etc.

I feel about Ishiguro’s prose the way I feel about haute cuisine — I can appreciate the delicate nuances of each of the ingredients, and I recognise that it takes pure genius to pull it off, but, you see, I don’t actually like venison. This book is about Christopher Banks who starts out life as a typical expat-brat in colonial Shanghai, but when he is ten years old his parents mysteriously disappear and he is sent back to England to live with his aunt. Christopher ends up pursuing a childhood fantasy of becoming a detective, mostly just so that he can one day return to Shanghai to pick up the case of his missing parents, which he eventually does. Ishiguro’s prose is unquestionably sumptuous and he writes the untrustworthy narrator so convincingly that Christopher makes judgments and leaps of faith based on such questionable information that I almost caught myself thinking “plot gap” when really it’s all part of Ishiguro’s master plan. If that plan was to create an exhaustive experiment in literary technique, then it’s successful. But if the plan was to create an enjoyable novel, it’s not.