When We Were Orphans

Christopher Banks in London

Christopher Banks is, in the 1930s, London’s most celebrated detective — a status the novel establishes with a careful ambiguity, since we see Banks’s reputation largely through his own eyes, and his eyes, as we will discover, are unreliable instruments. He moves through the London social world of the period with a slight awkwardness that reads initially as shyness or self-containment: he is admired but not entirely at ease, successful but not quite rooted.

His childhood friend from Shanghai, Sarah Hemmings, reappears in his London life with her own social ambitions and her own unresolved past. Their friendship has the quality of a bond formed in a previous life — they share the category of “orphan” in ways that are both literal and metaphorical. His Japanese-educated friend Akira, from his Shanghai childhood, returns to him in memory and eventually in dreams, a figure whose significance the reader understands before Banks does.

The 1930s London chapters establish Banks’s professional confidence alongside his personal evasiveness. He is a man who solves other people’s problems while systematically avoiding his own — the detective’s classic displacement. His parents disappeared in Shanghai when he was a child; he has been in England since; he tells himself he will return to investigate when the time is right. The time, in his telling, is always almost right.

Shanghai in Flames

The novel’s third section is the most formally audacious thing Ishiguro had attempted since The Unconsoled: Banks arrives in 1937 Shanghai as the Sino-Japanese War is beginning in earnest, and his investigation — into a house in the International Settlement where he believes his parents are being held — takes him through an active war zone. The sequence where Banks and a Japanese soldier cross a no-man’s land of burning buildings, neither quite understanding the other’s presence there, moving toward a destination that may not exist, is among the most extraordinary things in Ishiguro’s work.

What the investigation uncovers is the truth about his childhood: that the story he has carried for decades — kidnapped parents, an open case waiting for him to solve, a childhood ending interrupted — was a protective fiction, the construction of a traumatized child who needed the disappearance to be solvable rather than final. The revelation reframes everything we have read about Banks’s detective career: he has spent his professional life solving other people’s mysteries because he could not face the fact that his own mystery had been solved long ago, and the solution was not what he needed it to be.

The wartime Shanghai sequence also functions as a portrait of a world ending. The International Settlement — that extraordinary zone where British and American and French and Chinese and Japanese interests coexisted in an elaborate, unstable arrangement — is being dismantled around Banks as he walks through it. His childhood world, already gone, is literally on fire.

Ishiguro’s Genre Hybrids

When We Were Orphans was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000 — a recognition that acknowledged Ishiguro’s ambition while registering some critical unease about whether the ambition had been fully realized. The detective plot is, by conventional standards, implausible: Banks is treated as a great detective despite never solving anything on the page that we see, and the mystery of his parents is resolved not by detection but by a conversation that simply gives him the information. Readers expecting a genre payoff will be frustrated.

The novel is best understood as continuous with The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled rather than as a departure from them. All three novels are about men who have organized their lives around a professional identity and a governing fiction — Stevens’s belief in dignity and service, Ryder’s belief that the concert is always reachable, Banks’s belief that the case is always about to be solved — and who encounter, at the novel’s turn, the cost of that organization. In each case, the professional fiction has been a way of not knowing something about the self that is too painful to know directly.

The Nobel Prize context (awarded in 2017) has rehabilitated many of Ishiguro’s less-celebrated novels, and When We Were Orphans is among those that reward re-reading with the full arc of his career in view.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Ishiguro’s most genre-adventurous novel uses the detective form as a lens for exploring how we construct the past to make it liveable — and what it costs when the construction finally fails.