Review: Klara and the Sun
I have been radio silent for a while, due to my teaching commitments, but I should be producing content again pretty soon. I recently shared a year end “book review” episode for my Church History podcast, in which I talk briefly about Ishiguro’s novel, but here I present to you a longer consideration of it.
I am not the kind of person that looks for Nobel Prize winners to read (most of them are perfectly forgettable), but in the past few years I have read several novels by non American authors, and found them to be much more to my literary tastes than the fiction, literary or otherwise, produced in the United States. (I will probably post about this more in the near future.) This past year I managed to try one who is also a Nobel Prize winner as well, with interesting results.
Klara and the Sun is the latest novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for his novel Remains of the Day. I am not sure how I first heard of it but I am glad I read it. What follows below the jump is a detailed review, so there are spoilers ahead if you haven’t read the novel.
Klara and the Sun is the tale of an android named Klara, who is selected to be the companion of a young girl named Josie, who suffers from a mysterious illness. The action of the story takes place in what feels like a near future, in which human beings are genetically altered and those who do not measure up intellectually are put on a different track career wise, as is the case with Josie’s friend (or boyfriend—it is ambiguous) Rick.
It begins in the department store where Klara is in the front window, looking at passersby. Klara, who narrates the story, is fascinated by the world outside but focused on attracting a buyer. We find out early on that Klara is a slighly older model of robot, and therefore there is some doubt in Klara’s mind as to whether someone will want to purchase her, as some of Klara’s fellow robots’ have had the misfortuned to experience. (This doubt about whether or not one is “up-to-date” and therefore worthy of recognition has a parallel in the human world as well). Eventually, however, a young child appears at the window, and takes an instant liking to Klara. This is Josie, who pesters her skeptical Mother (she is described by Klara as “the Mother” for most of the novel) to come back and purchase Klara, which she eventually does.
Klara becomes increasingly aware of tension in the household between the Mother and Josie over her health, which Klara soons learns is not good. Over time, Klara also learns of tension between Josie and her neighbor, Rick, which Klara intuits early on might have something to do with her illness. Between the two is also a tension having to do with status, though Ishiguro doesn’t spell this out until later in the novel. Early on, the Mother holds a party for Josie to which she invites Rick, who when he arrives is clearly uncomfortable in that setting, something Klara notices. At the party, a group of Josie’s girl friends disperse after making comments about him (to which Klara, and therefore the reader, are not privy). The cause of Rick’s embarassment is later revealed as the lack of genetic enhancemements that these other children have.
At first, the Mother is suspicious of Klara, but over time gains her trust. Klara learns from her that Josie was not her only child and that she died a few years before Josie. As the story moves on, we find that Rick, like Josie, lives with his mother but without his father. Unlike Josie, he is embarassed by his mother, who comes off as somewhat earthy and uncouth. (Josie’s father enters the novel later on, however.) But the biggest, and by far most interesting character reveal in the story is Klara’s.
For Klara, the Sun is a source of energy, and from the beginning of the book Klara looks for its light whenever it appears. Moreover, Klara finds a barn near Josie’s home where Klara watches the sun set. Later, when Josie’s illness grows severe, Klara goes out to the barn, and addressing the sun, asks her to heal Josie—prays to the Sun, in effect. This is a fascinating twist, and probably the best part of the novel for me. Ishiguro is, if memory serves, a Christian of some sort, and the question of whether machines can achieve some sort of consciousness and become “human” looks quite different if you see worship as something quintessentially human. (Of course, the Psalms talk of praising God but Klara praying to the sun is a bit more literal in its presentation. Still, it is a fascinating idea.)
Later on, Klara finds out that the Mother had intended Klara to be a replacement for Josie, to take on her body and memories, on the assumption that Josie would not survive until adulthood. Klara, when informed of this by the scientist who has proposed this with the Mother, expresses skepticism that Josie could be replicated in such a way.
In the end, Josie recovers from her illness, and both her and Rick go their separate ways, while Klara is essentially retired, presumably to run out of energy—and die?
That is the burden of the novel in philosophical terms, of course. Ishiguro is good at letting the action of the story evoke the questions that naturally come to mind: can machines become conscious? Are human beings really unique or we essentially organic robots? The threat of genetic engineering is a very real one, though in Ishiguro’s hands it feels more like a vaguely threatening possibility, even when the whole prospect of “cloning” Josie is introduced. Ishiguro doesn’t say anything earth shattering to say about these questions but neither does he get on a soapbox (except perhaps when Klara complains about the smog produced by factories, clearly intending a message about the environment). The whole debate about AI and consciousness is misplaced, since imagining that machines can become human presupposes the erroneous idea that human beings are really just machines in the first place, the mind merely a very complex organic computer. In reality they are very differen things, but then that is difficult to convey in a story, though I think Ishiguro wants to affirm our basic humanity, by making Klara so very human-like.
At least that was the sense the book left me with. Most of the characters were not that compelling to me, other than Klara, but then the real star of the novel is Ishiguro’s writing, which is amazing. I have never read writing so clear, limpid and supple as his. I admit the novel was not exactly a page turner, and so I read it on and off for a few weeks. But I found that whenever I picked up the story again, I knew exactly where I left off, something I have never experienced before as a readers. In any case, I heartily recommend Klara and the Sun to anyone looking for literary fiction with a bit more gravitas to it, and look forward to reading more of Ishiguro’s work in the future.