In many ways, When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro's masterful new novel, is the sum of its parts. It is less a story than an examination of themes of memory and nostalgia, loss and longing, which figure more as characters than the orphaned souls who drift unhappily through the narrative. Is the past what we think it is, is memory history or myth, and can one remember with the mind when the heart is unable to cooperate?

Few writers have made a career of exploring the sublimely sublimated like Ishiguro, best known for 1989's The Remains of the Day, later made into a Merchant-Ivory film of the same name starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Ishiguro's other books include Pale View of the Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and The Unconsoled (1995), all of which feature similar currents of the tragic outcome of emotions unexpressed. If pain makes for good literature, then pain unexpressed--stifled under a thick pillow of propriety and elaborately worded justifications--makes for great. Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki in 1958, emigrated to England with his parents at age five, and his elegantly nuanced portrayals of England's "tragedy of manners" between the World Wars have made him one of the leading figures of contemporary British literature.

When We Were Orphans is billed as a mystery, but it doesn't unravel as a whodunit, and there are no twists, turns, clues or surprises to provide the reader with the sense of urgency and suspense requisite to the genre. While Ishiguro draws in style and tone from writers like Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie of England's Golden Age of detective fiction, the story and its format are unique.

The tale unfolds in irregular diary entrees between 1930 and 1958 by protagonist and narrator Christopher Banks. The protagonist's account, following only the loosest chronological order, mixes flashbacks to his youth with the current events that forces them, however reluctantly. His voice is indulgent, self-important, fussily meticulous, and unconsciously very unhappy.

Christopher, or "Puffin" as he was known, was born in turn-of-the-century Shanghai to well-to-do British parents in the employ of a company named Morganbrook and Byatt, an obvious stand-in for the Jardine Matheson Co.. Puffin's mother, apparently a famed beauty in the International Settlement, was an ardent campaigner against the opium trade, which proved problematic as his father's employer, like most trading houses of the era, established itself in China and gleaned most of its profits from the import of opium. The bulk of his memories, however, center around his games with Akira, a Japanese boy his own age who lived next door.

When he was nine, Christopher's parents disappeared under circumstances never fully explained, and he was shipped back to his "home" in England where he had never been. The sense of an alternate life, that the boy would have lived had his parents not vanished, reflects Ishiguro's own sense of a parallel universe that split off when he left Japan as a child. Christopher was sent off to boarding school and then on to college, and while struggling to become part of proper society, he always remained ill at ease, an outsider, a loner. He fulfilled his childhood ambition to become an investigator, but remained haunted by the fact that he was never able to solve his own mystery. In 1937, after fourteen years of guilt and denial, he finally travels to Shanghai.

Christopher's return to Shanghai comes at page 163, almost exactly half way through the book. The somewhat plodding development up to this point perhaps represents the slow, rambling way that memory works, and is also indicative of the narrator's Hamlet-like reluctance to act. Lovers of fine prose for its own sake will delight in Ishiguro's sublimely subtle sophistication in portraying Christopher's painfully awkward odyssey into high society as his renown as a sleuth grows and his equally painfully attempt to ignore the looming, dark portal of the past. Readers eager for the story, however, will probably have given up early on.

The real action starts after the arrival in Shanghai, as Christopher begins to examine the accuracy of his memories with his ivory-handled magnifying glass. It becomes apparent, however, that his perception of the present is perhaps as blurred as his recollection of the past. His uncommitted and rather incompetent investigation into his parents' fate makes us wonder whether he is indeed the great investigator that he claims to be. Doubt is further thrown into the reliability of Christopher's narrative when he discovers a man he believes to be his friend Akira in the midst of a war zone and forces him to help find the house Christopher believes his parents are being held. It seems dubious that Akira, a young man from a family obviously of some means and position, would be a foot soldier on the front lines. Later, when it appears Akira has met an unfortunate end, the Japanese Colonel who apprehended them asks Christopher if he knew the soldier. "I thought I had. I thought he was a friend of mine from my childhood. But now, I'm not so certain. I'm beginning to see now, many things aren't as I supposed."

When Christopher finally discovers the truth, his unwillingness to face it, let alone act on it, is as maddening and as tragic as his passivity and avoidance throughout the previous demise. His hesitance causes the demise in various ways of everyone he has ever, in his deeply reticent heart, loved: Akira, his mother, and of Sarah, his love interest. The book's hero is also its villain. Christopher's inability to connect with Sarah, whose determination and decision represent everything he lacks, is why his mission ultimately fails. Their tragedy is explained in the final pages:

But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm. (335-6)

Nonetheless, the book is among the most interesting recent literary portrayals of Old Shanghai. The author's grandfather worked in Shanghai, and his father, like Akira, was born and grew up in the city. Ishiguro offers various interesting descriptions of Shanghai at that time, and some of these insights also hold true today. For example, in one of the book's few moments of levity, he describes the irritating tendency of Shanghai residents, foreign and Chinese alike, to stand squarely and deliberately where they will entirely block one's line of vision. However, there is a "second, complimentary Shanghai practice to make life a little easier: it appears to be quite permissible here to employ surprisingly rough shoves to get people out of one's way." Indeed. But there are other, more serious indictments.

I felt, not for the first time since arriving in Shanghai, a wave of revulsion towards them. It was not so simply the fact of their having failed so dismally over the years to rise to the challenge of the case, of their having allowed matters to slip to the present appalling level with all its huge ramifications. What has quietly shocked me, from the moment of my arrival, is the refusal of everyone here to acknowledge their drastic culpability. During this fortnight I have been here, throughout all my dealings with these citizens, high or low, I have not witnessed--not once--anything that could pass for honest shame. Here, in other words, at the heart of the maelstrom threatening to suck in the whole of the civilised world, is a pathetic conspiracy of denial; a denial of responsibility which has turned in on itself and gone sour, manifesting in the sort of pompous defensiveness I have encountered so often. (172-3)

When We Were Orphans proves an enjoyable and worthwhile read, even if its pleasures are had more from the journey than from the destination. Ishiguro's evocative manipulations of English are as elegant as they are archaic, and these portrayals of self-suppression are a in a way a grand celebration of expression. It probably does not entirely deserve the universal critical acclaim it enjoys, but then again it does not fall short. We can hope that, like J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun--a not terribly different story of a boy from a very similar background--When We Were Orphans will provide an excuse to again portray Shanghai in all her glory on the silver screen.