The tryhard Sherlock Holmes in ’30s Shanghai. When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Spoilers ahead. Be forewarned.
Kazuo Ishiguro seems to be a bit of a big deal. His novels have been made into films, such as Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go; he’s been nominated for the Booker Prize multiple times, won it once and in general, stands pretty well with the critics. But I can’t help feeling that his books are just a bit meh. When We Were Orphans is my third Ishiguro book, and though I wanted to love it once the story gets going, I ended up with that familiar, unsatisfied feeling.
And I did have some hopes for it. There is a nice premise to the novel: the crossover of time and memories between the East and West, penned by an author who is the embodiment of that. Ishiguro moved to London when he was a child, though much younger than Christopher Banks in the book. I was tempted to think that it is a novel about being out of place, the struggle to fit and being accepted. And in some ways, it is. And in other ways, it’s much more than this. Sadly, in typical Ishiguro fashion, the book managed to let me down.
Ishiguro seems to carve out the most British of characters with the most British mannerisms and dialogues: the “old boy”, “old man”, “indeed”. It’s like we’re attending a Monty Python 101 class. It was the same impression that I had when I was reading Remains of the Day, which to be fair is about probably the most English of all professions: being a butler. Well, the hero of our book somewhat fills the archetype of another very British character in Sherlock Holmes as he is a detective, complete with his own prided magnifying glass with ivory handle.
Christopher Banks, detective, takes on an impossible case
After spending his childhood in Shanghai, Chris Banks was shipped off to England to live with his aunt. For reasons that he could not grasp at that time, he became an orphan. His father left to buy milk, sorry I mean to go to work, and never came back. Shortly after, he was abandoned in the middle of nowhere by a family friend, the good old uncle Phillip, before making his way home and finding out that his mother is gone.
In England as a schoolboy he was a bit of an outsider. It was no secret that everybody had known of his ambition to become a detective, for which he became the butt of many jokes among his peers. But somehow he did manage to become a capable detective, in effect becoming a Sherlock Holmer without a Watson. Even in his twenties he managed to enter the upper echelons of society and making interesting friends who may or may not turn out to be his friends.
One of those “friends” were Sarah Hemmings, a young girl who seems to be aiming to marry high no matter what cost. She eventually did, marrying the reputable Sir Cecil Medhurst and moving to Shanghai. Coincidentally, this also fits with Banks’s plan to spend some time there awhile to play detective to his parents’ disappearance. When he arrived there however, with his notes that he has researched all his life, he found that Shanghai was a different animal altogether and the prospect of reuniting with his vanished parents are closing by the day.
The stench of opium, and the even worse stench of memory
When We Were Orphans took place in an interesting time of history which often goes underlooked and swept under the rug. This is the time after England had beaten China in the Opium War and for years after had shipped opium into China, causing millions and millions of addicts which put the country on the fast track to decay. It is also the time when the yellows and reds are battling it out in a dynamic power struggle, but both are still fighting the Japanese in all fronts.
In the heart of all this is the International Settlement, where expats with too much money will frequent bars in the Bund and even the best of them would go to obscure gambling houses to pile up debt, thinking that in a stroke of luck that they can win it all back. Outside of this settlement, Shanghai was destroying and recreating herself. The Shanghai Banks remembered was a Shanghai of his childhood, much sheltered and sanitised. He wouldn’t have known about the struggles of the Chinese outside and he could guess on important subject matters.
But it is this memory of his childhood which fueled him to his adulthood. He has always wanted to be reconciled with his Japanese childhood friend, Akira. The memories of his parent’s separations haunt him daily. He learned about his mother better as an adult than the mere passing understanding when he was a child. But then memories can taint us, and give false impressions of the persons we remember, regardless of how intimate we are with them in the past.
It is this memory that betrays us, or at least have the potential to betray us. For Banks, however, it is the very memory of his parents and the drive to investigate their disappearance which give meaning to his existence, provides him a career and a whole personality. But in hindsight he should have perhaps have been more cautious. At times, memories weigh us down — a burden to let go. Banks might have treated his memories with coldness of an investigator to extract the facts from the remnants of the ruins, but at the end of the novel we found that it had really controlled him all along, though it should have been the other way around.
Not Ishiguro’s best work, he would admit himself
Generous critics reviewed this work as “surpassing intelligence” and it definitely surpassed my fucking intelligence because I couldn’t make head or tails of it. It is definitely a strange novel. I find Winnie the Pooh living in the woods more believable than the shit that happens in the novel, of the decisions that Chris Banks took, especially towards the end of the novel. Do I hate it? No, not really.
Admittedly, there are elements in the novel which might have saved it some, such as the depiction of old Shanghai, especially the stark difference between the International Settlement, where the party goes on like no tomorrow, and the battleground between the Japanese and the Kuomintang, the warren. That section, though we are frustrated with Chris being a bellend, was vividly depicted and much too visceral with its claustrophobic spaces, starving wild dogs and the smell of shit, which though present everywhere in Shanghai, was much, much stankier in the warren.
Like always, I have no issues with Ishiguro’s prose. Though the book passes by, the prose was very readable, at time lyrical. It is the characters which let the book down, especially Banks as an over the top Englishman who’d treat locals like garbage and chasing impossible chances. Sure, it’s good drama, but it’s fucking moronic to try to find a house your parents might still be in eighteen years later behind the warzone. Maybe it’s the trauma, that in a lose-lose situation, you’d take the most minute of chances, but the decisions which Banks took at the end of the book killed what had already started off as a mediocre book.
I am yet to find an Ishiguro book that I love. Perhaps I’d even go as far to say that I’m yet to find an Ishiguro book that I like. But I know for a fact that I’m not in a rush to find any books from his repertoire to add to my already scary looking TBR pile.
