Klara and the Sun

Never have I seen so many reviews, advertisements and other articles about a book by Kazuo Ishiguro. This is what winning the Nobel Prize does to your exposure rate, apparently. This was, in my opinion, a very deserved Nobel Prize. I've been reading his novels since Never Let Me Go was part of my English Lit studies and have both loved and feared them in equal measure. In his universe, you can never be sure that the narrator is actually telling you the truth, or that they are hiding some dark secret that will come to whack you in the face on the last couple of pages, leaving you devastated and wondering how you never saw this coming. Catharsis with a sharp edge. Which makes me realise I've never actually reread one of his novels before; I wonder whether they are still as beautiful when you already know what is real and what isn't.

Anyway, his newest novel, Klara and the Sun, is told by an Artificial Friend called Klara. She is a robot companion, designed to accompany 'lifted' children who may otherwise be lonely. Since her point of view is very limited, we never really find out where all this is taking place, apart from that it must be some time in the future in some generic American city.

Now the plot, as always with Ishiguro's novels, isn't the main deal here. Klara spends some time in the store, is then bought to accompany Josie and moves to the house she shares with her mother in the countryside. Josie is friends with an unlifted neighbouring boy, falls ill, recovers, makes her drawings and otherwise has a pretty uneventful life, apart from a trip to the city that casts a different aspect on the whole story. But it is not what happens that matters.

What matters, is that we're seeing all this through the eyes of Klara. Klara is a very smart and observant robot, as is mentioned time and again, and she sounds pretty human. But she is also an Ishiguronian narrator. So we can never fully be sure that she is telling the truth. Also, when Klara tells us she 'feels fear' or 'feels relief flowing through her'; is she actually feeling something? Can robots feel? She does her utmost to care for Josie and tries to save her on several occasions, but is this done out of love, or because she is programmed to take care of the child she has been assigned to, no matter what?

What is completely absent from Klara's voice, apart from any kind of humour, is judgement. She describes what she sees, experiences, interprets, but there is no judgement. Several of the humans she encounters are distrustful or even angry at her presence, but their emotions do not really have an impact on her. She can feel fear for her wellbeing, but is otherwise completely naive, without anger or other negative emotions towards people who threaten to harm her. This is of course logical; when programming a robot you'd make sure all those emotions never even enter their heads, but it casts a different light on all the positive emotions she tells us about. How genuine are they?

Apart from an exploration on how robots 'think', how humans behave towards them, and what this means for relationships of all kinds, there are at the edges of the novel signs of the society Klara finds herself in. Just as her own vision sometimes becomes fragmented into boxes, so the world seems to have separated into different social groups. Klara describes people dressed as 'high-raking' or 'middle-ranking', of course without giving any judgement on this herself. But the people around her are constantly moving in opposition to others; children are 'lifted' or not, people may become unemployed and move themselves outside of main society to 'communities', which also seem to be warring between each other. In the safe bubble of Klara's existence we never get to see the full picture, but the dystopian atmosphere is tangible throughout. It makes you wonder; is this what we're heading towards?

 

Klara and the Sun has been compared to McEwan's Machines Like Me because of the similar relationships-with-robots theme, but in my opinion, any comparison is moot. Ishiguro's novel is just so much better in setting the scene, in showing without telling, in creating the tension, the doubt and big questions that come with any good novel. Klara, because she has no stakes other than caring for Josie, gives us the ideal eyes to see without immediately judging and to put our own assumptions into perspective. To me, this novel is another great addition to Ishiguro's deserved Nobel Prize winning oeuvre. And with that said, it may be time to start rereading some of his older work...