Ishiguro's infatuation with Englishness deadens tone of 'Orphans'

By Bradley Winterton
SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR
Sunday, Aug 20, 2000, Page 19

By Kazuo Ishiguro 313 Pages Faber & Faber

It is a long-standing joke that it's impossible to write a review of a Kazuo Ishiguro novel without using the word `understated.' From his early A Pale View of Hills to his best-selling The Remains of the Day (filmed starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson), the word seemed unavoidable.

Japanese birth, Ishiguro has lived in the UK since he was five. A Pale View of Hills was set in Nagasaki, but his prime subject has always been England and the English. It remains so in this new book, but in it he also turns again to the East.

Christopher Banks has grown up in Shanghai in the early years of the last century, living with his parents in the International Settlement. His father was an employee of one of the large British trading companies there that dealt in, among other things, opium. His mother was a dedicated philanthropist, trying to recruit friends to help persuade the company to abandon its involvement in the lucrative drug trade.

The parents, however, both disappear in unexplained circumstances. The boy is sent to school back in England, and when the novel opens, in the 1930s, he is a young man embarking on a career in London as a freelance detective.

After solving a number of celebrated murders, Banks opts to go back to Shanghai and solve what is for him the ultimate mystery, what happened to his parents.

Critics been surprised that Ishiguro should turn to what looks like a detective story at this juncture in his career. But his concern with the political turmoil of the years before World War II is a return to the subject of The Remains of the Day. In addition, When we were Orphans is in reality not a detective story at all.

Up the point of Banks's departure for Shanghai the novel has a ponderous, over-urbane, mannered tone, representing the fictional narrator's historical period and class background. Once Banks arrives in Shanghai, however, the story enters a more phantasmagoric world, and nightmarish and unreal events seem to occur.

For one thing, he stumbles over his childhood friend Akira, then the son of a Japanese businessman and his wife, now a wounded soldier in the invading Japanese army. They set off together to "discover" Banks's parents, who Banks assumes are, after an interval of 20 years, still being held prisoner.

By stage the novel has become as dreamlike as Alice in Wonderland. Banks brandishes a magnifying glass like a comic, pastiche Sherlock Holmes. Things sober up toward the end, but by now the reader knows he is experiencing the fictional technique that involves what is called the "unreliable narrator." However, in war-torn Shanghai, what we are being confronted with is something more extreme than simple unreliability. It is more a case of profound self-delusion.

Looking we can see that Banks was always a man in the grip of fantasies, such as that he could single-handedly save the world from impending war, that his friend Akira would still be in Shanghai (it is not clear the Japanese soldier he eventually meets is Akira at all), and, most absurdly, that his parents will still be alive and captive in the same house he believes they were spirited away to when he was a boy.

Crucial this literary conjuring trick of Ishiguro's is the question of style. His manner as a novelist has always been sedate, measured, even laborious. Banks, too, is made to speak in a style that gives the impression of an over-fastidious gentleman, but this well-tailored formality masks a terrible lack of self-knowledge.

There's little doubt where Kazuo Ishiguro's literary origins lie -- in the ponderous and heavily symbolic novels of Henry James. Like James, Ishiguro is an immigrant in thrall to Englishness, and particularly the supposedly urbane, restrained English gentleman. Both writers, however, see through the Englishman's reserve and pride, while still remaining in some way hypnotized by it. If the result is a style that is overly mannered, decorous, cautious and middle-aged, then this is the price they pay for their infatuation.

The whole justification for Kazuo Ishiguro's deferential tone is that underneath the immaculate exterior serious themes are silently moving. If so, what are they?

As with his other books, this novel is about how history affects people's lives, but also about how people fail to respond to that history because they are caught up in fantasies of who they are and what their destiny should be, fantasies in this case rooted in childhood.

The problem with When we were Orphans is that this perception only gets to the reader late, and so a re-reading of the whole book is in effect called for. But the novel has been too unrelieved by changes of tone, humor, liveliness or, to be honest, vivid writing of any kind, to make such a re-reading a very attractive proposition.

At worst, Ishiguro appears to be aiming directly for classic status, bypassing freshness and novelty on the way. But as Hemingway said in Green Hills of Africa, writing a classic can't be a conscious aim -- all an author can hope to do is write well about the worlds he understands and feels for.

This novel will almost certainly make a stronger film than it is a book. In matters of literature though, as Hemingway pointed out, time makes its own judgments.