Kazuo Ishiguro is a contemporary novelist very worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature that he was awarded in 2017. Born in Japan and raised in Great Britain, Ishiguro differs from the Modernist and late Twentieth Century novelists who preceded him. Each of the Modernists developed a distinctive style that they applied to whatever subject matter they were dealing with. So a reader can recognize Hemingway for his short and aphoristic sentences, Faulkner for his long and complex sentences, Joyce for the allusive style of his masterpiece, “Ulysses”, and Mann for his richly descriptive style. That is different from Updike and Roth, both of whom wrote straightforwardly even if their subject matter was gauche. For his part, Ishiguro crafts a different style for each of his novels. He makes it seem that arriving at the style in which a novel will be written is part of the chore of writing because the style sets up the kind of world which he is creating. So “Never Let Me Go” sounded like a research report; “The Buried Giant” sounded like a legend; and “An Artist of the Floating World” sounded like a series of apologies, everyone deferential in what is supposed to be the Japanese manner. The subject matter of those three novels, however, was the same. They were about the impact on people’s lives of the loss of or never having had a memory of pivotal events. The clones in “Never Let Me Go” did not know their ancestry and never found out, however much the reader can catch on fairly early that they were descended from dogs. The people in “The Buried Giant” seem to forget things after a few days, and the Japanese in “An Artist of the Floating World” suppress their memories of what they did during the Second World War. Moreover, all three novels explore how and why it is that people are so deferential to those around them. They are very annoying even if some of the characters, such as the dog-clones, are quite endearing.
In “When We Were Orphans”, Ishiguro takes on an even more complex task. He does not do away with memory. He is more realistic in that he conveys how memory is distorted or crafted so as to support the illusions and the ambitions of his characters. Also, deference in character is treated as a problem of some people, an inadequacy of their characters, something to be explained, rather than as part of the human condition. So let us go into this most comprehensive of his novels, however much the insularity, of things not said, that it shares with his other novels.
Although the novel is told as a set of memoirs by the protagonist, Christopher Banks, mostly in Twenties and Thirties London, and in flashbacks to his childhood in Shanghai, the novel opens when he is at a public school, in his teens, and already has his eyes set to become a detective. So the novel can be taken as another takeoff on the Sherlock Holmes figure, this time the hero a bit embarrassed by his ambition, and made fun of by his peers for that predilection. The style is Late Victorian, something like that of Samuel Butler. It has long and winding sentences that exactly describe the immediate time and physical features of the situation, not at all given to the elisions that make novels move along more quickly, as happens in Robert Louis Stevenson. Everywhere there is a sense of social class. We are embarking on a novel where a young man seeks to find his place in the world.
Moreover, we delve deeply into the mystery of what it is like to be a detective, which would not, on the basis of Wilkie Collins, who is said to have started out the genre of detective fiction (though that honor belongs instead, I think, to Poe), whose detectives are renowned but definitely not of the social class of the people they serve. Rather, they arise out of the middling ranks of society and are interested in money. But the hero is inclined to think his a very noble calling in that it confronts the evil that lurks all about us in the world and he meets important people who say things about his profession which are so flattering that the reader suspects that those conversations are recalled and reconstructed so as to flatter him, to make him think that in the evolving, comprehensive and grandiose world, detectives are the ones who protect civilization against its enemies. We are also immediately aware that this is not the rational world of Sherlock Holmes, where cleverness about circumstantial evidence allows Holmes to reason out who is the culprit. Rather, what our hero seems good at doing is to read the psychology of a situation, what people are like and what they are hiding, just as he himself is full of things he does not yield up easily and what he hides as best he can from others and from himself.
There are Doyle motifs. He has some celebrated cases that he refers to and these seem to have made him the reputation that allows him to move in high society, though we are never told the details of these investigations. His occupation is a freelance one, as is that of Holmes, and like with Holmes, we are on the lookout for a Dr. Moriarty. Also out of Arthur Colan Doyle, is a recurrent female figure, Sarah Hemmings, the equivalent of Irene Adler, the only woman who had ever engaged him. They are always coming into contact with one another at one or another dinner party or ball. She is an unattractive figure because she is rather plain and petite rather than womanly and has been associated with numerous men she dropped when it turned out that their successes were short lived. As she and the hero become better acquainted over what prove to be years without any indication that they are romantically involved with one another, engaged in no sort of courtship, she flitting about from one social engagement to another and often eating alone, it becomes clear that they do indeed have a great deal in common, which is their desire to be associated with famous people, though as she is quick to point out when this is suggested, they are interested in people who make contributions to society and that their own way of doing something to help society is to associate with its makers and breakers. So they are not selfish or vain, or at least that is what they tell themselves.
There is something else about these two defective people which makes them similar. Both want to act in a socially proper way, Christopher having learned early on at public school to imitate as best he can the mannerisms of the other students there so that he not seem to be an odd duck, though that is precisely what he is taken for, and he is picked on and bullied by his schoolmates and, before that by his family and playmates in Shanghai. Christopher feels generally unsettled, not knowing how to be, wanting to be,as he puts it, “more English”. And Sarah Hemmings is not above creating a scene in public so people feel sorry for her and, not much later after the event, she re-remembering the debacle as a time when she got her way or else that her behavior was misunderstood. Christopher, for his part, fell apart into tears when he was on the boat back from Shanghai after his parents died, very much resenting that the man who escorted him and who he met again in London by chance reminded him of it, his revenge by showing him up a fancy dinner. All Christopher reflects is that he might have been a bit rude at that dinner with the old gentleman.
Hemmings carries on herself at a dinner party to which she had not been invited, though she had met Christopher in the entrance way and would have expected the courtesy of him acting as her escort into the ball. Instead, she creates that scene to gain admittance, and she thinks later in the evening that the event had been a wonderful success because she had gotten her way. Such are the delusions whereby people reconstruct their memories of the past so as to suit them, so as to make them more commendable than they really are, which, one might say, is the true theme of many a late Victorian novel, both Jack Hawkins and Long John Silver talented at manufacturing a charm that serves them in good stead and allows them to elide difficulties, such as that Jack Hawkins switches sides and goes back again and can get away with it, perhaps because he is so comely to all the grown men around him.
Then, even early in what has already happened to the prospects of a young man in London, the novel changes focus from the detective world of London to childhood memories of Shanghai. What remains consistent is that Christopher exhibits his same ever more extreme of his predilection for reconstructing his memory to serve his sense of his own grandiosity and vindication. He reminisces about his childhood friend in Shanghai. Akira, who also had bullied him and out of his own need to construct his memories of his own life, had insisted that problems with his parents were that he was not English enough, thus placing that idea in his head, because his own parents worried about whether Akira was Japanese enough. People pick up on phrases and make them their own, explanatory devices to deal with something very dissimilar. In Christopher’s case, his parents were upset not with him but with one another because the mother believed her husband was involved with a corrupt corporation, one involved with the opium trade, and she chastised him for his profession, and consulted with other righteous ladies about this situation of living in the International Settlement in Shanghai. Christopher concocts conversations in which he remembers his mother telling off a company functionary for his abuse of the natives, which perhaps she had not done because she would be open to the same criticism. Instead, he confides in his “Uncle” Phillip about his misgivings about himself-- whether he is “English” enough-- before owning up to the fact that Phillip was not such a perfect person but had abandoned him in downtown Shanghai so that he would not be at home when his mother disappeared.
All of this takes place during an hours long diary session that took place immediately after Christopher had rode with Sarah Hemmings on that bus, obviously moved enough to come to terms with part of his past, to let it unravel before him. So the diary entry is devoted to his memories of his childhood in Shanghai, of his interchanges with servants and what he could gather of the company which employed his father, and the fantasy dramas he played out with his Japanese friend, though a reader might think he was too young to have remembered those, and what he most certainly could have expected to remember, which were the circumstances of the disappearance of his mother and father and the fantasy he had of detectives discovering where his father had been hidden when kidnapped. In this section, the novel takes on its particular British sheen as a work that explores social class and the moral choices involved in managing those. We are very far, it seems, from the Bloomsbury introspection that had come before, though the characters continue to have the same personality dynamics: manipulating memory so they can confront only what they care to, as when Akira and Christopher imagine that his father is living a very comfortable life while in captivity and the reluctance with which the hero is willing to undertake his long delayed investigation into the disappearance of his parents. What is he hiding from himself?
Nothing more is heard of Miss Hemmings until some years later when she is married to the illustrious individual she had met where she had created a scene. She again spurs Christopher to action, even though he now has as a ward a young woman who also lost both of her parents and so someone with whom Christopher can sympathize. But Christopher abandons his responsibility to this girl, fully knowing how damaging his absence will be, because Sarah goads him to look into what is happening in Shanghai, as if his personal intervention could solve world problems, she always flattering him, treating as if he were a bold person who dominates a room when in fact, even though he is now illustrious, or would think himself so even though he is living off his inheritance, he continues to be bullied. Hemmings also plays into his infantile belief that he is the center of the world and that all evil is summed up in issues of murder. She is the dark side of his personality in that she is what makes it possible for him to live with himself, bad suppressed memories and all. And so we enter yet again into a different kind of novel, perhaps something one might expect out of the Thirties, perhaps something reminiscent of Andre Malraux or else the early Hitchcock movies. It would be about international intrigue and the early versions of what would become the Second World War, and so we would be witnesses to Ishiguro’s moving us through the styles of the Twentieth Century novel, just as Jerome Kern moves us in “Showboat” through the fashions in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century music. Sit back and enjoy the performance.
But that is not what happens. What the reader discovers, instead, is that Ishiguro has had his lead character, Christopher Banks, deteriorate even more into the childlike insular soul he had been as a child and which had been cemented in by the disappearance of his parents so many years before. He is not the stable man who can emotionally and financially take on a ward. Rather, from the start of his foray back into Shanghai, he lives in a kind of dream world where he senses that the people around him are peering at him and trying to block his view, which is a repetition of his childhood paranoia, and he still has the childlike dream of solving the mystery of his parents’ disappearance. He believes his many years later will be rescued and a great ceremony when he has found out the mystery. Christopher thinks that his main contact is really a Britisher in charge of spying, when in fact the man may be simply in charge of keeping an eye on this deluded fellow Briton.
Christopher again runs into Sarah Hemmings, who is now seen as caring for a husband who is a drunk and a gambler, and appealing to him for help, which may be a kind of wish fulfillment in that he had been thwarted in his not very effective non-courtship of Sarah, and this was his revenge, that her life had deteriorated when she went off with another man. These are the thoughts of a person who was the same queer fellow he had been back at school, as that was recalled to him by an old school chum who also turns up in Shanghai but who might well be a creature of Christopher’s imagination, or so the reader now senses. Finally, Sarah Hemmings does propose that Christopher run off with her to the South Seas, or to Italy, or even to set up a family life with Jennifer, his ward, but Christopher is hesitant even though he agrees to meet her. He is neither romantic with her, perhaps more interested in her needing him than in his need, if any, for her. The reader feels sure that Christopher will not keep his appointed meeting with Sarah; he is ever the one who lets people down.
Ishiguro is excellent at making the reader feel anguish with the realization that Christopher will miss his appointment with Hemmings, however much the reader knows, by now, that Christopher misses opportunities, turns away from chances at happiness. And Ishiguro is also excellent at providing Christopher with excuses and circumstances so as to avoid what the reader believes are the obligations he has taken on. Obligation is not a term with much meaning in the comic book melodrama in which Christopher has drenched himself so as to avoid such a concept that is present in the real world to which his world is to be contrasted. This makes Christopher a pathetic figure rather than a tragic one because there is no nobility in what he does, only his giving himself over to his fantasies. Even Jennifer, had seen through his delusions about the great achievements he would accomplish some time in the future. The reader has also become fed up with Christopher’s whining, his self-serving apologies, his obtuseness, and his parading of a higher calling as an excuse so as to engage with life, to the extent he does that at all. Ishiguro, I suspect, has set the reader up to be fed up with his protagonist, and so what does the author now have in store to set that right or to, on the other hand, to confirm and find the significance of his events.
There are just more comic book adventures, all of these a let down after the disappointment of knowing Christopher will not leave Shanghai with Sarah. Ishiguro is masterful at providing lively incidents to stretch out the narrative and to show how Christopher is retreating ever more into his infantile perspective on the world, the present no more than the past overladden with some indications of the present, Christopher therefore living in a replication of the Freudian view that we are all trapped by our distorted views of the past. There is a wild taxi ride in which Christopher is ever farther from the house that is supposedly right nearby. There is a wrecked police station, where its few inhabitants are caught up in a battle with the Japanese, but the Chinese are very polite about denying Christopher’s plea that they supply officers to help him in his quest for his parents, Christopher not able to believe that the fate of his parents is of no great moment to anyone but himself. And there is meeting up with his childhood buddy Akira, melodrama bordering on farce. And so it goes on, Ishiguro ever inventive of incidents when the heart has gone out of the effort because Christopher has abandoned Sarah Hemmings, the lodestone of her life, and now nothing to do but find new and clever stratagems to make himself as plausible or presentable a person as he can. He wanders through the warrens of the destroyed houses in Shanghai wartime, only to abandon Akira because the Japanese think he was a traitor; he finds a way to reinterpret Hemmings as an unreliable person who will just wander from one man to another. He has an unravelling of the “mystery” of his parents, told by an old friend that is lurid and which has some satisfaction that his mother was tortured so as to save Christophers financial well being, this disclosure no more reliable than any of his other concoctions because it is too convenient and a telltale sign that an occluded view of a scene means he is engaged in the fabulous and the drastic, not aware of how much he embroiders a preferred narrative that makes him worse a person than a better one. He is totally selfish and egoistic as he spends his constructions. By that time, the entire fiction of a detective, always a childhood idea of grandiose, has collapsed. A Japanese office, towards the end of the novel, is allowed to state an epigram that sums things up: “Our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we are grown”, though he has not become grown until he is very old if at all. Christopher always has excuses, the ultimate one for all his shabby deceits, that he is, over all, an orphan, carrying that very profound burden.. It is Ishiguro’s art that he makes it a bit plausible, as if it were a rounded life, filled, as with everyone, with failures and successes and not having been, he thinks, not too badly.
Like the other novels of Ishiguro that I have mentioned, this one could lose fifty pages at the end. The author has said what he has to say. But that would confuse his work with ordinary novels where plot and subplots are woven together through coincidence and irony, the reader's eye always on the major problem to be resolved: how will David Copperfield fare in life? Will Elizabeth and Darcy finally come to terms with one another? Rather, the form in which Ishiguro is working is that of the epic, where there can be an endless series of incidents to fill the space between the problem set (Let us “rescue” Helen from Troy, or make our way back to Ithaca to reclaim our family and land). These multiple incidents all illustrate the fundamental issue of the epic (or its negation). “The Iliad” has incidents about the costs of war in deaths and reputation; “The Odyssey” contains tales of reconciliation or attempted reconciliation, though there is not much arguing to be done with the Cyclops, so he must be fooled and then disarmed. In never let me go, the endlessly illustrated theme is the dependence and loyalty of the clones. Here, in “When We Were Orphans”, the theme is the betrayal of the self by delusions designed to make oneself seem important. This is what happens if a person lets dreams and hopes shape a solipsistic view of the world out there. That is just not what Sherlock Holmes wants to happen, himself subject to the attractions of self-delusion, something the rest of us are prone to. This is a terrifying novel that leaves the reader with Christopher’s pusillanimous rhetoric ringing in his ears and wondering if all of us are not like him. It is a real accomplishment for a novel so mannered, so wedded to the singular conventions of storytelling that it employs, to pack such an emotional wallop to make you care about characters so unappealing and so clearly fictional, but that is what Ishiguro does. It is an accomplishment parallel to that of Kafka, which is very high praise indeed.