A review by nohoperadio
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

3.75

Kazuo Ishiguro very much has his thing, his very specific thing he always does, which is: first-person narrators who seem to be very candid about telling you their life story at first but then we start noticing little tensions in the narrative and it gradually becomes clear there’s something huge they’re failing to acknowledge perhaps even to themselves because the huge thing directly contradicts the version of themselves they’re trying to create in the telling of the story.

It’s a fun thing! He’s good at it. But the question with each book is always, to what extent does this stuff feel like it emerges organically from the nature of the story being told vs feeling gimmicky, like something being imposed on a story that doesn’t suit it because Ishiguro wants to show off his clever unreliable narrating skills. In his two great novels, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, there’s no question at all: both books are, to me, absolute miracles, perfect stories that needed exactly Ishiguro’s skillset to do them justice. Everything else, so far, I’ve been less convinced even though I usually enjoy the ride anyway.

I enjoyed this ride and I wasn’t convinced. I loved the narrative voice, the characters are bigger personalities on the whole than in the first two Ishiguro books, the plot goes to some wild places; but our hero’s particular brand of insanity, and less forgivably, the ways everyone else reacts to it (or doesn’t), are perfectly and implausibly calibrated to keep the plot on its rails. It’s jarring in a way that might even be exciting if the author hadn’t elsewhere shown us how good this kind of thing can be when done right. But I’m afraid he has!