Rating: 
Summary: You can't judge a book by its author....
Review: Ishiguro can write. There is no doubt about this. However, this ability is definitely not reflected in "When we were orphans". This must be just about the most disappointing book I have ever read. The pace is pedestrian, the plot improbable, the naivety of the narrator and main character stupifying and the characterisations stereotyped. I wish I could be more positive! There is nothing in this book to recommend it, which is really quite amazing, given the real quality of "Remains of the day" and "The Unconsoled".
Rating:
Summary: Illogical and unbelievable
Review: How can a book have such tightly-controlled writing, yet such an illogical, unbelievable and frustrating plot? The narrator is a detective, yet we are given no details on his professional triumphs (we're just told, repeatedly, he's a great detective), and, judging from his lack of memory and inability to focus on essential clues from his past, no reason to think he has the mental acuity to be such a brilliant detective. This novel is both too tight and too loose at the same time.
Rating: 
Summary: Lost in Shanghai
Review: Sorry to say that I think this fine writer simply lost his way on this one. After an enticing beginning the whole fabric quickly unravels. The random blind alleys of the plot were not only boring, but infuriating and often totally unbelievable. I finished the book out of respect for his other better works, but can in no way recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: Well written, but a loose, rambling story lacking cohesion
Review: "When We Were Orphans" performs a delicate balancing act between an interesting psychological portrait and an abject failure. The tool that helps the novel keep its balance, its umbrella if you will, is Ishiguro's writing ability and use of language. His skill is what keeps you turning the pages, even while the plot makes you want to hurl the thing against the wall. For a work with a detective as the main character, there is no detecting. All cerebral inquiries take place off-stage, and are only mentioned after the fact. Even with the device of the unreliable narrator, some inkling of detective fiction would have been helpful. One gets the feeling that Ishiguro lacks the skills necessary to accurately portray a detective in action, so he covers this by having it all happen elsewhen. Many other things, relationships, chance meetings, character introductions, all seem like the plot-devices they are. Much of it is too forced, too false. There is little internal logic. Plots are left dangling, such as Mei Lin. With that criticism, "When We Were Orphans" still has some power in it, and can deliver a few gripping scenes and summon up some depth of feeling. The war zone of Shanghai is one. The revelations of Uncle Philip are stunning in their strength. Some of the characters live and breath, such as Jennifer, even while interacting with the cardboard cut-outs that stand for other characters, such as Akira. Read as a series of short stories, interlinked with a wandering narrative, it is a decent book.
Rating:
Summary: The unreliable narrator
Review: The "unreliable narrator" is a venerable device, with its roots in Poe and Dostoevsky. In English lit it was first fully exploited in 1915 by Ford Maddox Ford in "The Good Soldier". The reader has to figure out just how much of the narrative is "true" and how much of it is just what the narrator wants to believe is true - or wants US to believe is true. In its time, the technique was revolutionary -- it added a whole new level of psychological complexity and irony to the novel. But this book takes the device to absurd extremes. The only way to make sense of any of it is to conclude that almost everything the protagonist reports is part of his delusional fantasy, except (possibly) his childhood memories and the somber ending. But even this doesn't help much, since almost all the other characters are apparently suffering in one way or another from their own delusions. So what we're left with is a kind of anti-detective story, where *none* of the clues are meant to add up in the end. I suppose one could take it as an allegory -- after all, the title is "when WE were orphans" -- we're all orphaned from the innocence of our childhoods and try valiantly to put our lost world back together again into some coherent psychological whole, but no matter how we try, the pieces won't fit... If so, it's an intriguing and ambitious idea, but it ends as a confusing and frustrating mishmash. A big disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: My favorite of Ishiguro's works so far
Review: This seduction of a novel lulls the reader into one reality while masterfully thumping you upside your head in the last chapters. The result is your convinction of the decidedly unromantic consequences of British Imperialism. This book is too sexy for the Booker Prize. English boy, put your magnifying glass down. It's a bombardment, not Biology lab. Take a look at yourself. It's just not like you thought.
Rating:
Summary: I too was Shanghaied
Review: I enjoyed reading Ishiguro's other novels, and this one had the recommendation on its cover that it had been "Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2000", so I didn't know whether to look forward to it (on the basis of my past experiences with this author) or to beware it (on the basis of my past experiences with novels that had won, or come close to winning, prizes). Unfortunately, I found "When We Were Orphans" a huge disappointment. It had all the building blocks for an intriguing novel - an English detective returning to inter-war Shanghai to investigate the disappearance of his parents (mystery, exotic locations, and so on). In fact, I thought that "When We Were Orphans" was a mess, and at times an excruciatingly bad read. The plot becomes more ridiculous by the page, the use of outrageous coincidence seemingly the only device by which Ishiguro could try to breathe life into it. The central character, Christopher Banks, is an utterly unattractive, unsympathetic figure. There's nothing particularly wrong with that - where is the rule that the main characters in novels should be sympathetic - but those traits, coupled with the fact that the reader is supposed to believe that such an incompetent person should be a world-renowned sleuth, made it even more difficult for me to maintain my interest in the book. The dialogue, especially but not exclusively that of the Chinese and Japanese characters, felt about as authentic as you would hear in an old Charlie Chan B-movie. In all, I thought that this was poor stuff from an author who was (and I still hope will be) capable of far better work. G Rodgers
Rating: 
Summary: High Expectations Unmet
Review: The problem, I think, with this novel, is that if one has had any prior experience with Ishiguro, as I did with Remains of the Day, then one is bound to come into this one with unreasonably high expectations. And although this is not a bad novel by any means, it nevertheless fails to achieve the lofty heights gained by Remains, and proves, alas, that Mr. Ishiguro is a mere mortal after all. The plot in this one has to do with a young Englishman who is born and bred in Shanghai in the 1930's, and the story is told in the first-person by him. At the tender age of nine or so, his parents are, one by one, kidnapped. He is sent to England for the remainder of his youth, becomes a detective, then returns to Shanghai in 1939 to resolve the mystery of their disappearance. If you have been avoiding this novel because you have been told that it is a jumbled mishmash of confusing recollections and psychoanalytic dissection, don't. Instead, the story is told in a straight-forward manner and is easy to follow. In fact, one could describe it as a page-turner, with the mystery it has at the core of its plot, and the very intriguing locale. Nevertheless, it doesn't take long before you realize that you are in the hands of that classic literary device known as the "unreliable narrator." So you must pay attention. And this is where the book falls. Although we know that what we are being told is not always the truth, the author fails to give us enough clues so that we can know for sure what the truth is. Now to some degree this may be what he was trying to convey: our memories and our recollections are not always as accurate as we believe them to be. This is fine, but at some point the reader requires some sort of branch to hang onto as we are hurtled down this river. For example, when the narrator returns to Shanghai, it is made clear to us that everyone in the city expects that he will be reunited with his parents shortly, even though he has been gone and they have been missing for twenty years. Now, it's one thing to suffer under a misperception, but this is almost delusional. Does he really expect that he's going to find his parents, and does he really believe we will accept this without his ever explaining why? Shortly thereafter, he is searching for the home he believes his parents have been kept in all of these years, which happens at that moment to be in the middle of a war zone between the Chinese and the Japanese armies. He is indignant when the Chinese officer refuses to take him into this zone. This is no memory lapse, this is completely irrational behavior. There are several other examples of this kind of thing, which seem to serve the reader no other purpose than to leave him scratching his head. It's even more baffling because the narrator is in contact throughout the novel with other characters. Surely, some of them could have been used to shed some light on what is going on here; unfortunately, most of them don't. What is the author's purpose? By the time one gets to the end, in trying to sift through the truth of all this, one could reasonably conclude that the entire thing was a dream, feverishly concocted by a little boy in a strange land traumatized forever by the disappearance of his parents. Is it? But no, that's not it either, as the mystery of their disappearance is ultimately resolved in a rather conventional way. We end up with nothing but a bunch of red herrings. This is disappointing because without giving us any perspective, Mr. Ishiguro misses out on some interesting thematic implications as well. For example, there are several broad hints that the European community in Shanghai essentially fiddled while Shanghai was burned by the Japanese, but because his narrator's recollections are so flawed, how is one to make literal sense of this? Also, the narrator, shortly after discovering it, apparently loses the love of his life to his continued pursuit of this mystery. Interesting, if this obsession caused him to lose his chance for happiness, but he is unfortunately so vague about it that it is unclear to us whether this truly was a golden opportunity for love to begin with. Having said that, though, it must be remembered that this is an Ishiguro book after all, and there is plenty enough good in here to recommend it. There is the language, for one thing, which is as elegantly beautiful as it was in Remains of the Day. There are the characters, perfectly etched, particularly the mother, who comes across as stern but also girlish, playful, and pretty, and for whom the heart of any boy would ache with love. And there are the narrator's childhood reminiscences as well, which with his friend and their fantastical games and behavior in general are as dead-on accurate as any account of childhood I've ever read. His mother, for example, is attempting to explain something to him, but he, in his nine-year old mind, is instead curiously interested in how many steps he can actually take up the staircase while leaving his hand on the rail at the starting point. These sorts of details, sharply rendered by Ishiguro, give the reader an acute sense of compassion for his characters. A good book, and a good try. Mr. Ishiguro certainly aims high. But this time, anyway, he didn't hit his target. Whatever it was.
Rating:
Summary: Touching
Review: What I particularly like about Ishiguro's work is his amazing ability to depict childhood and all the emotions, peacefulness and confusion associated with it. He displays his skill once again in this novel as he draws readers into the world of Christopher and Akira. It is a job well done (but one would expect nothing less from Ishiguro).
Rating:
Summary: Beautifully evocative writing in a mediocre tale
Review: Ishiguro's latest is a classic example of what separates a good book from a great book. His elegant, fluid prose establishes a lush, gorgeous setting in the same way that Wong Kar-wei uses lighting and primary colors to create a creamy, dreamy ambiance like dreams of the past after one too many cocktails. "Orphans" impeccable prose is indisputable, but the author's stylistic excellence can only partially compensate for his shortcomings as a storyteller. As the other reviewers have noted, Ishiguro uses the device of the unreliable narrator to create a sense of confusion and surreality, but once it is created, he fails to do anything interesting with it. The climax of the story, which is the discovery that there really wasn't much of a story, leaves the reader feeling cheated rather than suprised. Ishiguro's father grew up in Old Shanghai, and serves as the basis for the protagonist's playmate. As a setting, he captures the ambiance of decaying romance of the place. The history, however, upon which the worm at the end of the story turns, is flawed. The abduction of a British woman by an inland gangster would have never been tolerated by the Colonial authorities in the 1920s: the right people would be paid off, threats would be made and carried out, and such a matter would be promptly resolved. Moreover, a foreign woman wasn't so prized a trophy, considering all the impoverished White Russian princesses to be had for much less trouble. Also, the most surreal chapters when, towards the end, Christopher is climbing through the war-devastated ghettos to reach his family's old home, where he thinks his parents are being held, is geographically impossible. The fighting described took part in the slums of the northern Zhabei district, far removed from the posh foreign mansions in which his family might have lived. The foreign areas never saw serious fighting.
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