Ishiguro

Klara and the Sun

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

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.

Sleeping Dragons

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

Kazuo Ishiguro works a consistent theme. Even in his earliest novels, he explores the manner in which people refuse to acknowledge the reality through which they move. Many of his characters display a kind of aphasia, an inability to grasp the issues surrounding them, the motives of people, even those they are close to, or what is unfolding before their eyes. In a way, they are peculiarly narcissistic. I say peculiar because quite often their sense of themselves is the last thing they seem concerned with, even when others are.

At times this has led him to experiment with tactics of evasion that result in novels that resist our attempts to connect, even to access what is going on, but we read them anyway because he cloaks the experiments with plots and devices that hold our interest, but which we suspect are little more than extensions of the evasions at the core of his characters’ lives.

In a few instances, he has his characters actually go out in search of the mystery that seems to enshroud their worlds, though usually they look in the wrong places or simply fail to comprehend what they discover.

Such is the motive behind Axl and Beatrice as they leave their small village in the heart of a post-Arthurian England to find their long-absent and possibly estranged son and perhaps get to the bottom of the cloying fog suffocating memory. Their journey takes them to the source of a strange amnesia in The Buried Giant.

The landscape is mythic. This is a land occupied by Britons and Saxons. It is a land that has only recently been host to the epic struggles of King Arthur, Merlin, his knights, and the aspirations of Camelot. If there is any doubt how real Ishiguro intends us to treat this, he dispels such doubt by having Axl and Beatrice encounter the aging Sir Gawain, one of the few survivors of those days.

There is much of the Quixote in this Gawain, although his skills are impressive. Age alone has blunted his abilities. Ostensibly, he is still on a quest. Not the Grail. No, that is never mentioned. Rather he claims to be on a mission to slay the she-dragon Querig.

Joining them is a young Saxon warrior, Wistan, and a boy he has rescued from a village where because of a wound the boy suffered from ogres the villagers intend to kill him for fear that he will become an ogre.  As, indeed, he is destined to—but not in the way superstition would have it.

Wistan for his part is also on a mission.  He, too, is on the hunt for Querig. But for him Querig’s demise is but a means to an end, and a terrible end at that. He and Gawain come into conflict over it eventually and thereby we learn both the source of the Mist, which robs people of their memory, and a truth about King Arthur not recorded in the myths.

Through all this, even as it would seem rich material for a dense fantasy about knights and dragons and kings and ogres, Ishiguro’s focus is on Axl and Beatrice and the nature and quality of commitment and forgiveness.  For in the mists of poorly-glimpsed memory there are terrible things between them and as they progress on their journey to find their son Axl begins to have second thoughts, not at all sure he wants to remember, afraid that perhaps he had been the cause of great pain and sorrow.  Ishiguro is concerned here primarily—and almost exclusively—with the nature of time, memory, and forgiveness and the many ways they are the same essential thing.

In that sense, the controversy he stirred when the novel appeared by claiming that he was not writing a fantasy—that he did not want to be seen as plowing the same fields as George R.R. Martin or Patrick Rothfuss—was unfortunate. He spoke truly.  This is not a fantasy in the sense of contemporary sword & sorcery or secondary-world fantasies.  He is not doing the same thing as Martin, although he may have borrowed a subtheme or two from Tolkein. His disclaimer was taken as a derogation of fantasy, yet one can see from the text that he is fond of those elements of the book taken directly from the long tradition of English fantasy.

If there is a fantasy element here worthy of the name it is in his portrayal of the end of a mythology and the terminus of one world as it transforms into another.  The Buried Giant is about remembering as much as it is about things forgotten.  The changes soon to be wrought by the conclusion of Wistan’s quest and Gawain’s final stand have to do with how history turns and what is taken after a time of interregnum during which things lost are grasped, reshaped, and put to new uses.

But it is always about what is between people and how we use memory and its infelicities.

As in other Ishiguro novels, there is much that annoys.  His characters talk.  And talk and talk and talk and often it is about nothing until we realize that it is all tactic.  Dissimulation as replacement for substantive communication—until finally the act of avoidance itself becomes the point and the things hidden are revealed by inference. Axl and Beatrice as blind and trying to perceive the elephant they explore with tentative fingers. That it is to a purpose, however, makes it no less frustrating, but it would be a mistake to see this as anything other than absolutely intended.

The point of the quest–for all of them–becomes evident when at last they find Querig and it turns out not to be what they had all expected.  And we then see how myth sometimes is more useful than reality.