Kazuo Ishiguro: Klara and the Sun
by Jennifer Bryce
This book has been longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. The only other book of this highly-regarded author that I’ve read is Remains of the Day. I may be at a disadvantage having not read his other work that ventures into science fiction, particularly Never Let Me Go, indeed in his reivew in The Guardian, Alex Preston suggests that Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant and Klara and the Sun should be read as a trilogy https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/01/klara-and-the-sun-by-kazuo-ishiguro-review-another-masterpiece.
Klara is an android. Specifically she is an AF: an Artificial Friend – in this society, which feels very much like America in, say, thirty years’ time, the well-to-do young people have AFs who are combination sibling, plaything, and nursemaid. The book is written from the viewpoint of Klara, an AF who starts off in a shop on display with other AFs, but is ultimately chosen by Josie, a fragile adolescent.
Klara is powered by the sun, which for her seems to take on a kind of religious significance. She is a mixture of intelligence (she can read, teach/ impart science) and what was for me unbelievable naivety, believing that the sun lives in a neighbour’s barn and that there is only one polluting machine in the world.
Josie and her mother (always referred to by Klara as ‘the mother’, Klara doesn’t seem to be able to use pronouns) take Klara home to what seems to be a well-to-do perhaps American household. The mother is a professional, who drives off to work each day, divorced from Josie’s father. There is a housekeeper, Melania Housekeeper (a coincidence that this is the name of the former US First Lady?). As I read, in my mind everything was a bit artificial. And why don’t they have a robot to do the housework? The house is in a rural setting – in my mind it was rather like a toy farmhouse and although the other characters were ‘real’ people, I pictured them as rather robotic.
Josie’s illness may have been caused by her being ‘lifted’ – something that seemed to happen to children of a certain class (maybe surgery – it’s unclear) that increases their intelligence. Josie’s friend Rick hasn’t been through this process – he seems quite bright without it (he designs drones), but the reason is most likely that his family is not well-to-do. We later learn that Josie’s sister died, possibly connected to the ‘lifting’ procedure. The main drama is that Josie might die like her sister.
Klara has learned to be devoted and believes that it is her duty to ‘save’ Josie. Klara learns that she is, in fact, being groomed by Josie’s parents (with the help of a scientist, Capaldi) to take on Josie’s characteristics to replace her in the event of her death. Perhaps fortunately, Josie does not die. Is she saved by Klara’s exhortations to the sun?
As Josie gets older, Klara is needed less and is consigned to a utility cupboard. When Josie goes off to college she glibly says, ‘You’ve been just great, Klara’. That’s it. And Klara ends her days in a rubbish dump, where she is visited by her original store manager and she is in the company of other abandoned AFs – that seems to be what happens. This is acclaimed as a book about love. For me it was more a pessimistic comment on present-day society.
littlesmackerel 
Thanks, Jennifer. It will be interesting to see how this one goes.
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Yes, Margaret — as is probably apparent, I didn’t think it ‘great’. But this runs against substantial reviews in NYT and The Guardian.
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Thanks Jenny – interesting, but I’m not sure I’ll read it.
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Helen, as I said to Margaret, most people think it’s a great book. It just didn’t do a lot for me!
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Jenny, as usual you’re very kind to this book. Ishiguro is good on people as always, less good on the sf content. Here’s what I wrote about this book:
Yes it’s another (unacknowledged) sf novel by an author from outside the field. This is the same sentence I started with, reviewing John Lanchester’s The Wall in 2019 and Sophie Ward’s Love and Other Thought Experiments last year, and the problems this causes are again here in large measure.
The problems caused not so much by the unacknowlegement (done, I presume, for good commercial reasons) but more by the failure to properly build the imagined future worlds in which the authors choose to tell their stories. And these believable worlds are, I would argue, what we sf readers are looking for in order to engage our willing suspension of disbelief. So here, the android POV is barely credible, the android Klara itself is less physically able than some of our present dancing robots, but the consciousness aspects are vastly in advance of what we are capable of. Perhaps it’s the magic juice with a gobbledegook scientific name that’s extracted from Klara at one point that like a fairy tale spell gives the gift of consciousness to these artificial friends. And the society around Klara and the family is barely in advance of what we see around us every day – indeed, in some respects well behind: college, cars, phones, coffee, teenagers, jobs, housemaids, are just like now – or a few years ago. Though there is nothing in the novel to suggest this, it all would have worked better if this world was an alternative reality, one a bit behind where we are now but with that magic gift of bestowing consciousness on some of our artefacts the Jonbar point at which our realities diverged. Or is it all just a failure of the author’s imagination?
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Thanks Tony — helpful to have the SF perspective — I don’t regard myself as an SF reader but I did find the world rather implausible and this made it difficult to engage with the novel.
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