Mind Picker: Klara and the Sun

One afternoon, when the Sun was looking in all the way to the back of the store, Manager came to where I was and said: “Klara, I’ve decided to give you another turn in the window. You’ll be by yourself this time, but I know you won’t mind that. You’re always so interested in the outside.”

Told from the POV of an “Artificial Friend”, Klara and the Sun retreads some familiar territory for Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro — the first person narration, the sense of mystery as the character’s reality is slowly established, the examination of identity, love, and human connection — and this book is worth reading for the always satisfying experience of Ishiguro’s literary craftsmanship. But despite being set in a plausible — and not very nice — near future, experiencing this world from the perspective of an artificial intelligence (a child’s companion who only knows what she’s seen and been told) wasn’t entirely mind-expanding. If this had been a SciFi novel — with explicit world-building and prescient conjectures explored to their limits — it could have been entertaining and philosophically challenging; but as Ishiguro deals in capital “L” Literary Fiction, this was more about evoking a mood than prognostication; a compelling reading experience, but I don’t think it will be a memorable one. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

These were helpful lessons for me. Not only had I learnt that “changes” were a part of Josie, and that I should be ready to accommodate them, I'd begun to understand also that this wasn't a trait peculiar just to Josie; that people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passers-by — as they might in a store window — and that such a display needn't be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.

As the novel opens, we meet Girl AF Klara: a highly sophisticated companion robot waiting in a store to be purchased; watching the world go by and making advanced connections about all she witnesses. Klara’s keen skills of observation seem to be unique to her — there are Boy AFs in the store who tease Klara about her self-generated beliefs and another Girl AF that she is frequently posed with (but who doesn’t seem interested in intellectual debate) — and it is from this singular perspective that the story is told; a different AF would tell a different kind of story. Soon, Klara is selected by fourteen-year-old Josie — a sickly girl with an overprotective mother — and everything that we learn about this world is based on Klara’s incomplete knowledge of it (which does add the narrative tension of a mystery novel and it is satisfying to have little nuggets of information come along that snap the puzzle pieces into place.) We will eventually learn what is meant by “lifting”, “oblongs”, and “interaction meetings”; why some adults wear “high-ranking office clothes” and others live in quasi-fascist “communities”; why Josie is sick and the different approaches her Mother and Klara will take to deal with that sickness. But again, we only learn what Klara sees and is told, so there isn’t a lot of history of how we got to this future and the information is shaded by Klara’s ironic misconceptions and knowledge gaps. I appreciated that Klara has feelings and something like a human mind without questions of her sentience (she is programmed to serve and that is her only concern; more Stevens from The Remains of the Day than Kathy from Never Let Me Go, but at least they were actually human and gave the reader something to emotionally connect with), and I also really liked that as she is solar-powered, Klara creates for herself a primitive and superstitious sun-worshipping belief system. Klara spends much of the story trying to understand human interaction and romantic love, but the only relationships she witnesses are between people who spend most of their time in stilted arguments (about past events that they don't feel the need to fully explian) and who otherwise censor what they say in front of Klara (which I suppose is an interesting narrative hurdle for an AI trying to understand what she’s witnessing, but it was plain mystifying to this human reader).

Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual?

Naturally, there is some discussion around the difference between humans and AI — it is eventually revealed that in this future, robots are taking away the traditional jobs and parents will go to extreme lengths to guarantee their children a future in the workplace — but Klara herself seems satisfied to be treated no differently than a vacuum cleaner, removing herself to the Utility Closet like a Roomba when she’s not required. So, this really isn’t philosophically dense, and the plot takes no truly unexpected turns, but the mood — and especially the sense of mystery as we get to know this future — made for a pleasurable reading experience. I’d give 3.5 stars if I could and am rounding down because I wanted more from Ishiguro.