Who Is Christopher Banks In When We Were Orphans?

Ishiguro has created a memorable character in detective Christopher Banks. On the surface he is your typical detective – intelligent, methodical and admired by his peers. However, underlying Christopher’s exterior is a man struggling to come to terms with his past. The reader can see that Christopher’s long career as a detective has been a way of avoiding reality, in the hope that he might one day solve the one mystery that has always plagued him. The novel switches between the glamour of pre-war Shanghai and the devastation of the war years. This is mirrored in the downfall of Christopher’s own illusions about his past. His childhood friends are brought back to life, including his best friend Akira. Through these characters we see more of Christopher’s pain and his unresolved grief from the past. In the end it is left to the reader to decide whether Christopher’s greatest tragedy was the loss of his parents as a child or the way their loss affected the rest of his life and stopped him from living in the present.

Unreliable narration from a master. Ishiguro’s novel about a man who tries to get to the bottom of his parents’ disappearance from Shanghai after they vanished when he was a child is also a powerful novel about the stories we tell to get by. The main character Christopher Banks is an obsessive man who confuses his professional ‘hunches’ with his personal delusions, and reading him is an painfully raw experience. A particularly devastating moment comes when Christopher finally realizes that Shanghai has moved on without him.

The protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans is Christopher Banks, a world-renowned detective who solves mysterious crimes, but cannot solve the greatest mystery of his life: the disappearance of his parents when he was a child. Born in early 20th-century Shanghai to British parents, Christopher’s memories of his childhood in Shanghai are interrupted by his parents’ mysterious disappearance. Determined to find the truth about their disappearance, he travels back to Shanghai as an adult to search for the truth. Throughout his life as a famous detective in London, Christopher’s unresolved trauma from his childhood shapes his perception of reality. His work as a detective is a metaphor for his own search for the truth of his parents’ disappearance.

Ishiguro skillfully raises a question as to how much of Christopher Banks’ narrative of his past is true and how much of it is mere memory. Revisiting Shanghai decades after he had left as an adult, Christopher’s aim is to uncover the truth about his parents’ disappearance. However, instead he delves into a psychological labyrinth of his own making. His attempt to ‘rescue’ his parents is pitiful and childish. The way he tackles the issue of their disappearance in the face of adversity, such as the approaching of war, is heartbreaking yet it is also viscerally close to gnawing remorse of others. It is a magnificent portrayal of how a trauma of childhood can influence an adult and how an erroneous narrative of the past which others may agree to blindly follow can fail to bring closure.

I can really relate to the main character, Christopher Banks, in this novel “When We Were Orphans” by author Kazuo Ishiguro. At the beginning of the story, I thought he was a rather famous detective in search of a solution to a current mystery. But in reality, he is a young boy who was abandoned by his parents, and he continues to search for them even into old age. Christopher’s search for answers to life in trying to solve current cases in hopes that one of them will lead to the solution to finding his mother and father. Sadly, he is stuck in a time warp and is searching for ghosts as he grows older. This novel is about memory and how we perceive the past through our own personal reminisces. In the end, we are left wondering whether Christopher really remembers his parents or if he has conjured up a perfect vision of them to mask his own grief and pain. One scene in the book that was particularly powerful to me was when an elderly Christopher returns to Shanghai and starts to dig through rubble as if it were 1910 again.