A Sleuth in Search of Himself
REICH, TOVA
A Sleuth in Search of Himself When We Were Orphans By Kazuo Ishiguro Knopf. 320 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara,' "The Jewish War" Kazuo Ishiguro is a writer in...
...He responds, "Well, Colonel, it's hardly foreign to me...
...he takes it for granted that the overriding urgency of his task and the link between his personal loss and the looming worldwide catastrophe are universally acknowledged...
...Who is he...
...In fact, it is a detective story about a detective...
...Banks' beautiful, singing, playful mother in her fragrant dresses is idolized for her campaign against the opium trade...
...Akira, his proud Japanese playmate, roars with laughter, rolling on his back and "kicking his feet in the air...
...These two female characters, along with his mother, are the only individuals with whom he achieves any semblance of closeness...
...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara,' "The Jewish War" Kazuo Ishiguro is a writer in control...
...Very soon thereafter he leaves to take refuge once more in his search for his parents...
...A similar repression and fastidiousness characterize Banks' relationship with Jennifer...
...But all the while he is buried within the construct of his own memories, utterly unconnected and alone...
...For the reader, viewing the accretion of detail that constitutes and transcends memory through the prism of Ishiguro's ordered larger vision reveals the truth...
...Banks' memories, subjective by nature, are brought to life through Ishiguro's meticulous choice of detail...
...He considers himself dignified and unexceptionable, with an earned place in the company of important people...
...in a book where some of the scenes, such as the quest through the warren, are as dark and dreamlike as a descent into the underworld, it is a wonder that the total effect is concrete and vivid...
...Like The Remains of the Day, the 1989 Booker Prize-winner, his latest novel—written in the stately, reserved prose that has become the hallmark of this Japanese-born British writer—is constructed in layers of remembered episodes that are unfolded with supreme authority...
...the corpse of her brother is stretched out nearby, entrails hanging out "like the decorative tails of a kite...
...Financially secure through an inheritance, he was educated at an elite prep school and at Cambridge, then came down to London...
...In particular, there is Sarah Hemmings, a woman he initially denies feeling attracted to ("But as it happened, the first time I saw her, I did not think her at all pretty...
...It moves with seemingly effortless grace from the protagonist's memories of different moments in the present to an equally rich and varied trove in the past...
...Early in these pages, Banks remembers how, when his school friends gave him a birthday gift of an old magnifying glass to use in his future detective work, he was shocked that they were aware of his ambition...
...He had thought, until then, that he had successfully kept it secret from everyone...
...And while the great case that this celebratedEnglishsleuth.ChristopherBanks, is working on involves the disappearance of his parents in Shanghai when he was 10 years old, the real case is himself, and its resolution involves self-knowledge...
...A profoundly sad story of personal loss and disillusionment, it is at the same time so monumentally absurd a tale of skewed perspective and lopsided pride that despite its serious tone and inherently tragic themes, it can, like Kafka, also be read as a comic novel...
...Memory—its stratagems, its selectivity, its obsessional quality, its refinements, its expedience and uses—constitutes one of Ishiguro's great preoccupations...
...But that's because you know nothing, practically nothing, sir, concerning this matter...
...For Banks, focusing through the glass on limited details makes the unbearable, at least for a moment, bearable...
...With Sarah he feels not just the kinship of orphanhood but what is here construed to be the shared ambition of the orphaned to eradicate evil—he by solving the mystery of his parents' disappearance, she by marrying someone "who'll really contribute, I mean to humanity, to abetter world...
...The loss of that world, represented by the loss of parents, also means the end of innocence—metaphoric and cosmic innocence as well as literal and personal...
...In his mind, the kidnapping of his parents is of much vaster import...
...The heart of When We Were Orphans spans the period from the waning days of British colonial rule in the Far East to the brink of World War II...
...He encourages the child, albeit in rather formal terms and settings, to confide in him about her loss—for he, better than anyone, can understand what must be her sense that the world has collapsed around her...
...In a book that gives the reader absolutely no idea of what the main character looks like or of what he eats when he bothers to eat at all...
...The Japanese colonel who apprehends him at the end of his nightmarish trek through the Shanghai warren tells him of a court poet who wrote "of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown...
...I know full well what you've been thinking all this time, Lieutenant...
...After the disappearance, first, of the English boy's father, the two weave a complex detective fantasy of solving the case...
...Thus, when he returns to Shanghai to finally close matters in the fall of 1937, amid the chaos and slaughter of the SinoJapanese War, he believes he is serving humanity...
...They meet again later in Shanghai...
...Her home and family have just been completely wiped out...
...In many ways, it's where I've continued to live all my life...
...But when they meet to make good their escape, and begin kissing "just like, I suppose, a couple on the cinema screen," he feels something "oddly inelegant" about their embrace...
...Many of the recollections of the past are triggered by Banks' memories of encounters with Sarah in the present...
...You believe this is all my fault, all this, all of it, all this terrible suffering, this destruction here, I could see it in your face when we were walking through it all just now...
...It was as though this suggestion of hers—which for all I knew had been thrown out on an impulse—carried with it a huge authority, something that brought me a kind of dispensation I had never dared to hope for...
...He also adopts a child, Jennifer, through a charitable organization and raises her as his daughter...
...From his mother he is, of course, brutally cut off...
...Indeed, the flow of the narrative is essentially a circuitous j ourney through memory...
...Sarah, so like him in so many ways, has the "spirit"—as does Jennifer, as did his mother—to open him up and make him vulnerable to his memories...
...Not that Banks by any means considers the crowning case of his career to be merely about his father and mother...
...You may well know a thing or two about fighting, but let me tell you it's quite another thing to solve a complicated case of this kind...
...There he moved into a solitary flat in Kensington and began what has turned out to be a successful career as a much sought after detective...
...Nevertheless, he counsels her, as he had been counseled in his time, to forget the past and to look forward...
...He has no compunction, for example, about requesting that military personnel be pulled from the heat of battle to assist him...
...An orphan, after all, is defined in relation to the loss of parents, so the person who persists in seeing himself as one remains stuck fast in childhood...
...Sarah is by then unhappily married to an elderly and worn out statesman of distinguished reputation, and she proposes that they run off together...
...As children, Banks and Akira acted out intricate imaginary games...
...It is, in effect, the game Banks still plays in his adult years...
...And she possesses the power, as do the other two, to ultimately liberate him from guilt...
...What is the nature of this life and this world he has been thrust into...
...Banks believes his public persona to be entirely unmarked by the trauma he endured...
...Surprisingly, given his solitary temperament, he agrees, and the decision overwhelms him with "an almost tangible sense of relief...
...It is, as he perceives it, indisputably associated with the world's ruin, for which he personally feels responsible because he had, for so long, failed to solve the crime and restore justice...
...The few people who can draw him out of this isolation, at least to some degree, are other orphans...
...Banks continues to use the magnifying glass when he is a veteran detective— most absurdly, in one of the novel's closing scenes, to examine the gaping wounds of the little Chinese girl's dead mother...
...The idea of looking hopefully to the future becomes even more ironic in the context of a character so caught in the warp of his past...
...The inhuman absurdity of this advice—to keep up one's courage and look ahead even in the face of unspeakable tragedy—becomes bitterly apparent when he offers it to a little wounded Chinese girl he meets at the end of his horrific journey through the warren...
...Banks regards himself as a savior, the long-awaited hero who will put everything right, and he is convinced that others do too...
...Again and again, as the memories unfold, details of this sort uncover the transparent self-deceptions and expose the reality...
...Like that earlier best-selling work, too, his new one is a tight drama of a poignantly self-deluding soul, acted out on a cruel and indifferent international stage...
...It is through the strata and associative quality of memory that the author constructs this novel...
...Torn from that paradise and sent to live with an aunt in England, Banks closed down emotionally and was initiated, without realizing it, into the society of orphans...
...On another level, however, one that renders it immediately accessible and engrossing, the novel is a mystery...
...he say s to the Kuomintang officer who guides him part of the way through a surreal warren of war-ravaged dwellings in search of his parents, "I could see it in your eyes...
...As bizarre as such grandiose self-deception may seem, Ishiguro manages to make it ring psychologically true, not least because he has carefully re-created the enchanted world of a remembered childhood...
Vol. 83 • September 2000 • No. 4
