Originally published on Medium. com, Jan 21, 2025
Thoughts on critical blurbs for Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans
Kazuo Ishiguro is the Nobelist in question. The prize, awarded in 2017, planted a well deserved crown on a literary life filled with master works. That accolade exempts one work that Ishiguro himself in an interview declared “not my best book.” That book was When We Were Orphans published in 2000 and shortlisted for that year’s Booker Prize, that being the occasion for Ishiguro’s quote. The book did not win the award.
The reasons for both Ishiguro’s assessment of the work and the Booker committee’s choice of another work are somewhat surprising given the praise for the book appearing on the book’s dust jacket. The reviews in question came from prestigious sources, including the Times Literary Supplement (TLS), the Guardian, Esquire, and so on.
I found the copy I eventually read in a library book sale some twenty years after it’s publication. At that time I had already read Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, which had in 1989 actually won the Booker. And more recently, also read Clara and the Sun published in 2021, long listed as well for the Booker that year. Again it didn’t win though. These two books because of the stunning English language, which Ishiguro is noted for, led me to pull out Orphans from the book pile and put it on my read list.
Now that I’ve finished the book, I can without reservation agree with the author that it is not his best book — at least the best of the three I’ve read. I was interested, though, to reassess the gushy blurbs on the dust jacket to see how they matched up with my reaction. And, in short, they do not. My feelings are more in line with Ishiguro’s own.
The novel to me was not a “fascinating, imaginative work of surpassing intelligence and taste” as Joyce Carol Oates assessed it in the TLS. The taste part is true enough, because Ishiguro is always tasteful. But the imaginative work was of the sort you see in a Hollywood car chase where the hero or heroine is careening off market stalls along narrow, twisting, intersecting roads in a city he/she is new to and hasn’t even a map of. But city layouts are irrelevant, the hero can still elude the pursuing bad guys or maybe cops. In other words, a lot of the action in the book was highly improbable.
The Esquire blurb suggested it would remain with me the reader as a “densely plotted and dramatic novel…of extraordinary thematic resonance and depth.” The only way that would be true from my reading would be if dense and dramatic referred to the kind of staged, and highly scripted car chase mentioned above. Likewise thematic depth must refer to a disjointed plot involving “I love her, I love her not; my benefactor was my mother’s enslaver; my father kissed me goodbye one day and I never saw him again; my British uncle was a double agent for the Chinese during the war.” And through all these disconnected dramas, or maybe because of them or in spite of them, his protagonist became Britain’s most honored and capable detective.
The Independent seems to acknowledge the fractured plot arc as Ishiguro’s “inimitably out-of-kilter vision,” a line intended to be complimentary, but then on reflection maybe not so much.
All of my judgmental take-aways from the book do not take away from my overall impression that Ishiguro did write a book accurately coming across, as the Guardian blurbed, as “one of Britain’s most formally daring and challenging novelists.”
You, and I mean myself too, just have to forgive the lapses in plotting and wonder how this author turns out such beautiful prose, sculpting a character who holds your attention, even if he does not ultimately command your compassion and leads to you scratching your head about how the hero could be so astute and so unaware at the same time.
Paperback of the week: When we were Orphans: A detective goes to Shanghai to investigate his parents’ disappearance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fifth novel. www.theguardian.com
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