Ever since "A Pale View of Hills" (1982), Kazuo Ishiguro has been playing games with his readers' minds. Some people find this infuriating, some fascinating, as the mixed reception accorded his novels -- even the Booker Prize-winning "The Remains of the Day" (1989) -- attests. But there is no doubting the skill with which he manipulates reality. Perhaps no writer in English has so completely mastered the art of the unreliable narrator since Vladimir Nabokov let Humbert Humbert loose in the pages of "Lolita."
On the face of it, "When We Were Orphans" does not plunge the reader into as phantasmagoric a world as Ishiguro's last novel, "The Unconsoled," in which it was reliably known that the hero had suffered a lapse, actually a complete collapse, of memory and was possibly schizophrenic. "When We Were Orphans" (ah, but who are "we"?) has as a narrator a man whose powers of recall are not just intact, but seemingly total, and well under control. Unlike the emotional, piano-playing Ryder of "The Unconsoled," Christopher Banks is that coolest and most rational of customers, a detective (not a modern, TV-style detective, some rumpled employee of the local police force, or even a hard-boiled private eye a la Philip Marlowe, but an educated English gentleman-detective in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes.) At last, you might think, Ishiguro has given us a narrator whose take on the world is likely to be dependable.
You would be wrong. In terms of its perceptions, this novel is more than a pale view of hills; it is a fog-bound view of a black hole.