Klara and the Sun: Another Brilliant Ishiguro Novel

KLARA AND THE SUN (2021)

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Random House/Penguin, 307 pages

★★★★★

 

 

 

There are reasons why Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro has won most of the major awards a novelist can, including the Whitbread, the Arthur C. Clarke, the Man Booker, and a Nobel. He manages to be an amazing stylist without being pretentious, and he never repeats himself thematically. Consider just a few of his subjects: the Sino-Japanese War (When We Were Orphans), the British aristocracy (Remains of the Day), and a dystopian in which children are raised to become organ donors (Never Let Me Go).

 

In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro turns to what we construe to be the very near future. AI (Artificial Intelligence) has reached advanced levels, and genetic engineering has become commonplace. The titular character is an AF (Artificial Friend), which are all the rage as companions for children bred for superior intellect. Klara has not yet found a home because she’s an older model. There’s something about her, though, that attracts the eye of young Josie, who doesn’t have many friends other than Rick, who has never been “lifted” and comes from a difficult family situation. In addition, Josie’s sister, Sal, is deceased. Chrissie, Josie’s ambitious mother, wants her daughter to get one of the sleek new B3 models, but Josie insists on buying Klara.

 

For an android like Klara, the Sun is godlike, as it replenishes her batteries. She’s a bundle of wires and programming capable of high-level thinking, but Klara is essentially a child, as she knows little of the world except what she observed through the store display window. You will be charmed by Klara, how she learns, what she “feels,” and her skewed look at the world–phones are “oblongs,” for example, and she misreads illogical social situations. Among Klara’s impressions is that the “Cootings Machine”–the name on a piece of construction equipment–is evil and environmentally destructive.

 

Klara is an excellent AF to Josie, who is often ill, perhaps as Chrissie fears, mortally so. We also learn that Chrissie’s ex-husband, Paul, has concerns about how his daughters have been raised. He comes off as a cross between a hippie, a survivalist, and a Luddite, but maybe he’s not a naïf. He is particularly concerned when Chrissie begins taking Josie to a painter named Calpaldi, who also did Sal’s portrait before she died. Is more than painting taking place inside his studio?

 

Klara and the Sun is a fascinating exploration of “humanity.” The novel reminded me of a Star Trek Next Generation episode titled “The Measure of a Man” in which scientist Bruce Maddox wishes to disassemble Data to see if he can be replicated. After all, Data is just a “machine.” Is Klara just a “’bot?” How do we measure humanity? Klara learns, is self-aware, and her programmed emotions are often superior to those fired by biological receptors and neurons. What about GMOs like Josie? Does live birth make her more human than a manufactured sentient being? Once DNA is altered, is a biological child still fully human? Who cares more for Josie: her status-obsessed mother, or a robot who implores the Sun to heal Josie and engages in an unusual escapade she thinks will help? When Calpaldi opines that, “there’s nothing so unique” about humans that “our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, and transfer,” is he offering a dose of harsh truth, or setting the stage for the end of the Anthropocene?

 

What a book! Even if you think you don’t like science fiction, Ishiguro will take you on an intellectual journey that raises many questions and trusts readers to answer them. Many years ago, novelist Philip K. Dick queried whether androids had souls in the ways humans conceptualized them. If consciousness is a measure, Ishiguro suggests that placing robots in the service of a biological species might be a form of enslavement. Is it okay to discard/dismantle a robot whose neural networks continue to function? In our time, much has been about climate change, plague, and war. Maybe this is our version of Data’s dilemma and Calpaldi’s assertion.

 

As only the most confident writers can do, Ishiguro prefers open-ended possibilities to dogmatism. If, however, we believe what AI boosters say, the conundrums Ishiguro posits are ones that will soon jump from the pages of science fiction and into the realms of ethics and politics– two “human” pursuits that historically have not been good friends, AF or biological.

 

Rob Weir