When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro 6.5
When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro. 336 pages.Reasons I read this book:
1. As I said, despite it's many problems, Never Let Me Go was still comparatively good, so...
2. I wanted to see if Ishiguro used to be better, plus...
3. Someone had put it on display at the library, making it inevitable.
Brief Summary:
Christopher Banks was born and raised in Shanghai in the early 1900s, living in the International Settlement with his parents and spending his days with best friend, Akira, whose family is from Japan. When his parents disappear without a trace, one after the other, the 10-year-old Christopher is sent to England to continue his schooling and his life. However, he can never forget Shanghai or the mysterious events that transpired there, and after establishing a reputation as a famous detective he returns to put the long-unsolved case(s) to rest.
(Sounds like a mystery novel, but due to the literary aspirations of the work, it is more of a reflective memoir of one man as he tries to make sense of his childhood.)
Reasons why the book is disappointing:
1. Although Ishiguro has set the frame for an extremely compelling story (orphan driven to resolve the mysterious disappearance of parents in an exotic locale, set against the backdrop of escalating British-Chinese-Japanese conflict in China during the 1930s), he does little with it, so the book is more potential than product.
2. As with Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro relies heavily on phrases like
a. "Although it did not seem important at the time, in retrospect I have come to realize the significance of that event."
b. "I cannot say for certain that [x] indeed said those very words that night, as I was very young at that time, but the conversation undoubtedly left a deep impression on me."
c. "Even then something about the encounter struck me as significant, although it would not become clear to me for many years."
This dependence is unspeakably annoying, as it implies that either Ishiguro lacks the confidence that his novel will speak for itself or that he believes the reader is dumb enough as to require literary hand-holding through the plot. Either way, it's overkill. And to add insult upon injury, nothing is quite as exciting or important as foreshadowed.
3. A good majority of the novel is given over to Banks' remembrances of his childhood (see #2), but when the remainder of the novel attempts to bring this story to a close (What happened to his parents? What happened to Akira?), it does so with blatant orchestrations, which are so obviously designed to leave the reader with a sense of loss and disappointment that they do a deep disservice to the underlying quality of the novel.
4. Despite Ishiguro's efforts otherwise, none of the adult characters are very evocative or compelling. They do not inspire a sense of tragedy, merely disgust.
5. Banks' closing reflections are really lame.
VERDICT ON THE BOOK: 6.5/10.0 He expends such visible amounts of effort in setting things up in When We Were Orphans that the finale is a huge letdown. The novel is the work of an impressive portraitist who left his grid lines on.
VERDICT ON ISHIGURO: While Ishiguro's stories are different from book to book, the flawed narrative style is not. It is frustratingly easy to see how any of his works could have been amazing rather than just nearly so. His shortcoming is not in conception or literary skill, but in execution, and that, I think, should be the for a novelist easiest to overcome.
posted by alice @ 10:04 AM
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