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The Unconsosoled By JAMES WOOD
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
(Knopf, 337 pp., $25)
THERE ARE NOVELISTS whose books are always the same, as similar as postage stamps. Anita Brookner is one such, and Kazuo Ishiguro might have been one had he not published a strange novel six years ago called The Unconsoled. He had proved himself, in three previous books, the reliable creator of a gently unreliable first-person narrator, the best-known of whom is Stevens, the English butler in The Remains of the Day. In these books, Ishiguro controlled a kind of emotional seepage. The narratorcalm, flat, hiding behind the foil of a pedantic English style-unwittingly reveals, here and there, his failures, and reveals that all is not calm or flat. Emotion is pressurized: the more it is inhibited, the more it longs to be released; and it is the writer's task to know when to control its escape.
The danger of using an unreliable narrator is that the narrator is always reliably unreliable, and thus a little unreal, a fake, since his unreliability is manipulated by the writer. Indeed, without the writer's reliability we would not be able to read the narrator's unreliability. Once Ishiguro had begun replicating this narrator in a series of novels, his reliability was in danger of overwhelming his narrator's unreliability. Indeed, he admitted to an English newspaper that he had become almost too expert at this kind of narration, that he yearned for something more ragged. The result was The Unconsoled, essentially a five-hundred-page dream-narrative.
It was bold of Ishiguro to abjure facility and to exchange it for difficulty. Kafka spoke of the effect of his work as "seasickness on dry land"; but Ishiguro's novel produced, in many readers, seasickness at sea. In fact, he had not entirely renounced the unreliable narrator. As in the earlier books, a man tells a story that he appears to control, but which he does not in fact control, in an elaborately pressed and buttoned English: "I stepped out into the corridor and made my way to the elevator feeling not a little annoyed"; "After a while I happened to glance down at the lake and was surprised to find I was now looking at it from a considerably different...