When We Were Orphans
When We Were Orphans is a novel whose principal action is the removal of its own disguise.
In the beginning, we have what appears to be the memoir of a celebrated English detective investigating his most important case: The disappearance of his own parents in Shanghai in 1915, while the family were living together in an International Village and the narrator, Christopher Banks, was just a boy. Given Christopher’s profession, as well as the time and location of the crime, the recollections of his boyhood in China seem less an exercise in nostalgia than in establishing the facts leading up to the disappearance—particularly to the reader of detective stories, who already believes that he is on familiar ground. In reality, that reader has fallen, as I did, for an authorial misdirection, which Ishiguro reinforces by introducing some familiar tropes of the genre: Besides the mystery itself, in its obligatorily exotic location, there is also a probable motive, a foreign villain in an ostentatious motorcar, an implied confederacy between that villain and a family stalwart—and even a magnifying glass, which Christopher carries with him at all times, and uses, Holmeslike, to scutinize crime scenes. There are moments during sleep when our dreaming brain is completely taken in by the false reality of its own dream—until some suddenly intruding impossibility (a visit from a dead relative, a lilliputian animal, our own smooth ascent into midair) breaks the illusion and alerts us to the fact that all before us is a phantasmagoria, that nothing is certain, everything must be doubted, called into question, reassessed. And so it is with the second half of When We Were Orphans. Since his parents’ disappearance, Christopher has been living with his aunt in London where, lately, most of his free time and energy has been devoted to hobnobbing at gatherings of high society. But as the climax of the novel approaches, Christopher abandons returns to Shanghai, and plunges into an adventure of increasing intensity and diminishing plausibility—and no matter how stubbornly you attempt to maintain good faith in the opening premise, the accumulating flaws and illogicalities of this account finally compel you abandon it. In this sense, Ishiguro forces the reader into the role of detective that his hero fails to fulfil: The portrait of Christopher the Detective is so problematic that we begin, detective-like, to investigate the detective whose investigation we have been reading. For me, this moment came quite late in the narrative, when he was already stumbling at night through the ruins of a neighborhood destoryed by the ongoing Sino-Japanese conflict, dodging bullets, searching for the house at which his sleuthing has led him to believe his parents were once held hostage. We can easily believe, with Christopher, that their disappearace is connected to the opium trade (in which they both had equal but morally opposite involvement) and with the Chinese gangster. The problem is that Christopher also believes that his parents, despite the elapse of several decades, will still be there when he arrives. It was here that I lowered the book and, after a long moment of perplexity, realized that I was being invited to review the rest of Christopher’s narrative in view of this obvious piece of insanity. And indeed, so many details that I had wondered at, then hesitantly passed over, now returned to mind with a new significance: The detectable air of ridicule with which his friends presented him with that magnifying glass on his birthday; the worker at the British consolate who spoke (now presumably in mockery) of the reception to be held after the great detective finally located his parents; all those preposterous comments about everyone depending on him to prevent the outbreak of war and save the world—together with his general failure to detail a single one of his cases or reveal a single believable aspect of his methodology. With a sudden goosefleshy thrill, we realize: Christopher may not be a celebrated sleuth at all, but a pathetic lunatic who only plays at being a great detective and has become the laughingstock of both Shanghai and London as a result. The possibility injects absurdity into the narrative, but also a great deal of pathos. After Mr. Banks disappeared, and shortly before Mrs. Banks followed him, Christopher and his Japanese playmate, Akira, would pretend to be detectives looking for the missing man. This circumstance tempts us to hazard a psychoanalytic explanation, and wonder if Christopher’s mind, seeking a bolthole from grief, become permanently trapped in the idle but comforting fantasy of a child. Despite a final shocking confrontation with the main antagonist, during which Christopher learns the truth about his parents, this important psychological ambiguity of the novel is never definitely resolved. Some readers have commented that, near the end his narrative, Christopher’s voice becomes less equivocal, more sure of itself, and take this as an indication of redemption. Other have suggested that the resolution is implied by the title: Since becoming an orphan is irreversible, it is illogical to speak of a time in the past when one was an orphan; the title must therefore refer to a figurative orphanhood (being orphaned by the truth, for instance, or by self-knowlege) while the past tense implies that Christopher has transcended it. The problem with unreliable narrators is that they are unreliable, even when disclosing the absolution of the secret, blindspot or delusion that led to their unreliability in the first place. For me Ishiguro’s text remains masterfully ambiguous, like an optical illusion that endlessly vacillates, and is now a pair of human profiles, now a single vase, depending on your perception of the moment. |