When 9-year-old Christopher Banks's father--a British businessman involved in the opium trade--disappears from the family home in Shanghai, the boy and his friend Akira play at being detectives: "Until in the end, after the chases, fist-fights and gun-battles around the warren-like alleys of the Chinese districts, whatever our variations and elaborations, our narratives would always conclude with a magnificent ceremony held in Jessfield Park, a ceremony that would see us, one after another, step out onto a specially erected stage ... to greet the vast cheering crowds."

But Christopher's mother also disappears, and he is sent to live in England, where he grows up in the years between the world wars to become, he claims, a famous detective. His family's fate continues to haunt him, however, and he sifts through his memories to try to make sense of his loss. Finally, in the late 1930s, he returns to Shanghai to solve the most important case of his life. But as Christopher pursues his investigation, the boundaries between fact and fantasy begin to evaporate. Is the Japanese soldier he meets really Akira? Are his parents really being held in a house in the Chinese district? And who is Mr. Grayson, the British official who seems to be planning an important celebration? "My first question, sir, before anything else, is if you're happy with the choice of Jessfield Park for the ceremony? We will, you see, require substantial space."

In When We Were Orphans Kazuo Ishiguro uses the conventions of crime fiction to create a moving portrait of a troubled mind, and of a man who cannot escape the long shadows cast by childhood trauma. Sherlock Holmes needed only fragments--a muddy shoe, cigarette ash on a sleeve--to make his deductions, but all Christopher has are fading recollections of long-ago events, and for him the truth is much harder to grasp. Ishiguro writes in the first person, but from the beginning there are cracks in Christopher's carefully restrained prose, suggestions that his version of the world may not be the most reliable. Faced with such a narrator, the reader is forced to become a detective too, chasing crumbs of truth through the labyrinth of Christopher's memory.

Ishiguro has never been one for verbal pyrotechnics, but the unruffled surface of this haunting novel only adds to its emotional power. When We Were Orphans is an extraordinary feat of sustained, perfectly controlled imagination, and in Christopher Banks the author has created one of his most memorable characters. --Simon Leake


From Publishers Weekly
Despite some contrived events and a tendency to rework the characterizations and themes of his previous books, Ishiguro's latest novel triumphs with the seductiveness of his prose and his ability to invigorate shadowy events with sinister implications. Like all of Ishiguro's protagonists, the narrator, here a recent Cambridge graduate named Christopher Banks, is an emotionally detached man who hides his real feelings from himself and who passively endures being trapped in nightmarish settings that give him "a grave foreboding." Like the hero of The Unconsoled, Christopher is bewildered by "the assumption shared by everyone... that it was somehow my sole responsibility to resolve the crisis." The crisis here is nothing less than averting WWII, which shares priority in Christopher's mind with the disappearance of his parents in Shanghai in the early 1900s, when he was nine years old. Christopher is sent to school in England, where he first formulates his dream of becoming a famous detective, an objective he achieves at a young age. Though he is convinced that his parents are still alive and that he can find them, he doesn't return to Shanghai until 1937, when he is in his mid 30s. It's obvious to the reader that Christopher deludes himself about many things, such as his conviction that when he "roots out evil," he is "cleansing the world of wickedness." This inclination toward grandiosity is a direct result of Christopher's sense of powerlessness as an orphan. While he is unaware of the connection, he is drawn to mercurial Sarah Hemmings, also orphaned in childhood. Ishiguro again conjures time and place with precise detail, evoking both the exotic atmosphere of prewar Shanghai, festering with the contrast between the arrogant residents of the International Settlement and the Chinese living in squalid slums and supplied with opium by foreign merchants, and class-conscious England, in which one's "connections" depend on family lineage. While the novel is mainly an introspective account of the protagonist's emotional dislocation, Ishiguro shows a new mastery of narrative tension, notably with Christopher's Kafkaesque experience during the Japanese invasion. In the end, Christopher understands that his vision of reality was distorted, and that his lifelong mission, "chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents," was the inescapable fate of one caught in the toils of historical turbulence. 75,000 first printing. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Atmosphere, historical detail, suspense: Ishiguro's new book has it all, and if the parts finally don't add up, the author should still be credited with providing another great read. He should also be credited with originality, for though he investigates the polarities of insider-outsider, English-foreign, as he has done before (e.g., The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled), he is hardly writing the same book again and again. Here, Christopher Banks is an Englishman born in early 20th-century Shanghai whose parents disappear mysteriously when he is nine. He is escorted to England, grows up to be a famed detective, and returns to Shanghai, convinced that his parents are still alive and that he must find them. The reader is less convinced that Banks is a real detective and wonder how he can entertain the romantic notion that his parents have been held hostage in Shanghai for decades, but the truth behind their disappearance comes as a satisfying surprise. And the writing is just wonderful, at once rich and taut. More writers should take style lessons from Ishiguro. For most collections.-DBarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Michael Gorra
I have little doubt that Kazuo Ishiguro will himself avoid the oblivion into which his narrators all finally sink. When We Were Orphans is his fullest achievement yet.



"Isaiguro has mapped out an aesthetic territory that is all his own."


From AudioFile
Christopher Banks, the great London detective who narrates Ishiguro's fifth novel, speaks with an elegance and reserve that personifies the 1930s, when great detectives were celebrated and revered figures. But Banks has a mystery in his own past the disappearance of his parents in Shanghai 20 years earlier, when he was only 9. John Lee conveys both Banks's intelligence and his uneasy depths in this fine performance, which far surpasses the print version as a reading experience. Lee's witty multi-accented reading of tony British and pidgin Chinese brings to life a sometimes stodgy narrative, and gives an edge to Ishiguro's sometimes too subtle humor. The reserved, punctiliously grammatical narrator, a first cousin to the butler-narrator of The Remains of the Day, here again offers a dramatic contrast to the backdrop of the times--the Japanese siege of Shanghai in 1937; the growing unrest and uncertainty of a world moving toward war; and the romance, courage, and resolve so identified with that era. D.A.W. -- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Ishiguro follows the graceful and well-received novels Remains of the Day (1989) and The Unconsoled (1995) with a limpidly written, subtly complex novel set in two very different parts of the world in the 1930s. As the story opens, Englishman Christopher Banks is fulfilling his life's ambition to become a private detective. Christopher was born in Shanghai, China, and when his parents disappeared early in his boyhood, he went to live in England even as the best detectives in Shanghai continued trying to find his mother and father. Once in England, Christopher's pursuit of his goal to become a detective has a certain inevitability about it, as does his eventual return to Shanghai to try his own hand at discovering the whereabouts of his parents. The China he returns to is in the midst of civil conflict between the adherents of the Nationalist Party and the followers of the Communist Party and is also contending with the invasion of the Japanese army. Christopher reconnects with his best friend Akira, but more importantly, he also discovers the truth about what happened to his parents--specifically, the startling knowledge about the source of his financial support during his years in England. This is a compelling novel that artfully depicts certain specific political and cultural clashes as a backdrop to exploring the conflict inherent in any individual's pursuit of freedom and identity. Serious fiction readers will both enjoy and admire Ishiguro's subtle work. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

ANNOTATION

Nominated for the 2000 Booker Prize.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

England, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents in Old Shanghai when he was a small boy. Now, as the world lurches towards total war, Banks realizes that the time has come for him to return to the city of his childhood and at last solve the mystery - that only by doing so will the world be saved from the approaching catastrophe.

Moving between London and Shanghai of the inter-war years, When We Were Orphans is a story of remembrance, deception and the longing for home; of a childhood vision of the world surviving deep into adulthood, indelibly shaping and distorting a person's life.

SYNOPSIS

When Christopher Banks becomes a private detective, he fulfills a lifelong ambition. However, none of his new professional chores have the force of one very personal assignment: Banks decides to return to his Shanghai birthplace to trace his parents, who disappeared when he was just a boy. In the hands of a less adept novelist, this plot would slip quickly into well-worn tracks. In the hands of Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of Booker Prize-winning Remains of the Day, the narrative becomes a subtle instrument, registering cultural nuances and character changes.

FROM THE CRITICS

Guardian

Ishiguro shows immense tenderness for his characters. [The novel] confirms Ishiguro as one of Britain's mist formally daring and challenging novelists.

Sunday Times

You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction. Ishiguro's abandonment of realism is not a defection from reality, but the contrary.

Publishers Weekly

Set in Shanghai on the eve of World War II, Ishiguro's Booker-nominated novel follows the surreal predicament of Christopher Banks, an English expatriate whose overwrought state is perfectly rendered by narrator John Lee. After his parents are mysteriously kidnapped, nine-year-old Christopher is shipped off to England, where he grows up to become the Sherlock Holmes of his times--a man able to right wrongs, restore order. After 18 years, Banks returns to Shanghai with the bizarre notion that if he can find his parents, he can prevent the world war. Banks's search drags him through the era's Chinese-Japanese war in a masterful sequence where past and present, reality and imagination, good and evil become indistinguishable. Lee seamlessly renders Banks's complex psychology, but he employs an exaggerated nasal voice for the characters of several pompous Brits, and his Chinese and Japanese accents are often off-putting. But listeners probably won't let these small blemishes keep them from Ishiguro's much-acclaimed tale of abandonment, nostalgia and self-delusion. Based on the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, July 10). (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Atmosphere, historical detail, suspense: Ishiguro's new book has it all, and if the parts finally don't add up, the author should still be credited with providing another great read. He should also be credited with originality, for though he investigates the polarities of insider-outsider, English-foreign, as he has done before (e.g., The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled), he is hardly writing the same book again and again. Here, Christopher Banks is an Englishman born in early 20th-century Shanghai whose parents disappear mysteriously when he is nine. He is escorted to England, grows up to be a famed detective, and returns to Shanghai, convinced that his parents are still alive and that he must find them. The reader is less convinced that Banks is a real detective and wonder how he can entertain the romantic notion that his parents have been held hostage in Shanghai for decades, but the truth behind their disappearance comes as a satisfying surprise. And the writing is just wonderful, at once rich and taut. More writers should take style lessons from Ishiguro. For most collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/00.]--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

AudioFile