Oblique observations

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This article was published 13/03/2021 (1700 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a master of creating a vibrant portrait out of half-glimpsed elements and fragmentary information.

The Nobel Prize winner’s wheelhouse is narrators who are hamstrung by their natures and/or prevented by circumstance from seeing the full picture (see The Remains of the Day’s Stevens, a butler whose dedication to dignity and service blind him to the affection of the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and the fascist tendencies of his master, Lord Darlington.)

In the British author’s latest novel, he’s created another of these narrators who should be unreliable, but whose story is paradoxically rich and full of truth.

Klara and the Sun is a nominally science-fiction work, narrated by an AF (artificial friend) named Klara. AFs were created to be companions for lonely children, though why these particular children would be particularly lonely is not immediately spelled out. (The novel began life as a children’s book, and in its questions about love and altruism and what makes us “real,” there are echoes of The Velveteen Rabbit.)

Josie is one such child; when she spots Klara though the shop window, she is immediately smitten. Despite what seems like Josie’s mother’s objections, Klara is purchased and goes to live with them in a house in the country.

Klara, though a remarkably sensitive and observant AF, is operating in the dark, without context, able to see only slices and corners of any situation. Her early experience of the world was limited to the view from the window of the store where she resided; her understanding of human nature is based on her limited interactions with those around her.

Because we’re relying on Klara’s perspective, the reader, too, is only slowly apprised of the possibly nefarious reasons for her purchase and the conditions of the world she inhabits. But as an unjudging witness, Klara is the receptacle of many people’s confessions and secrets: Josie, her mother and father, her childhood friend Rick, even the housekeeper.

It gradually becomes clear that we’re in similar territory to Ishiguro’s 2005 science-fiction work Never Let Me Go. That Booker Prize-shortlisted novel (made into a 2010 film starring Carey Mulligan and Keira Knightley) inhabits an alternate Earth where clones are raised in order to become organ donors; they will eventually “complete” (ie: die) after their final donation.

The near future of Klara and the Sun has the same dystopian overtones with the same redeeming focus on love, familial and romantic, and Ishiguro’s fascination with whether technology precludes humanity. Never Let Me Go’s clones create art as part of a study to see if these copies have souls; Klara is a sentient robot who makes decisions that indicate she has a heart that operates in a realm beyond zeros and ones, and whose reliance on solar power results in an almost religious relationship with the sun.

Through Klara’s oblique observations, we learn that children who show promise are “lifted,” a process that seems to involve genetic manipulation.

“Lifting” has unpredictable side effects that may lead to the child’s demise; however, parents who choose otherwise are ostracized, seen as dooming their children to a second-rate life as the kind of worker who will eventually be replaced by an AI drone.

It does take a while for the story to gain momentum, and what the Guardian has called Ishiguro’s “ostentatiously austere” style can be slightly alienating. Even though the plain but formal language used by Klara aptly reflects her likely limited vocabulary as an AI, a reader may balk at the 10th use of the word “passerby.”

But Ishiguro’s ability to convey emotion via language that has relatively flat affect is unparalleled. Readers may find themselves unexpectedly tearing up over something as prosaic as a sunset viewed through Klara’s lens or a woman sitting alone in a diner; the book’s strange, kaleidoscopic mood is hard to shake.

Jill Wilson is a Free Press copy editor.