IF there is such a thing as a literary darling, Ishiguro must be it. Three-times Booker short-listed and once a winner for his wartime tale of duty versus romance, The Remains of the Day (1989), he has a graceful, limpid prose style and a subtle shrewdness. Ishiguro is also a writer not so much caught between two cultures as nimbly side-stepping them and this is central to his fiction with its themes of war and displacement. When We Were Orphans, however, is a daft, pretentious performance featuring a central character so wooden as to have splinters. Christopher Banks is an English detective who enjoys a celebrity beyond belief - particularly as he appears to have no personality. Set in 1930s London, the stiff, mannered tone of the narrative never relaxes while the dialogue borders on parody. Banks is utterly unsympathetic. He does not describe himself as an orphan, referring instead to "my lack of parents". His stilted characterisation is consistent - Banks tells his story at a distance from everything, including himself. Banks, the most English of Englishmen, in fact grew up in Shanghai's International Settlement and arrived "home" after the double disappearance of his parents to an England he had never visited. A strange young social climber woman enters his circle. More stalemate. Added to this is the narrator's decision to unravel the mystery of his parents. As a study of emotional repression and cultural confusion as well as the process by which a life is shaped, this reflective, laboured Booker runner-up has traces of merit. Yet as an offbeat stroll on the weird side, it is even less convincing than Ishiguro's irritating if potential cult odyssey The Unconsoled (1995). Eileen Battersby