Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara and the Sun, 2021, is the latest novel by Nobel and Booker prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.

By the author’s own admission there are common themes underlying all his work.  This is in spite of the wide differences in approach.  One of those connections centres around the illusions his characters live with.  The source of these illusions varies across the novels.  Sometimes it is something imposed on the characters, as in Never Let Me Go, 2005, where-in clones are created to supply ‘spare parts.  In others, it might be a collective political decision as underlies 2015’s fable-like The Buried Giant, the un-questioned conforming to a role in Remains of the Day, 1989, or in An Artist of the Floating World, 1986, illusion as a necessity of a Faustian pact.  In all of these, at some point, the illusion is revealed for what it is.

His protagonist’s epiphanies; missed opportunities, wrong decisions, false beliefs and misspent lives, are accentuated by his consistent use of (excepting The Buried Giant) first-person narration.  Ishiguro leaves his protagonists older, and perhaps sadder but wiser, but not finding any kind of salvation and a happy ending. This places his work firmly in the realm of the classically tragic.

The title character in Klara and the Sun is an android.  That establishes this outing by the author as science fiction, but with little overt concern for the science part of the genre.   In this near future world technology has advanced to the point of constructing machines with Turing Test passing artificial intelligence, and frequent reference is made to wide spread redundancies due to their replacing humans in most jobs, humans are still driving taxis as well as their own cars.

Klara and the Sun follows on the heels of many preceding sci-fi stories focusing on robots, androids, replicants and the like.  Classics like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, 1950, and its follow-ons and Philip K Dick’s, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968.  Ishiguro is an admitted film buff, so would be aware that both of these, sometimes less than faithfully, have been adapted for the screen.  More to the point, regarding the plot of Klara and the Sun, would be the film A. I. Artificial Intelligence, 2001, based on a Brian Aldiss short story of 1969, Supertoys Last All Summer Long.  Although there is a great deal difference between the short story and the film, both involve manufactured AI surrogate children.

Following on to the above, it would be of interest to know, in regards to some of the plot developments in Ishiguro’s novel, whether the author was familiar with Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics; which are as follows:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

 A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

And rather more recently, and probably not a factor in Ishiguro’s writing, there is Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me, 2019.  Which, with two acclaimed literary novelists recently publishing books with an android theme, raises the question of whether there’s a trend looming.

What is not touched upon in Klara and the Sun is the possibilities of androids as sexual partners.  That potential use is what seems to be driving advances in the technical end of replicating human beings.  An interesting, if somewhat depressing, exploration of the current state of that aspect of things is to be found in Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, 2020, by Jenny Kleeman. 

Klara and the Sun is set in a near-future United States, where current issues around automation and cognitive, enhancement have played out in ways that have exasperated social disparities.  What we can garner of the lineaments of this world is dependent on Klara’s first-person narration.

We see and understand everything through Klara, who is sentient and self-aware; and we are given to understand that, for her ‘model series’, she is unusually observant and inquisitive. Designed and programmed to be a companion to a child, officially designated an AF, Artificial Friend, she is something of a very sophisticated, and expensive, toy.  There is, in keeping with the previous movie references made regarding Ishiguro, a curious resonance with the Toy Story film series.     

The novel is, amongst other considerations, an exploration of that perennial debate over Nature versus Nurture.  Because she can ‘learn’ Klara’s understanding and behaviour modifies accordingly.  But all that is still at the mercy of her programming.   For example, as she is solar powered and dependant on sunlight for ‘sustenance’, she possesses a built-in reverence for the sun.  This attributing god-like powers to the sun leads to her perceiving it as being a sentient being who can be entreated and, even, bargained with.  This faulty understanding of the world, coupled with the way in which she is programmed to serve her young owner, leads to complications of both practical and moral dimensions.

That programming to serve brings in one of the author’s common themes.  The implications of being ‘in service’, whether to an individual, the state or to an idea, and the consequences of that for his protagonists (as outlined earlier) is a thread that runs through his work.

Any book by Ishiguro is an occasion and Klara and the Sun does not disappoint.  It is altogether eminently readable, thought provoking and moving.

Hardcover edition published in the UK by Faber & Faber at £20.00 and in the USA by Knopf Doubleday at $28.00