A very gripping story from an extremely interesting setting. ( )

Ironically, this is a radically different approach to being an orphan from the last book I read, John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. In Cider House, an orphan protagonist follows his principles, compromises but eventually makes it through to an honourable ending. In When We Were Orphans, the orphaned protagonist stumbles around deceiving himself and pursuing ambiguous goals until he finds that his life and ideas are fictions. Also, while Cider House was enjoyable to read, this book feels a bit like a bad dream that goes from one misery to a worse one.
The book of course is written with Ishiguro’s usual skill, delicately exploring how the protagonist, Christopher, imagines himself in one deception after another. In this, it’s like other Ishiguro books, with characters who either deceive themselves or are deceived. I felt more empathy for his other characters, though, even Klara who is not actually human. For Christopher, I felt from the beginning that he was living in a child-like make-believe world, and continues to do so as an adult. His fantasy is his way of coping with the traumas of his childhood, but I always felt that he should get a grip (or get some therapy) and join the real world. His self-importance is unattractive, perhaps made even more so by his telling readers repeatedly that he is known as a great detective, but does not say anything about any of his cases or his methods. His claim to be a great detective grows particularly questionable when he seems to live in a fantasy.
Initially, his imaginary world seems harmless. As a child, he plays at being a superhero or detective rescuing his missing father. Later, he says he has solved important cases as a young detective, and perhaps he has. When he is drawn into the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, his stories become a nightmare about international diplomacy and urban warfare with improbable coincidence, extraordinary heroism and criminal corruption. (Here, he’s the opposite of a James Bond heroic spy. He’s portrayed as a weak figure overwhelmed by the reality of violence and corruption. Is Ishiguro deliberately undercutting the false heroism of the Bond myth?) It’s hard to separate the reality in the novel from Christopher’s story telling, but he seems to abandon both his purported clients and those he seems to love in order to pursue his dream of saving his parents. How can he be so irresponsible when he claims to be so principled?
Christopher’s memories of his childhood seem to have little connection to the reality he later attempts to revisit. The physical places he returns to are not as he remembers them, and the situation is far worse. This is probably true of all of us to a degree. The past we remember is not the same as other people experienced it, and sometimes it’s demonstrably wrong. But I think this usually means that we colour things a bit better or worse than they might have been. I hope that our memories are not so destructively mistaken as Ishiguro portrays them here. But perhaps, viewing things less personally, they are: as nations and peoples, we do tell ourselves false stories about our history and relationships, and we use those to justify exploitation and military attacks on other nations. In part, this seems to be what is happening in Ukraine, the Balkan states, the Middle East, Africa. So from this perspective, misleading stories that lead to more violence and abuse could be a very relevant one. I didn’t get that from the novel while I was reading it, but thinking back, there are parallels with the self-serving myths of the colonial powers in China (and elsewhere) that cover up reality and justify continuing exploitation.
Toward the end of the novel, a character says, “…our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years in the shadows of vanished parents. There’s nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, but until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.” But Christopher doesn’t see through it until he is forced into a very sordid reality. ( )

For most of this lengthy novel, I would give a 4 but must admit that there were times that I begin to lose interest. Christopher Banks is a young man growing up in the international section of Shanghai in the early 1900's. His best friend was a Japanese boy who had never lived in Japan just as Christopher (known as Puffin) to his parents) had never lived in England but had a very British upbringing.

Both parents mysteriously disappear and Christopher becomes a very famous detective back in England as a grown man. Here he encounters a woman named Sarah who at first shuns him but is someone who becomes a part of his life. All his life he intends to return to China in order to find his parents.

Then with the coming Communists in the background, the returns to Shanghai; finds his Japanese friend who is now fighting the Chinese. There is interesting history here especially the opium trade in China which was brought about by British companies.

Overall, a good listen (loved the narrator). ( )

“I am beginning to see now many things aren’t as I supposed.”

As the story opens, protagonist Christopher Banks is a detective in London in the 1920s-1930s, at least that’s what he tells us. We never get any details of his cases, so we must take his word for it. It seems he wanted to be a detective to solve the disappearance of his parents when he was ten years old and living in the Shanghai. We gradually learn more about Christopher’s childhood in the International Settlement, and his Japanese friend, Akira. He believes his parents were kidnapped due to their opposition to the opium trade. He has always planned to return to Shanghai to rescue them. Along the way, Christopher goes through successes, failures, enlightenments, and disillusionments. Primary themes are the transience of memory and nostalgia.

Christopher is drawn to other orphans. He is effectively orphaned when his parents disappear and is reared by an aunt in London. He meets Sarah, a glamorous woman whose parents are deceased, and adopts Jennifer, a young orphan girl. As Sarah states late in the narrative, “But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end as best we can. For until we do so we will be permitted no calm.”

It shifts between a version of reality (as seen through Banks’ eyes) and an almost surreal segment when he returns to Shanghai in the midst of the Sino-Japanese war (1937). He tries to locate the house where he believes his parents are still held captive. We follow him through a war-torn region near Shanghai. In this gripping, and also bizarre, segment, the reader wonders how much of this can possibly be real. Does Banks believe what he is saying? Is he mentally ill? Is he really a detective? Is this a parody of a detective story?

Even though Christopher is an adult, he comes across as extremely naïve and sheltered. He seems to be stuck in his childhood. He is chasing memories of the halcyon days of his youth before his world was shattered. My take on the surreal segment is that he finally faces the fact that the world is a pretty horrible place (and about to get worse – this was just prior to WWII).

The novel is written in elegant prose, with parts harking back to the time period in which it is set. It will likely not be very satisfying to anyone looking for a traditional detective story. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I tend to enjoy these types of quirky off-the-beaten path stories.

The audio book is brilliantly read by John Lee. His pacing, intonement, and voices are beautifully performed. I am going to find out what else he has narrated.
( )

Kazuo Ishiguro’s enigmatic novel, When We Were Orphans, is as complex and baffling a work of fiction as I have ever encountered. Christopher Banks, our narrator, is not so much an unreliable narrator as a naive narrator who believes in the internal world he has created and acts upon it as if it were truth. Through so much of the novel I kept asking myself why he could not see the illogical conclusions he was drawing, but of course that is what this novel is about, his inability to leave his childhood behind him and his biased view of the events that lead up to the loss of his parents.

Christopher Banks is a detective, but this is not a detective story. There is a mystery to be solved, but solving the mystery is not the focus of this tale. In fact, Banks is a detective primarily because he feels himself tied to the events of his childhood that he carries around with him like an albatross. The only way he will ever be free to live his adult life is to solve the puzzle that surrounds the disappearance of first his father and then his mother. It is the mental workings of this character that are paramount, and you must be careful here because Banks sees mainly what he wishes to see, sometimes in complete opposition to what the facts appear to reveal.

Ishiguro does not entice you to follow Banks on his journey through his life, he does not lure you into the underbelly of Shanghai, he drags you along, sometimes kicking and screaming that there is something just not right about this story. I enjoyed trying to pick the truth out from among the obvious miscues and while I never felt anything akin to affection for Banks, I did sympathize with his situation and understand his desire to reconcile his childhood memories with what had truly occurred.

I suppose what I really took away from this story was that memories are not truths. The past cannot be reconstructed and no matter how much we might like to alter it, we never can. What has happened, even to ourselves, might not be in reality what happened at all, and spending the present on chasing the past might cost you the future.

...for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.

Perhaps we are all chasing the shadows of vanished parents. Perhaps we are all struggling to discover who we are, separate from them, standing alone. I had a discussion with my older sister once about an event in our childhood. There were only three years separating us and both of us were present for this event and witnessed it ourselves, but our memories of it were so dissimilar as to be diametrically opposed. We can never go back there and see who was right, and maybe we both were, because what is true for one is not always what is true for another. ( )