From Cover to Cover

The narrative floats back and forth, between a thirties London where Banks moves from social soiree to soiree, drawn to the mysterious La Hemmings like a moth to a star; his early childhood in Shanghai, with his Japanese friend Akira (very imaginative choice of name, that); and finally Shanghai again, in the late thirties dark, gloomy, unhappy, and ravaged by poverty, opium and war. The humour is understated and subtle: “The chauffeur had for some time been steering us through tiny alleys quite unsuitable for a car, sounding his horn repeatedly to get pedestrians out of our way, and I had begun to feel ridiculous, like a man who has brought a horse into a house.â€

Ishiguro’s description of Banks’s childhood is flawless, with tender care for the development of the bond between Christopher (Puffin, as his parents called him) and Akira. Akira’s continuous use of “old chip†instead of “old chap†one day, and reverting to “old chap†the next day as if he had always been saying it that way, will endear him to all readers. One also likes Banks’s mother’s disarmingly ethical stand in her crusade against opium the very product that pays her husband’s salary. One also is moved by the passages involving Banks and his adopted daughter Jennifer, a young girl who has lost her parents in a drowning incident. Especially when Jennifer says: “When you’re at school, sometimes, you forget. Just sometimes. You count the days until the holidays like the other girls do, and then you think you’ll see mother and papa again.â€

The sense of loss of an orphan can only be shared by somebody else who also lost his parents young. But the sense of all human mortality imbues these passages. The gentle description of the tender, somewhat hesitant moments between the two, filled with pure feeling, is possibly the sweetest triumph of the book. Unfortunately, the best part is soon over, and the worst is literally saved for the last. The unlikely finale of the story involves Christopher moving through the dirt, devastation and squalor in Shanghai in search of the truth which, when it is discovered, seems overly convoluted, coincidental and preposterous. This is where the weakness of When We Were Orphans lies.

The last fifty odd pages are made almost painful for the reader in quest of a complicated, twisted and completely absurd denouement. Parts of the book are glorious, but as a whole, Ishiguro’s latest work leaves the reader vaguely dissatisfied, as if an unusually lyrical piece of music has somehow ended abruptly, and on a jarring note.