. It's not a long book and doesn't seem thus, but that is part of the problem. He never manages to capture a sense of importance necessary for the reader to be truly involved with the storyline which makes you wish this experience would just end as soon as possible. The author manages to describes the scattered memories of the protagonist with a degree of skill but he fails on every count to make it an intensely literary experience. His attempts to give small clues as to the answer to the central riddle while not giving away a great deal begin to seem desperate after a while and this is annoying. Overall, the sequences where he remembers details from his past fail to achieve the coherence and smoothness it is apparent that the author and the reader would have desired. The author dwells for too long on the allegorical maze of the Hong Kong slums and it really isn't a very good way to climax a book anyway. The ending is uninspired and the answers provided seem disappointing given the sense of mystery and intrigue evoked throughout. If you want to read a Kazuo Ishiguro book, don't read this one. You'll come away from it with a feeling of having wasted your time. There are no rewards for the reader and it seems incomprehensible why this should have been nominated for a Booker Prize.

Although WWWO contains many brilliant passages in the first half, it does not hold together as beautifully as do NLMG and TROTD. The agonies in those masterpieces are always ennobling. Here, instead, they are too often disgusting.

After liking Remains of the Day a few months ago I decided to pick this book up. It reads very fast in part due to some tricks at the end of chapters (ala Ludlum) to push you into the next.

The prose is well crafted. There was one key weakness in my view which has to do with the extremely unlikely plot twist where the main character reconnects with his childhood friend. Why would he be fighting for the Japanese army in China? How could one ever believe in the chance meeting described in the book? I'd say it's a small blot on an otherwise satisfactory plot line.

For those existentists out there you will find a bit of an echo in the treatment of the main character and his relation to the world and the other people in his life. So at the end the book does leave you with a bit more than just a fun read.

Ishiguro's depiction of Shanghai is quite impressive. Although I am not a Shanghai man, I am quite familiar with the city because I've been there last year. When I read this book and thought of my Shanghai experience,the images of the city became vivid.
However, this story is not interesting until Christopher Bank, the protagonist, found Akira. That scene that they meets on the battlefield intrigues me; before that is totally a mess.
I think Ishiguro spends too much time describing something not very important, like the scenes Christopher meets Sarah. I think these scenes, although Ishiguro develops them, still do not meet with the enigmas Christopher finally solves. Those "scenes" or "lines", from my point of view, are not valuable and in some way they tire readers.

I've found the "Orphans..." to be exceedingly boring. The interesting plot and a few preciously painted details are buried under a rubble of monotonous, dialogue lines replete with seemingly endless repetitions and regurgitations of what has just been said. Victorian pleasantries and polite addresses abound while none of the characters, with the exception of Sarah Hemmings, gets any sort of portrait description. The depiction of romantic feelings and situations in the novel, though told from the 1st person, male perspective, is completely asexual and feels like written by an old, Victorian maid who has never had sex. Another flaw is the accents - for some mysterious reason, most Chinese characters speak fluent, more-or-less grammatical English, while the main character's childhood friend who grew up speaking English in the international settlement, caricature-like lacks most copula verbs and other basic English grammatical forms. Mr. Ishiguro seems to be here in need of a strict editor who'd cut the flabber of his novel and demand a better re-write.

A fairly shattering and wholly mysterious first person narrative of a life lived with intent but without perception. It's clear Ishiguro is on a trajectory all his own, and seems again with this book to be some new kind of contemporary but nonetheless prophetic voice, both affirming the legitimacy of and warning of the dangers of something like Richard Rorty's notion of contingency. Fine and suprisingly brisk novel that summarizes and builds beautifully on the author's previous works, and bears repeated readings. Five stars.

I read this book over two months ago, and I keep on returning to it in my mind. Does that make it a great book? Maybe not, but it's been the subject of many interesting discussions over the dinner table at my house. We've thrown around Freud and Kierkegaard, which sure beats our everyday conversation. Yeah, I guess that does make it a great book.

Reading the reviews in the store is usually much more informative than reading the marketing blurbs that appear on a book or frankly many of the reviews that appear in the press. The fact that this book was considered for the Booker award, the most important British literary award, is simply shocking. It points out that selling books is like any other business and therefore let the buyer beware. There are few books that I have reacted to so negatively in the last twenty years. The fact that many readers still appear to love the book and consider it a "masterpiece" is the only true mystery of this book for me. I suppose many people expect a great book from a popular and successful novelist, but this book in my opinion is a waste of time. It is a silly, illogical book that is also weirdly racist in its belief that the Chinese soldiers involved could have cared at all about this preposterous Englishmen and his missing family. It is not worth reading.

This seduction of a novel lulls the reader into one reality while masterfully thumping you upside your head in the last chapters. The result is your convinction of the decidedly unromantic consequences of British Imperialism. This book is too sexy for the Booker Prize. English boy, put your magnifying glass down. It's a bombardment, not Biology lab. Take a look at yourself. It's just not like you thought.

Oh how I hated this book. Sometimes I give up on a book when it is written poorly or with poor story craftsmanship. But in the case of When We Were Orphans, I was so disgusted with the poor quality of the story itself that I willed my self to finish it just so I could come home one day and write a review for the store. ... Ishiguro has written like a high schooler who has good technical ability but is not mature enough to actually think his story through. I kept finding myself chuckling at the absurdity of still thinking one's parents were alive and in the same darn house after having been kidnapped 30 years earlier. Huh?? I was also constantly reminded of the Belgian comic hero TinTin and his two-dimensional journies around the exotic regions of the globe....all 11 year old adolescent fantasy and thinness. Maybe the meditations on a child's memories make this the actual point??
A highly respected journalist friend of mine has one primary test for the quality of a story: do all the dots get connected in the end? And in the case of When We Were Orphans, the dots are not only disconnected - they keep disappearing as the story unfolds. Weak characters, simplistic plot devices, lazy story construction, offensive simplicity, etc. etc. I admit my vitriol is in large part motivated by a sense of disappointment after the oft praised Remains of the Day and even An Artist of the Floating World. Sorry Ishiguro....this is terribly weak and I suspect you know it. I'll give you another chance on your next novel though.

sometimes you read kazuo ishiguro and it seems that he's always playing the same tune -- "stiff, delusional older guy looks back on life and pieces together a tragic past" ... but this one proved that ishiguro can do more with his toolkit than just rehash remains of the day. this book is extremely powerful and gripping -- definitely on a peer level with R.O.D. and in some ways stronger.

the title is misleading. seeing that the title sounded like something similar to Copperfield, i decided to borrow it. to my dismay it did not turn out to be anything like it. the story itself is a little too far-fetched. however, some parts are written wonderfully and also reveals some insights of Kazuo. worth a read only if u are bored or have a lot of time to spare.

Ishiguro follows J Ballard's similar theme of a childhood in a foreign land. The book explores Christopher Bank's childhood in old Shanghai and continues with his adulthood in 1930s London. Ishiguro explores the loss of identity that Christopher feels, particularly on his return "home", to a place he has never lived, or was even born. The book alludes to the main idea, that we can never go home. Christopher, having never had a typical home, finds it difficult. Ishiguro plays with the idea of restlesness, as Christopher searches in vain for some sense of his past. All in all, a wonderful book, full of amazing imagery that places us in both the glittering aristocratic homes of 1930s London as well as the smoky opium houses of old Shanghai.

I found this novel to be rambling and poorly plotted. Perhaps it would have worked better as a series of short stories or a more tightly edited novella. Seeing Shanghai before WWII and the colonists' attitudes was fascinating, but it could not make up for the lack of character development or the ramshackle plot.

Ishiguro's `When We Were Orphans' simply doesn't live up to the praise with which it has been regarded. The author's protagonist has an exceptional command of the English language-there's no doubt about that. The real disappointment is that nothing substantially rewarding ever comes of it. Instead, the reader is left with numerous questions regarding the behavior and motives of the narrator and further, is letdown as the story meanders throughout in no real direction.

Plainly, this novel lacks a decisive plot. The character development is sketchy at best and the author is guilty of ignoring a paramount rule of literature: `Show-don't tell.' Throughout the book the reader is constantly reminded that the protagonist, Christopher Banks, is a famously celebrated detective. Like the legendary Sherlock Holmes, he carries with him at all times-the trademark magnifying glass. Unfortunately, this is as close as the similarity gets. While Christopher is well recognized for his talents at home and abroad, at no time in the book does he ever remotely come close to giving us an example of his powers of deduction. Indeed, the majority of the critical information he collects is by a series of chance encounters and dumb-luck inquiries.

There's plenty of mystery and intrigue in this novel. The problem is the narrator does little to assemble any of it into a tangible form. A psychological detective thriller this is not. In the end, Christopher Banks amounts to a modestly interesting character whose eloquence for the English language supercedes any real story he has to tell. His story, while on the one hand compelling, is buried within a political quagmire so full of holes and question marks that I find it hard that readers could ever sympathize with him, much less believe him.

This is the first book that made me angry upon finishing. It started out promisingly and then turned into something that is hard for me to describe. Ridiculous might be a good word. the two stars are for the writing style because it is very prettily written, too bad we are left not knowing why the author bothered.

...if there was a surprise reveal, a la A Beautiful Mind, at the end of the book.

I had great hopes for this book when I started it. I love the author and thought the start of the book showed promise, but I lost any connection to the characters and to the story quickly. Christopher, Akira, the barely there not worth it "love" story with Sarah, and the way the narrative was tied up...it was all to over the top and didn't ring true. This was especially true when Christopher returns to Shanghai to solve his parents' disappearance. Return after how much time? It seems unreasonable and doesn't make sense that he believes he'll find them without a problem after so many years. Also, when he leaves Sarah at a pre-appointed rendezvous because he has to find a house his parents may be held in (how long has it been since they were taken and he expects they're in the same house a witness mentioned at the time of the disappearance???), I shook my head in disbelief. This narrative was just too over the top to believe even an ounce. But when Christopher is being led through a poor settlement of houses in search of this house and runs into Akira, I thought this was the most ridiculous book I'd ever read. Then I thought if it was revealed that Christopher was dreaming all of this up (since Ishiguro does allude to him being somewhat strange and out of touch earlier in the novel), it would redeem everything, but alas nothing like that and I was sorely disappointed at the end of this book.

I wish I had read some of the negative reviews before I wasted time reading this book!
This novel uses the "unreliable narrator," so presumably everything the protagonist describes is questionable--he apparently lives in a fantasy world, and the only explanation I can think of for why he hasn't been locked up yet is that perhaps he has so much money he's accepted as merely eccentric. But, really--why on earth are important people bothering to talk to someone who is obviously a childlike lunatic when there is a war going on? It's just too implausible, even if you accept that what he narrates is part fantasy, and that civilization itself is crazy in wartime.
The initial setup of the story is good, and the idea of using an unreliable narrator for it is OK--but it's poorly, poorly handled.

The beginning is interesting and promising. The childhood in Shanhai describtion is detailed and inspiring. It was great and I was looking forward to see how all developes, being patient and coping with the time elopes. But than suddenly all clushes and becomes indeed a big mess (as the reviewer before me mentioned). The plot loses its credibility. It does not feel like surrealistic to me. It just feels like the author lets us down and the book loses its integrity. I just felt sorry for the time spent reading this stupid novel.

How can a book have such tightly-controlled writing, yet such an illogical, unbelievable and frustrating plot? The narrator is a detective, yet we are given no details on his professional triumphs (we're just told, repeatedly, he's a great detective), and, judging from his lack of memory and inability to focus on essential clues from his past, no reason to think he has the mental acuity to be such a brilliant detective. This novel is both too tight and too loose at the same time.

Let me precede my review of 'When we were Orphans' with the caveat that Ishiguro is one of the best living novelists in the English language. This book, however, did not meet my high expectations

The main character struggles to integrate in stodgy 1930's England, although he is an outsider in every sense of the word. He grew up in colonial Shanghai in an expatriate cocoon inhabited fellow Brits and all other nationalities (except Chinese of course). There is a wonderful contrast with his best friend, a Japanese boy of the same age, who finds himself an outcast when returning to his 'native' land during vacations. The early parts of the story paint the picture of children with no roots trying in vain to blend in to lands where they do not feel at home.

Unfortunately, the story strays to the future and finds our main character searching for his parents in war-torn Shanghai. This is where the characters become unglued and the story follows a drawn out finale that is utterly disappointing.

Ishiguro may have overstepped his knowledge base and strayed too far into the unknown. I still rate him as one of the masters of the modern English novel.

The only reason I read this lame novel is because of the reviews it received. Boy, was I misled. What are you people thinking? This was an absolutely boring and stupid story. In an effort to justify your glowing reviews, you artsy intellectual types are trying to invent non-existent motives and intentions behind Ishiguro's work. Lets face it, the book made no sense and the plot lines were difficult and pointless. For example, after several years the "great detective" Christopher Banks still thinks kidnappers are holding his parents in a house that is in the middle of a war zone! Give me a break! The love interest is equally stupid. Every two to four years the main character has a breif chance incounter with an aggresive female social climber and from this we are to assume that they are deeply in love--wow!! What a leap!! Now I know that some of you philisophical types are thinking that I just don't get the deeper underlying meanings behind the trauma that afflicts Christopher Banks. But how can I invent some explanation that is not made clear by the author. If this book was as good as some of the reviews suggest, then why are its sales so poor? The reason why this book is no longer on the front racks of my local Barnes and Noble book store is because it is bad! My only consolation is that I was able to check it out of the local library (there was no wait to check it out) and I did not have to waste money on a purchase.
Dr. Robert D. Petersen Ph.D. Educational Administration

When an off-kilter investigator goes to Shanghai to uncover the mystery surrounding his parents' death, all bets are loose. Is the story you're reading the actual account, or is it all the figment of the leading character's imagination. You'll just have to read and find out. man oh man this is an awesome read!

Having read Remains of the Day I was excited to see that he had written a new book. The first chapters were interesting as they described his boyhood friend and their days of play.
The final chapters were disappointing. Expecting to find his parents after 22+ years of no contact really left me amazed that he expected to find them. Improbable and this got in the way of the enjoyment of the story.
It was as though it was written by a student of his, using his signature. I won't rush to read the next one if this is what I can expect.

A Finalist for the 2000 Booker Prize. Like Ford Madox Ford and Ferdinand Mount, the author utilizes the unreliable or semi-unreliable narrator to give a first person account of his early life. From pre-World War II Shanghai to England and back again, Kazuo Ishiguro weaves an intriguing plot.

This novel includes every ingredient that makes a story. The story is continually accelerating, the story has many levels, personal, political, cultural, etc. The portrayal of the persons is very good. The story has an interesting setting with contrasting cultures and time perspectives. This setting does however not dominate the main story but makes it all the more intriguing. It is always tricky to compare different authors but the author that comes into my mind is Paul Auster. I would rank this novel a little below Auster's novels when it comes to originality and on the same level if not a little above when it comes to story telling.

As I was interested in this book from a NPR review that I heard on the way to work one morning and purchased it on that basis, I was extremely disappointed when I completed the read. Better time could have been spent doing a variety of other things.... I enjoy the intricacies of English culture/life as much as the next reader but find it unhelpful when it is used as filler and does not appreciably add to the story line. I kept reading on waiting for the plot to improve and for some unusual chain of events to reveal some insight that would make the torture of what I had been laboring through worth the struggle...it never happened and by the time I suffered through the end of this weak but complex tale, I was assured that it will be my last effort with this author as life is TOO SHORT to waste it on drivel...

The first few chapters promise much and the intriguing encounters between Christopher and Sarah were captivating. However, the plot gradually degenerates into an incredible story of a senseless Englishman braving through Japanese shells and bullets to search for his parents, whom he believed were held hostage in a shanty town in the middle of a battlefield in wartime Shanghai for 30 years. But perhaps the most "intriguing" part is how the western community in Shanghai seemed to expect Christopher to bring world peace with the solving of the case of his parents' disappearance.

I do get what is happening in this novel, but as things are so far from reality it doesn't do for me what I want great literature to do, which is to feel an empathy and bond with the characters in the novel and a reflection on my own and others' lives. This is achieved in "The Remains of the Day" which I just read and which also relies on the unreliable narrator method. But Stevens only suffers from what I think are the normal errors of the mind in reconstructing history, while Banks is crazy.

In his previous novels, he has explored this inner world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight. The story is straightforward. It's telling is remarkable. Christopher's voice is detailed and detached, it's precision unsurpusing in someone who has devoted his life to the examination of details and rigors of objective thought.

I admit that I have not yet finished the book, and so perhaps should reserve judgement, but I won't. There are so many absurdities, unexpainable assumuptions made by the characters, both major and minor that I finally concluded that Ishiguro was attempting to write somthing Kafkaesque and, for me, only succedding in making Banks and many of the other charactrers appear deliberately obtuse. Like other reviewers, I am terribly bored by the book, which is admittedly very elegantly written, but I am put of by its abusurdity, which is tiresome and not at all compelling.

Ishiguro's latest, 'Orphans,' begins on very familiar ground. In fact, a good portion of the book is devoted to the introspection and introspective analysis that often typifies Ishiguro's work. The protagonist explores his past, and specifically his memory of it, to attempt to arrive at an understanding with his present. This journey transforms the novel into a full-scale detective story, giving the novel a compelling and gripping climax to a brilliant story. A most entertaining read.

This book was never good but at least at the beginning one might have the impression that the story could evolve... well I was waiting and waiting but things went straight downhill. What is this book about? The protagonist is not interesting in any sense. At the part where he goes back to Shanghai and looks for his parents (disappeared 18 years ago and he thinks they are kept in a house still held captive) while there is actual fighting around him and thinks he found a childhood friend I thought this guy is simply insane, really a mental case and since this is a memoir of his none of which I have been reading is true. I was disappointed to find out that the writer did indeed believe that the events depicted could have taken place. The whole book is such a disappointment!

"When We Were Orphans" is passionless. My sister and I both received the detective novel for the holidays, and when we discussed it over lunch the other day, I discovered that I was not alone in my confusion about key plot points and storytelling devices - and my lack of empathy and sympathy for its protagonist. I always break the binding of books with a desire to love them - not find fault in them. I do not often feel as dissatisfied as I did while reading and after finishing "When We Were Orphans".

I entered into this book with very high expectations for obvious reasons: Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go are examples of outstanding fiction. When We Were Orphans is not. It starts in a very compelling and beautiful manner with the intertwining of Banks' current and childhood life, but things start to really unravel when he returns to his childhood Shanghai to solve his parents disappearance (hence title). There are so many ludicrous gaps in common sense in the back third of the book, it becomes a supremely frustrating read. For example, an English Civil Servant plans for a huge welcoming party for his parents (lost 20 years previously!)... Banks still believes them to be alive! He meets his childhood friend in a war zone! Soldiers put their lives on the line to help him search in enemy territory for these parents he lost 20 years previously! He examines the stump of an arm (torn off by a shell blast) with a magnifying glass (what was he expecting to find? a clue about who fired the shell?)! Orphans pop up with annoying regularity! His uncle turns out to be the bad guy! It eventually descends into complete rubbish and I had to force myself to finish it.

My advice: avoid this poorly constructed mess and read his classics.

Ishiguro's depiction of Shanghai is quite impressive. Although I am not a Shanghai man, I am quite familiar with the city because I've been there last year. When I read this book and thought of my Shanghai experience,the images of the city became vivid.
However, this story is not interesting until Christopher Bank, the protagonist, found Akira. That scene that they meets on the battlefield intrigues me; before that is totally a mess.
I think Ishiguro spends too much time describing something not very important, like the scenes Christopher meets Sarah. I think these scenes, although Ishiguro develops them, still do not meet with the enigmas Christopher finally solves. Those "scenes" or "lines", from my point of view, are not valuable and in some way they tire readers.

Although I love Ishiguro's writing style, the convoluted plot detracts from the overall quality of the novel. Ishiguro sets the stage well and some of the prose describing scenes in Shanghai is truly beautiful and emotive. However, the random twists and turns particularly toward the end of the novel make the story implausible and too contrived.

dis book be good; it smack of de remains de day. de tone resemble. de main character, he a bit of a stuff shirt, mon. he be emotionally trammelled English man, mon. he remind of jenkins or whoever de heck de guy was in de remains. he think he know all--he not know all. but he endearing. ishguro prose like de japanese garden: beautiful, delicate, but not majestic, mon. de better english writers nowadays is WILLIAM BOYD, WILLIAM BOYD AND DAVID MITCHELL plus WILLIAM BOYD. Cheerio, mon!

I so enjoyed "Remains of the Day," but had a lot of trouble getting involved with the characters and story, or lack of coherent story line, of "When We Were Orphans." It picked up speed and interest toward the end, but I remain confused as to who these people actually were and why we should care about their quest.

This book is such a grandiose mess that I must remind myself of Ishiguro's great works, such as Remains of the Day, which show what he is capable of as a writer and artist. When We Were Orphans is a small, unpleasant, soapy story set against a gigantic and wildly improbable canvas, as if that will somehow give the story social weight, political size and personal meaning. It doesn't.

Having just finished this book and having enjoyed it mostly, I would just like to comment on a very long and complicated review of this book in these pages, written on October 22, in which the erudite reviewer was under the impression that most of the action in the Far East took place in Hong Kong! What book could this reviewer have been reading? Believe me, Hong Kong never was, has been or is Shanghai!

I had to plow through this book, which made no real sense after a while. It was soo boring. Full of nonsence information. I always felt that a book that was short listed for the Booker prize could be something more... well ... exciting. It was just boring and it had no real point to the whole story.

Ishiguro can write. There is no doubt about this. However, this ability is definitely not reflected in "When we were orphans". This must be just about the most disappointing book I have ever read.
The pace is pedestrian, the plot improbable, the naivety of the narrator and main character stupifying and the characterisations stereotyped.
I wish I could be more positive!
There is nothing in this book to recommend it, which is really quite amazing, given the real quality of "Remains of the day" and "The Unconsoled".

Wandering prose. Simply an unbelievable (in the negative sense) plot of an orphaned English boy returning in his adult life to Shanghai as a well known detective in the bad part of the 1930s to find his parents, supposedly held hostage by opium lords for 20+ years. Seriously???? I found this completely unsatisfactory and a waste of time.

The timing in this story is achingly slow, compared to many of today's novels...the language is not particularly metaphorical or even colorful, although the sentences are short. But lacking dialogue it remains dull, dull and I am unable to visualize the characters - more description is needed, and frankly, if it wasn't for previous success he may not have been published. I feel you have to be an anglophile to appreciate this book.

Vapid sleuthing in pre war London..delusions of fame..a wild goose chase and innumerable implausible plot lines later, I am left wondering why none of the reviewrs bothered to tip us off that this novel is just plain flat and awful. There is no humor, and alas, not much coherence.

hated this book! I read it because someone selected it for my book club. What was she thinking? It got a good review from the NYTimes, I suppose, but you have to really twist to see what the reviewer saw in this book, which is so far-fetched it beggars the imagination. As if everyone in Shanghai knew who this man was, without meeting him before! As if he waited years to go look for his missing parents! As if when he arrived the consulate became obsessed with planning a ceremony for the return of his parents as a sure thing! Agghh!

I picked this book up because I enjoyed Remains of the Day. The book is, however, arguably the worst book I have ever read.

A slow to non-existent plot drags interminably with page after page of tediously detailed description and converstations that do not advance the story one bit.

I kept wondering if this was a first novel, brought back to life in order to cash in on the author's current celebrity. It reads like a teenage first try.

Simply dreadful. Now, I wouldn't touch any other product by this author with a barge pole.