Kazuo Ishiguro brings us a novel more bold than his breakthrough Remains of the Day

By Kazuo Ishiguro
Published by Knopf, September, 2000

Christopher Banks, fledgling detective and the narrating main character in this novel, greets us first as a typical young Englishman on the rise and on the make in 1920s London. In the context of the professional and social career he is launching, a link to China seems jarringly exotic. In fact, it stems from childhood trauma in Shanghai.

Born there in the British expatriate milieu before World War I--his father worked for a business steeped in the opium trade--Christopher recalls a happy time playing detective and other games with a Japanese pal. But at age nine, his life turned upside down when first his father and then his mother disappeared. Packed off to an aunt in England, the apparently orphaned boy continues his youth in comfortably English fashion, Cambridge and all. Yet, as his early ambitions to be Sherlock Holmes evolve into a successful investigative career, the mystery of his parents' fate torments him as the ultimate case to be solved. His return to Shanghai in the late 1930s, with the Japanese already at war in China, provides answers of sorts.

Armed with a more intriguing plot than Ishiguro's acclaimed but passive "Remains of the Day," this book leads the reader through anticipation, if not exactly high suspense. The narrative carries a filmy, dreamlike quality at times-like London fog-evoking a Christopher with dreamlike memories and an almost passionless move through life. Although even the stark revelations of what happened to his parents do not definitively pierce this haze, Banks winds up a character surprisingly worthy of the reader's concern and sympathy.

Linda Frank

_Contact the reviewer on: editor@cityweekend.com.cn _