"Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro treats us lucky readers to yet another take on a dystopian future in Klara and the Sun. And once again, as in Never Let Me Go (2005) he approaches his subject obliquely. He withholds details of world events and resulting dislocations, giving only quick, almost throwaway indications here and there. The main indicator is that Klara, the first-person narrator of the title, is an AF, or Artificial Friend, a very life-like robot blessed with an AI-like ability to learn. But more to the point, Klara can provide companionship to humans. This is a haunting, understated read, the kind we have come to expect from Ishiguro. It is also a brilliant, accomplished fiction, which again, is no surprise, given the author.

Klara’s story leads off with her experience at the store, where she is available for sale to a discriminating teen. In Klara’s case the discriminating teen is Josie, a youngster dealing with an unnamed illness. In these early pages we also learn of Klara’s unusual cognitive abilities: she observes keenly, and from what she sees, makes nuanced and surprisingly sophisticated conclusions about human behavior and desire. In fact, Klara’s narrative reflects her unusual intellect and ranks as one of Ishiguro’s great achievements here.

I came to treasure Klara’s insightful storytelling, and her polite conversation. It’s the slightest bit stilted, coming from a machine, but clearly reflects Klara’s ability to observe, reason, and advise. Putting Klara in the first person is a bold stroke for Ishiguro, and yet it comes across as the only way to present this story. Teenagers are a mystery, and would make unreliable narrators: at some point parents have to decide whether to “lift” their pubescent young, a procedure which alters their genes and marks out the child as privileged—eligible for university training and a professional career—but also carries vague risks. These risks threaten Josie, and her illness lies at the root of the decision to buy Klara.

Humans occupy a central place in Ishiguro’s bleak future: addle-pated, lonely, crushed by circumstance, they struggle with the world they have made. They form up into warring clans again, harkening back a thousand years into a violent past; they try to fix things for themselves by buying artificial companions for their despairing children; they  grasp and grapple in a world obviously resisting any kind of sense or control. Of course Klara had to tell this story. In the author’s world, we could depend on no one else.

I felt this to be somewhat a companion-piece to Never Let Me Go. Its future is just as bleak, and the unfeeling, murderous, greedy, and exclusionary solutions people find to correct their own incompetence are almost as horrifying. As two separate treatments of current trends in the world, these two books are as chilling as they are masterful. Take up Klara and learn!