Klara and the Sun is a simple story built upon a deep substrate of subtlety. It realizes its best effects by the very plainness of its presentation. But given a moment’s reflection it becomes clear how profoundly well-imagined is the world he has constructed.
Klara, the viewpoint character throughout, is an AF—and Artificial Friend. A robot built to act as a personal companion for a child or young adult. It’s a very old idea, almost Victorian, from a time when the wealthy, the aristocrat, would pay someone to be companion to a son or daughter. A constant presence that could be relied on to always be supportive and, more or less, guide the subject on a solid path to adulthood. As the novel opens, Klara is resident in the store where AFs are sold, with a view of the busy urban street beyond.
We learn in short order that AFs are solar powered, that they are intent upon finding a place with a customer, that there are different models with different capabilities (Klara is a B2), and that to a significant extent they are emotionally aware. This last detail has always given me pause because emotion is intrinsically hormonal. Living creatures experience emotions because our bodies give us chemicals in response to event, so we know fear and happiness, embarrassment and depression. Without these systems, machines by definition cannot have emotions. (This is a trope in SF that has always troubled me, but it seems wired into things now.) Ishiguro gets us by this small problem by inference that the emotions are programs that seem incapable of serious modification. Even at the end of the novel, in less than ideal circumstances, Klara’s emotional engagement remains consistent. So we can see this as a matter of program response that is self-referential and operates within a relatively broad but constrained range. (There is within this a nod to Turing.)
Details matter, especially in the construction of plausible science fiction narratives, so I point the above out to suggest that Ishiguro has done his homework and built his world well.
Klara is purchased finally by the mother of Josie, who is around 12 or 13, and is not well. She suffers bouts of debilitation. Eventually we learn that this is a consequence of her having been Lifted, a kind of genetic modification intended to enhance a child’s potential, both physically and intellectually. It does not always work out, though. The Mother, Chrissie, has already lost a daughter to this process and now it seems another may die. So the choice of an AF for Josie is shot through with multiple motivations as well a guilt and hope. Klara determines that she is there to see Josie through this.
The setting is the near future. Things are different yet much the same. The social dynamics have found new bases on which to operate, but the results are much as they have always been. Lifting has become the new standard of acceptance and obviously there is a class component. Josie’s best friend, Rick, has not ben Lifted, and so is sort of a misfit in the social groups Josie’s mother wishes her to join. The tension around the process feels very familiar and yet is a disturbingly dissonant option—for some, not all. What emerges regarding Josie’s difficulties, the dynamics between her and her mother and the estranged father, with Klara in the middle for purposes she is not altogether aware of form the ecology of the novel. Klara’s own apprehension of the problem seems at times both naïve and simply off the rails, with her conviction that the Sun is the solution to all these problems. Because Klara is solar powered, it seems logical that she has what amounts to a belief system centered on the Sun as a sort of deity.
All these components merge into a disturbing yet disturbingly familiar expression of hope and need for purpose that, even as the answers and solutions sought by Klara are often beside the point, speaks to dedication, loyalty, and conviction. Klara succeeds, even thought what she actually does appears to have almost nothing to do with the actual mechanisms with which she wrestles, and experiences…well, perhaps not “life” as we might accept it, but fulfillment of intent that resonates.
Ishiguro has demonstrated a unique method of writing science fiction that “passes” as not. He has been working toward this for decades now, not quite succeeding in the attempt, until now. Just as he managed to recast the Arthurian legends as an unexpectedly trenchant work of mimetic historical fiction that was more concerned with the underpinnings of legend than with the legend itself, here he has given us a thoroughly-conceived work of SF that works as “literary” in the ways our culture accepts the idea. Certainly one can read this is as allegory, Klara herself as a metaphor, and, if one chooses, ignore the dislocations of the world itself. One can pretend this is a kind of riff on The Prince and the Pauper, a page lifted from Pollyana, a gloss on any number of sickly-child stories, even a study of the emotional fallout of adoption and divorce and loss. I suppose it might even work satisfactorily that way.
But it works best when the underlying conceits, which are wholly SFnal, are accepted and engaged. This is a disturbing world, a decade or two removed from ours, strewn with questions about the ethics of genetic engineering, AI, emotional substitution, and the economics of transformative technologies. One could go back through and pick a dropped line and unpack the meanings and marvel as the implications.
It has long been pondered what it would look like if one day science fiction became simply another mode of literature. I think this may be one of the best examples.
The Proximal Eye 