Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily Times, June 5th 2021

The nature of consciousness is a contentious issue in our household. My husband is confident that one day we will be able to so accurately map the firing of individual neurons in a person’s brain that we can know precisely how they subjectively experience the world. I prefer to believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon transcending the merely physical, my essential self forever ineffable and undefinable.

This question, what it is to be, lies at the heart of Klara and the Sun. Klara is an AF, an artificial friend designed to bond with an individual child and serve them in whatever capacity they desire: companion, confidante, servant, or toy. Although Klara wants above all else to be chosen by one of the children who gaze longingly into the shop where she lives, her empathy and perceptiveness set her apart from her fellow AFs and, unlike them, she is as interested in what lies beyond the confines of the window display as in speculating about her future owner.

When she is finally bought for a young girl called Josie, her delight at experiencing this new world is tempered by concern at her young charge’s frailty. Weakened by an aberrant reaction to an intelligence-enhancing treatment (a form of gene therapy that, it is implied, has already killed her older sister), Josie soon falls gravely ill and a desperate Klara bargains for the girl’s life with the Sun, who, as solar-powered being, she considers unto God. Meanwhile, Josie’s mother has a plan of her own to keep her daughter with her beyond death. Both courses of action require Klara to sacrifice a part of herself, but it is a price she is willing to pay.

In telling the story from Klara’s perspective, Ishiguro has set himself a formidable challenge, and it is a testament to his skill that he manages to maintain the balance between humanisation and anthropomorphism. It is achieved through her flat affect (a characteristic of most of his writing) and a myriad of small reminders scattered throughout the narrative. Just as we begin to forget the artificial nature of Klara’s awareness, a word or phrase will jolt us back into the uncanny valley: her habit of addressing other characters in the titular third person, or the way that her vision fractures during moments of emotional of sensory overload so that objects appear segregated into boxes or rendered as geometric shapes rather than integrated forms.

Of course, this being Ishiguro, the story’s science-fictional elements are merely a means to an end. Returning to themes of service, sacrifice, commodification and loss addressed in earlier novels such as The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Klara’s futuristic world is, in many ways, all too familiar. A story in which the character who most truly understands the human heart is made, not born, Klara and the Sun offers us glimpses of a world divided by class, privilege and generation and a society threatened by the distance between those who adopt new technology and those are displaced by or reject it. But it is also a tale of idealism, love and the fact that our children will all eventually leave us, one way or another. Beautiful and heartbreaking, this is Ishiguro at his finest.