A review by tessyoung
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

4.0

When We Were Orphans Kazuo Ishiguro (Audible + Paper)

 

In When We Were Orphans we spend time in the hands of renowned 1930s detective Christopher Banks, who recounts his life from childhood in the International settlement of Shanghai in the 1900s through to the 1950s.

 

Through a non-linear narrative his biography is built around the impact of a seminal experience during that childhood and his adult attempts find out what actually happened, and why. As Christopher pieces together the things he remembers, half remembers, believed as a child, assumes or deduces, we see an unreliable narrator perhaps a little close and entangled in his material.

 

I love Ishiguro’s acute observation of manner, of the English and the class system. For much of the time I found Christopher a quite sympathetic character, a product of his world and upbringing. The sections through his childhood, school days, early adulthood were just perfect.

 

However, in part 6, we see Christopher as an adult of Empire and any sympathy dropped away as he more fully embodied the role of one who knows best despite exhibiting total naivety of the situation. The ‘we’ll jolly well do this thing’ attitude oblivious to the risks to himself and how he thus endangered others, grated considerably. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I have no problem with disliking characters and it didn’t seem out of character so I was interested to see how Ishiguro made this shift.

 

The final section I also found interesting. The jump of 20 years reveals how Christopher has become much like those he criticised on his return to Shanghai. The change in places over time is viewed as deterioration, but he has lost his youthful expectation that certain people should, or could, have acted to prevent such change. He has also it seems come to terms with the solitariness of his life, roads taken and those not and has found a home in the status quo.

 

Still uncertain about Audible, I again found myself going back to the book to check out various sections, and to read sections for myself to see if the tone of the delivery skewed my response to certain elements. I don’t think it has in this case.