Truth in fiction depends on getting the voice right. Kazuo Ishiguro hit the jackpot with his novel Remains Of The Day where the ornate language was perfect in giving a vivid portrayal of the repressed butler at the heart of the novel. The same cannot be said of his Y2K novel ‘When We Were Orphans’ where the style sounds more stilted and soulless.
For the first half of the novel meticulously constructed sentences like “I entertained a vague expectation of hearing something from her concerning what had occurred” establish the aloof formality of protagonist Christopher Banks. Since the story is mainly set in the 1930s, I can understand why Ishiguro chooses not to use snappier language or phrasal verbs.
Banks is a private detective who, we are told, has solved some high profile cases although we are given only the sketchiest of details about his investigations save for the fact that he knows how to use a magnifying glass to good effect. There’s a vague love interest in the shape of social climber Sarah Hemmings but she fades from the picture as Banks gets immersed in the search for his parents who are presumed to have been kidnapped when he was a child.
As the inplausable plot progresses and the action shifts from the relative tranquility of Cambridge, England to the chaos and confusion of war-torn Shanghai, Ishiguro’s writing becomes almost a parody of itself. Take, for example, when Banks is negotiating the rubble of bombed houses with his Japanese friend. He hears what sounds like the moans of a dying man in the remains of one building and states : “I was on the point of remarking to Akira what a singularly unfortunate time this individual was having….”
Worse still, when he encounters a young girl whose parents have been killed in a bomb raid he ‘comforts’ her in this way: “Look here…All of this’ – I gestured at the carnage, of which she seemed completely oblivious – ‘it’s awfully bad luck. But look, you’ve survived, and really, you’ll see, you’ll make a pretty decent show of it if you just….if you just keep up your courage’ “.
Where death and tragedy is viewed respectively as ‘singularly unfortunate’ and ‘awfully bad luck’ Ishiguro’s fictional creation begins to sound like Prince Charles stumbling into a war zone. This is the point I lost any sympathy for the character and for the novel as a whole.
