Remains of Ishiguro

So, for example, his latest novel, When We Were Orphans, is set in England and Shanghai during the 1930s, twenty years before Ishiguro was born. And it uses as its narrator a brilliant English detective named Christopher Banks, a parody of the leading figures in 1930s crime fiction.

The awkwardness of Christopher’s cold self-sufficiency is presumably designed to teach us the lesson that a man’s public persona can differ from his interior life — though that lesson is hardly a new one, and what Christopher’s interior actually looks like never comes clear. Similarly, the broadly signaled unreliability of Christopher’s narration is presumably supposed to reveal the partiality and unreliability of all views of the world — though here, too, the news is news we’ve heard before. Ishiguro always writes of a world he never completely knew, but he makes of it little more than the modernist claim that the world itself is something we can never completely know.

Ishiguro’s father — an oceanographer who said he learned his English from British soldiers — was born in Shanghai, where his own father was setting up a factory. When the Japanese set off the Pacific phase of World War II, the family returned to Japan, settling in Nagasaki, where Kazuo was born in 1954. They traveled to England in 1960, when the father received a grant from the British government to study the North Sea. He joined the National Institute of Oceanography, based near Guildford, Surrey, south of London.

Ishiguro remembers promising his grandparents as a five-year-old that he would bring presents from England back to Japan when he returned in a year or so. But the family never returned and still live in Britain, on the same Guildford street where they first settled. This is particularly remarkable, because the Ishiguros never thought of themselves as having immigrated. “For the first ten years of being in Britain,” says Ishiguro, “I grew up thinking of myself very much as a Japanese person visiting Britain, as did my parents. In this sense you didn’t properly immigrate or leave a life behind. You just drifted off and turned your back on some things, and when you next turned round they had gone. That’s very central to my experience.”

The boy may not have been British, but he was manifestly not Japanese either, receiving “a straightforward southern English education” at local schools and then going on to the University of Kent to study English and philosophy. Doing some singing and guitar strumming in folk clubs as well, he became interested first in how to write songs and then in how to write stories. After his undergraduate studies, he enrolled in the creative writing Master’s program tutored by Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia — the only such course in the country at that time.

Ishiguro is one of the group of “ethnic” British writers that includes Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Zadie King. His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), both took place in a Japan almost entirely imagined by the author (he did not revisit Japan to get background).

But Ishiguro is best known for his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which won him the Booker Prize, Britain’s equivalent of the Pulitzer. Made into a Merchant-Ivory film starring Anthony Hopkins, the novel tells the story of the loyal butler of an English nobleman who is pleased by the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s and is ready to betray his country for them. The butler tells his story in the first person, proud of his loyalty to his master and of his efficiency as a butler, while the reader realizes he is emotionally and sexually repressed.

Ishiguro’s fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995), takes place in an imaginary central European city. And in his new novel, When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro returns to pre-World War II England — once again, a world he never knew and undertakes to imagine.

These novels typically center on a narrator whose reminiscences gradually expose his emotional rigidity and self-delusion. An Ishiguro narrator is cold, pragmatic, willful, hiding behind his profession and avoiding reality — especially in the form of emotional commitment. He is quite unreliable as to the meaning of events and his own effect on others. Thus, the butler Stevens is stupidly loyal to his fascist master and blind to his master’s treason in The Remains of the Day. The bohemian artist who narrates A Pale View of Hills becomes a propagandist for Japanese imperialism during the Second World War, without realizing the contradiction.

In When We Were Orphans, the unreliable narrator is Christopher Banks, who is a child in Shanghai in the years before World War II until his father and mother disappear, evidently kidnapped and murdered by Chinese warlords because Christopher’s mother is an effective opponent of the opium trade, from which his father’s company makes its money. Christopher is sent back to England where, after school and university, he becomes a famous detective of the type seen in 1930s detective fiction, solving cases that baffle the police. He is feted by society, but he finds himself avoiding another orphan, Sarah Hemmings, who pursues him because she is eager to marry someone famous. He adopts as his ward an orphan girl whose parents were lost at sea.

Finally — after half the book has been devoted to a colorless summary of Christopher’s grown-up life in England as a famous man and to memories of life before his parents disappeared — he goes to Shanghai just before World War II, sure he can now find his mother and father. As common sense should have told him (but few in Ishiguro’s world have common sense), he will not be able to rescue his parents after eighteen years.

Shanghai seems strangely unfamiliar to him. He meets a Japanese boyhood friend, now in the army, and gets caught up in the warfare between the Chinese Communists, Chiang Kaishek’s army, and the invading Japanese. When Christopher meets up with an important person from his past, one mystery does find a solution — although most of the mysteries in the novel remain mysterious. We last hear of Christopher at the end of his life in 1958, when he complacently declares that “For those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents.”

When We Were Orphans is ostensibly a story of a lonely, frightened boy who achieves mastery by becoming a detective so good that he can rescue his own parents, doing for them what they could not do for him. And like The Remains of the Day, the book is a study in the character of an unreliable narrator: The reader must become a detective who ferrets out the motives behind Christopher’s emotional reticence and comic-strip mission to defeat evil. This time, however, the reader is often unsure just how unreliable the narrator is and what Ishiguro’s purpose is in making him unreliable.

The history of narrators is in many ways the history of the novel as an art form. The novel moves from its beginnings in the eighteenth century with the omniscience of a reliable and impersonal narrator (Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: “We are now, reader, arrived at the last stage of our long journey.”) to a still-reliable but now personal narrator (Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations: “As I never saw my father or my mother, . . . my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from the tombstones”) to the personal and unreliable narrators of modern fiction (Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses).

Of course, there are many exceptions. The eighteenth-century novels Pamela and Clarissa by Samuel Richardson are told by personal narrators, while Emily Bronte’s nineteenth-century Wuthering Heights contains no less than three unreliable narrators, in a nested Chinese box of narration. But until the modernist era, use of an omniscient narrator had long seemed the natural form of the novel.

Many twentieth-century authors continued to use omniscient narrators (Doris Lessing, Alice Munro) and personal, reliable ones (Flannery O’Connor, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and William Trevor). Nevertheless, the “unreliable” narrator is the twentieth century’s natural voice — the voice of the modernist author: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges. And the result is that readers no longer automatically believe the narrator. We now know that the facts of the story are not necessarily what the narrator believes they are.

“Unreliable,” of course, designates several different things. It can mean a narrator who is simply lying to us, as in Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton. It can mean a narrator (or a center of consciousness) who is lying to himself, as in the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners. It can mean a narrator whose point of view is so limited or eccentric that it calls upon us to question our own views, as in Franz Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist” and Albert Camus’s The Fall. Or it can mean the narrator who is so inarticulate that we invest him with the emotion we believe he must be feeling: “He was dead. It was raining,” Hemingway gives as his famous “compound causative” sentences, leaving us to imagine the narrator’s feelings. All of these techniques are designed to force us to figure out how the narrator is distorting things — while calling upon us to notice the partiality and questionableness of our own ways of seeing things.

The problem with Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrator in When We Were Orphans is not that he is unreliable, but that he is unreliable to no purpose: There’s nothing behind his unreliability. Christopher Banks is merely a parody of Englishness and the clever detectives of 1930s popular fiction. Why should we pity him for his character flaws or admire him for the light he throws on our own lives?

The story is plot-driven, rather than character-driven, but very few details are given. We are never told what the cases are that Christopher solves, except that they often involve murder. We find that others see him as a “miserable loner,” but what is behind the layers of etiquette by which he relates to other people seems merely banal self-involvement. The detective Christopher in When We Were Orphans is as dull and uninteresting as the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day.

The worst case to be made against Ishiguro is that his characters are one-dimensional, comic-strip types who voice only feelings conventionally appropriate for fiction set in their time. Ishiguro’s prose is certainly wooden, flat, imageless, stale, and devoted to cliches. His scenes are colorless and rudimentary. His plots are simplistic and unbelievable. One admiring critic wrote that Ishiguro’s “single insight into the human condition is that people need love but continually spoil their chances of getting it, a piece of wisdom slightly below the level of Dr. Joyce Brothers,” adding that he “has acquired a reputation as a penetrating psychological realist and a luminous stylist [that] is entirely undeserved.”

But what When We Were Orphans actually does show, with neat efficiency, is that the unreliable narrator is dead, ossified as a modernist icon. That is, now that all narrators are deemed unreliable (including the omniscient narrator of a novel like Tom Jones), the unreliable narrator is no longer anyone special. Why should we care about him more than the other figures in the book? Christopher Banks does not conceal a more interesting character, throw light on our own characters, or view reality in a fresh way.

In fact, Christopher is so banally modernist he sets one’s teeth on edge. All his emotions are mere social constructions. And, of course, that seems to be the point. Other readers may be fascinated by a novel that demonstrates the social construction of character by presenting all people as papier-mache figures. But this reader was exasperated.

Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.