This could well be one of the oddest novels published this year - or any year for that matter. An English detective, Christopher Banks, appears to enjoy a celebrity unheard of this side of the movies. His fame is all the more surprising as he appears to be almost devoid of a personality. Setting his story initially in 1930s London, Ishiguro is at pains to create a stiff upper lip atmosphere in keeping with the manners and morals of the time. Banks is correct in manner, unusually formal and extremely anxious.
As early as the opening sentence we are informed that he had come down from Cambridge some seven years earlier and appears on the way to becoming the definitive middle class Englishman. Aside from his manner, there are other facts which have set him apart. Firstly he is not described as an orphan, but rather remarks about "my lack of parents". Not that he is making a fuss about this as he says, recalling his schoolboy self, this "had by then long ceased to be of any great inconvenience to me". At no time does Ishiguro attempt to win any sympathy for his narrator. Added to this is the even more peculiar Sarah Hemmings, a young woman, also an orphan, determined to secure a place in society. As Banks observes, "I'm not sure I quite understand you. You're under the impression you'll lead a more worthwhile life if you consort with famous people?"
The stiff, mannered tone of the narrative never relaxes, the dialogue could almost be parody - in a characteristically ridiculous exchange taking place when he finds himself under fire in a war zone, Banks is handed a gun by a Chinese officer who says, "It is better you do not carry a rifle, Mr Banks. But do you have a pistol? No? Then take this. It is German and very reliable." While Ishiguro certainly displays a stylistic consistency, the tone frequently renders the book dangerously wooden and absurd. It is not ironic enough to be funny yet the story is so offbeat that When We Were Orphans is difficult to abandon, if only because the whole thing is so weird. Banks tells his story at a distance from everything, including himself.
Early on we are told how his interest in solving mysteries became his life's vocation. Equally early comes the most valid clue in making sense of the narrator's calmly bizarre personality. This most English of Englishmen only arrived "home" to an England he had never been to after the double disappearance of his parents. Prior to that his world had been the International Settlement in Shanghai.
The mention of a long-lost friend's name causes the narrator to return to his boyhood and some of the sequences with his young Japanese pal, Akira, ring partly true. At first it seems Ishiguro has entered the world of JG Ballard's war classic, The Empire of the Sun (1984) and while it is interesting to note his return not only to the war theme, variations of which feature in earlier novels such as his best book to date, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and to a more shadowy extent in his Booker winner, The Remains of the Day (1988), this aspect of the book is its least convincing.
Far stronger are the atmospheric similarities this new book shares with its predecessor, The Unconsoled (1995), a lengthy endurance test of a novel which takes displacement as one of its themes.
From the publication of his debut, A Pale View of Hills (1982), Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki and moved to Britain at the age of five, has demonstrated a cool elegance. His graceful prose is understated and deliberate. Those first three novels were limpid exercises in detachment yet were also moving. Ishiguro's ability to convey the emotion behind facades dictated by duty and society, ensured the subtle power of those early books. No doubt because of this, The Unconsoled, with its intensely cerebral sense of fun, left many of his admirers more bewildered than touched. It is a book which initially irritates and slowly, very slowly - possibly only half way through the second reading - engages.
This is not the case with When We Were Orphans. The personal dilemma which Banks finds himself in loses its immediacy. Yet years later, having become famous, he sets out to find his parents. None of this ever seems probable. One day his father, a passive, weak man, left for work and never returned. His wife, the narrator's mother, is a disciplined, impressive character who has never concealed her disgust with the opium trade upon which her husband's company is built. Determined to find her husband and protect her son, she sets forth - and also disappears. Banks's return to Shanghai years later is predictable. He is as much an outsider there as he is in England. If there is a quest it is really about the narrator finding himself rather than his long-missing parents.
At the heart of this novel, as of any Ishiguro has written, lie cultural confusions and emotional repression. Banks is a sleepwalker and is as egotistical as he is insecure. At moments of doubt he invariably reminds people of his fame and position. All the more unconvincing is his decision to take into care a young girl named Jennifer to whom he confesses when she is 31, "I should have done more for you, Jeny. I'm sorry . . . I meant earlier on."
There is no fairytale ending, the climax proves as banal as life, but Ishiguro fails to evoke the emotion he is striving towards.
Banks admits to times "when a sort of emptiness fills my hours". And emptiness is true of much of this thoughtful but artistically laboured novel. Too often at the mercy of its contrived ambiguities, it lacks the natural deftness of the best of Ishiguro. It is only at its end that the true object of the narrative becomes clear: it is not about searching, it is instead concerned with how a life is shaped.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist.
