Klara and the Sun

Sixteen years ago, while on a family canoe trip in France, several of us took turns reading Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go.   We were fascinated by his story of young people (all clones) who had been raised into their teens for the single purpose of having their organs harvested for the medical needs of those who could afford them. .  Fascinated, and creeped out.

Ishiguro's recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021), is equally eerie, and raises somewhat similar questions in our minds -- questions we may or may not like contemplating.  Ishiguro's approach in both novels reminds me of that in works by Ursula K. LeGuin -- both authors deal with worlds very similar to our own, but with certain critical differences.  As LeGuin once stated, she was not interested in predicting our future, or in envisioning possible scientific advances -- she was not, she believed, writing science fiction.

Instead, like Ishiguro, in story after story, she described our own world, or a world very similar to our world, but one with certain critical differences, asking the question -- if we postulate these differences, what might result?

In Klara, the variable is the development of artificial intelligence to the point that resulting "robots" not only can imitate all human behavior, not only have superior perceptions to humans, not only excel humans in analytical skills, but also seem to have a sense of self and an ability to display empathy, to experience emotions.  

These abilities have permitted the development of robots that serve as "Artificial Friends," or AFs as they are called in the novel.  (A development we see developing even now, in "real life," in embryonic form.)

The story is told from the point of view of a female AF, whom we first see as she stands on the floor of a retail establishment, waiting to be purchased.  She develops a reciprocal friendship with a young girl, Josie, whose mother finally decides to purchase Klara to keep Josie company.  Josie is ill, it turns out, suffering from after effects of having been "lifted" -- genetic editing to increase intellectual ability -- which has become a prerequisite for admission to virtually all universities.  Klara is purchased to help keep Josie's spirits up, to give her a close friend, while she struggles with the illness.

As in his earlier novel, Ishiguro asks us what it means to have a soul.  In Never Let Me Go, the young people -- cloned, which in our civilization would not detract from their humanity -- were believed by everyone to be soulless, mere physical imitations of human beings.  In Klara, the AF is clearly a manufactured being.  But, by telling the story from Klara's point of view, we are left unable to doubt that she thinks, acts, and feels in ways identical to ourselves, modified only by not having the advantage of our years of gradually accumulated experience with the world.  If she doesn't have a soul, what exactly do we mean by a soul?

And what do we mean by love?  Klara doesn't love romantically, but she is devoted to Josie, to Josie's boyfriend, and to their hopes of a lasting relationship.  She loves the Sun, which she personifies as a divine presence, one to whom she turns repeatedly with both prayers and adoration.  She perceives the divine Sun, as it reflects through several stacked panes of glass:

Although his face on the outermost glass was forbidding and aloof, and the one immediately behind it was, if anything, even more unfriendly, the two beyond that were softer and kinder.  There were three further sheets, and though it was hard to see much of them on account of their being further back, I couldn't help estimating that these faces would have humorous and kind expressions.  In any case, whatever the nature of the images on each glass sheet, as I looked at them collectively, the effect was of a single face, but with a variety of outlines and emotions.

She thus develops a sense of the complexity of her divinity, the Sun, and, perhaps, of the complexity of human love.

As I've suggested, the entire story is told by Klara.  Klara has a high intelligence, an incredible ability to infer human emotions from studying faces, but a limited familiarity with day to day human life.  Her eyes apparently divide her range of vision into "boxes," blocks which she learns to combine to give a true picture of reality, the way we combine views from our two eyes to obtain three dimensional sight.  She has concluded that the sun literally sinks into the ground at the point of the viewable horizon.  Her nemesis throughout the book is some form of machinery that emits a cloud of smoke; she believes the purpose of the machine is to produce pollution, an offense against the Sun.

It's a fascinating story -- the oddities of Klara's perceptions, the intense, the lasting sense of guilt by Josie's mother for having had Josie "lifted," and thus subjected to life-threatening illness, the underlying love story between Josie and her friend Rick.  The Kindle edition has a Study Guide at the end, with eighteen questions to consider.  I didn't find the questions particularly helpful, but they do suggest the number of issues considered or hinted at in the novel, the various ways it might be interpreted.

Despite its complexity, Klara and the Sun is an absorbing story that draws one into its world, a world so like our own, but with the addition of thinking, feeling Artificial Friends, AFs with their own hopes and dreams and ways of viewing life around them.  

And an ending that is therefore heartbreaking.