Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
It’s fun being the human inside a robot’s mind.
Klara is a highly-sophisticated android: an Artificial Friend chosen by teenage Josie from a shop window to offset loneliness.
“One never knows how to greet a guest like you. After all, are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?”
As an AF, Klara is unique. The shop manager states this from the get-go, and we see the truth of it the more Klara observes and reflects. We’re froced to ask: what makes us unique: nature or nurture? Are we unique by design or by experience? Could uniqueness be replicated? Could you love a replica? Could you find the anser to the human soul inside a machine?
Klara and the Sun is set in a near dystopian future - a future revealed obliquely through shadows and asides. Understanding the exact nature of this new society is one of the novel’s several slow-burning threads of tension. Another is the revealing of Josie’s mother’s plans for Klara.
“We’re both of us sentimental. We can’t help it. Our generation still carry the old feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. ”
Though Klara is a super-brain, her understanding of what she calls the Sun is limited. I thought this fascinating. For Klara, the Sun is God. Her petitions mimic our own. But is the Sun listening, or even there at all?
Though she is robust enough to withstand physical mistreatment, Klara is not an all-terrain robot. She struggles outside. The children in the novel rarely go outdoors, and several characters remark on the pollution and the looming cranes on the horizon. It’s a bleak view, this idea of only darkness lying ahead. Klara herself is out-of-date within the opening pages, and her replacements jeer at the older AF models. There’s no mercy in aging.
The triumph though is the empathy we feel for Ishiguro’s narrator. We care for Klara far more than the humans. She alone represents decency, courage, and selflessness… But what does this say for mankind, society, and the future?
WHAT TO READ NEXT
If you liked Klara and the Sun, try Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans or Barry Unsworth’s study of hero-worship and delusion - Losing Nelson.
