When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro

When we were Orphans

What a strange book. Starts out comfortably like a 20^th century British novel, a mundane one at that, and then how it turns and twists and swallows itself whole!

The story of a (British) man, comfortable in his moral tower of ivory — and how he is dragged through the mud! John Osborne’s Look back in anger is nothing to Ishiguro’s effort of tearing down the delusions that protect us. If women need be collateral damage, so be it. To the plot – spoilers and all.

The protagonist, Christopher Banks, is an English detective between the wars – that time when the world was a happy two-dimensional place for the masters of the universe.  He has a tragic back story – Banks lost his parents when he was ten and in Shanghai, and came to England as an orphan. He has done well for himself since then and achieved some renown, but is a bit of an orphan always, a recluse looking in, from the outside. In the course of a few tame adventures in England, he meets a young woman, Sarah. There seems to be a connection, but the attraction is apparently not compelling enough for consummation of any kind.

A word here about the style of storytelling – it is siege fashion and narrator centric. The book itself is a set of first-person narratives that move in time and space (1931 London, to 1920 Shanghai for example); each of these narratives goes back and forth in time as the protagonist reminisces, recounts, goes forward and backward until he comes back to his starting point before taking a final baby-step forward. The style makes the novel incredibly atmospheric - in the sense of conveying the fug in which our thoughts flow.

Back to the story now - there comes this point in Mr. Banks' career when he decides the time has come for which he has been preparing his whole life - it is time to return to Shanghai and find out where his parents are. 

Up until then, one assumed that the parents getting lost is a euphemism for death, for which British colonists could have stayed lost for twenty years? The reader could be forgiven at this juncture for thinking they have missed something in the story. Readers being readers, however, still dutifully set off to Shanghai with the writer, where Part 2 of the novel commences.

The dreamscape of a Mulholland Drive

Thus through one neat little sleight of hand, Ishiguro reels us into a strange dreamland, where the plot is putty in the hands of an obsessive intelligence all out to prove a point.

The style in Part 2 is not dissimilar to 1 but there is some difficulty here. In Part 1, the detective in London serves as a trope, that we as readers of British fiction have been force-familiarised with, through the almost de-rigueur consumption of mystery books. We auto-fill the swathes left unexplained and have no trouble immersing ourselves in Banks’ inner life. His memory of his mother, the childhood in Shanghai, his Japanese friend, makes for beautiful nostalgic prose. It carries us along, in a tide of memory, loss, and sadness, banked we sense, by Banks’s reserves of resilience and correctitude. An interesting vignette or two, mostly Sarah centric, inches the story forward.  However, this style starts to unravel in Part 2.

The setting is foreign, and the reader is getting antsy for rising action; Ishiguro’s penchant for staying mostly in the mind mixes with these elements to unfold a set of barely explicable scenarios that recall that wonderful movie, Mulholland Drive. The reader will likely race through this part, annoyed and fascinated in equal measure by the bizarre flights of fancy, the incredible plot twists, and the growing conviction that something really strange is going on. On it goes until the time for the denouement.

Which I hated. The resolution has been praised but in my book, the subjugation of a woman, even as an allegory, especially as an allegory is heinous. Then comes falling action in Part 3, in the form of a rather sad, horrible, really, tying of ends. I was left upset and wondering why a writer would do this to his characters. And this is my theory.

Many writers have a central experience that informs their writing life. In Arundhati Roy’s case it was her mother’s fight for property inheritance in a patriarchal context, for Jane Austen it was her spinsterhood in a world, which believed that all women must be in need of a husband. For Emily Bronte, it could be her repressed sexuality, for Oscar Wilde, his secret double life (from Banbury to Dorian Gray to Arthur Saville to Mrs. Erlynne to Lady Windermere).

For Kazuo Ishiguro, it is the singular condition of being Japanese and having grown up in post-war England. To have likely been demonized again and again in the language and dominant culture of the here and now in words that would have the sting of irrefutable logic. And so, he sets about in Remains of a Day grieving for a man whose life’s work has been to be in service to a fascist. In a clever way, he also spotlights the fascist pre-war faction of England, a people who would be swept away under the rug otherwise.

I have already discussed how in Never Let Me Go, he examines how people with more education than an ignorant butler might subscribe to a terrible inhuman system.

In ‘When we were Orphans’ Ishiguro turns the lens away from an imagined representative of the Axis (fascist, inhuman) powers, and on to the British – he shines the spotlight on them and says a big fuck you to them. Fuck you, he says to those who imagine themselves to be good in the fight between good and evil. Look at the silly games you are playing, see the hubris in how you imagined you would succeed or think you can understand and work this universe. You know nothing, your life is a lie and all that you have, you did not achieve, these are the proceeds of a prostituted life in the service of the opium trade and worse, the gains of regular abasement. In doing so, Ishiguro focuses on British culpability in the opium trade; at the same time he bends some plausibility to his will. I mean, could a memsahib have been kidnapped like that in the colonial era?

Yet I do not know if my explanation is sufficient. I do not know what to make of the enigma that is Sarah, or the unsavory fate of Banks's mother – there is more misogyny in this book than others. Is that because women tend to be more idealistic and have triggered Mr. Ishiguro’s vengeful angel?

This is a book that is in parts soothing, engrossing, and infuriating. It stays in your head a long time after you are done with it.