When We Were Orphans
by Kazuo Ishiguro, Lee John
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro, Lee JohnEdition: Audio Cassette
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2000-09-01
ISBN: N/A
Book Reviews of When We Were Orphans
Book Review: Unremarkable writing, daffy plot, weak recycled protagonist
Summary: 2 Stars
Another disappointment from Kazuo Ishiguro, and the fact that it was nominated for the Booker Prize shows how imbecilic literary fiction prizes are these days.
There were many annoying things within this novel, and chief among which is the protagonist Christopher is a passive idiot. Of course, Stevens from Remains of the Day was a passive idiot too, but Stevens was SUPPOSED be an idiot whereas Christopher is supposed to be a celebrated detective. This guy can't solve some kid stealing lunch money much less the most celebrated cases in early 20th-century England! I started getting mad--I always do when I read crap novels--when Christopher is searching for the house his parents supposedly were jailed in. Why he assumes his parents are there is beyond me--it's explained, but it's a VERY weak explanation--and why he would assume they would still be there despite a passage of 20-odd years and the fact that it's in the middle of a war zone is jaw-droppingly idiotic. Along the way, in the middle of the war while searching for his parents, Christopher just happens to be come across his great childhood friend Akira. Think about this for a second. Shanghai has, what, 10 million people, and Christopher, after yearning to see his childhood friend for so long, just happens to come across this guy on the street. Give me the break!!! Contrivance works sometimes--notice the reemergence of the protagonist's childhood enemy in The Kite Runner--but you'd better have a decent plot to hide such contrivance. This novel, sadly, doesn't have a decent plot. In fact, I'm not even sure what the hell Christopher was doing in Shanghai as a detective. What crime was he trying to solve? It's explained very anemically, and the only investigation he does is finding some drunk cop from the old days. He does no interviews, collects no evidence, nothing. And Ishiguro describes him as if he were Holmes or something!
Bottom line: a weak effort on Ishiguro's part. He seems to be repeating himself. Jennifer, Christopher's adopted daughter, has suicidal tendencies much like the Japanese woman's daughter in A Pale View of the Hills. Never mind that Jennifer, from her childhood, seems a very vivacious girl with a happy disposition. No, Ishiguro had to make it sad, and what's sadder than a young woman who wants to kill herself?
Worst, all his recent male characters seem to be variations of Stevens, the repressed, passive butler in Remains of the Day. Stevens worked because the story NEEDED a Stevens. This story needed a lot more dynamic a protagonist.
And the prose is the perfectly understated, narcoleptic prose of his other novels--even though this is ostensibly a detective story set in a major war. Imagine Lars von Trier directing Terminator, and you'd see why such prose is so totally out of place in writing such a story.
Bottom line: Ishiguro is starting to look like a guy with a one-trick pony--and he's seriously flogging it for all it's worth.
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