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Klara and The Sun
by Kazuo Ishiguro

Probably because I have been languishing in enforced isolation for 13 months, though it must be said that I am antisocial by nature and therefore comfortable in isolation as long as I have the option to go out (and at the time I wrote this I had not gone out in 7 weeks); probably because I have had to live vicariously through books and movies and place upon them the burden of liberating me from this long sentence of sameness and claustrophobia; probably because I am a great admirer of Kazuo Ishiguro and have been looking forward to a new novel from him for several years (and I disliked The Buried Giant even before I read the withering review/scolding by Ursula Le Guin); and probably because Artificial Intelligence is no longer a science-fiction concept but a banal reality (Are we not all programmed by algorithms now?), no longer something to fear (Terminator) but a potential solution to the arrogant human bumbling that has brought the world to the brink of oblivion, my pleasure (because I did enjoy it) at reading Klara and the Sun was tinged with irritation at the narrator-protagonist’s relationship with the world. I found myself wishing Ishiguro would vary his schtick a little.

To be fair this schtick is one of the reasons I enjoy his novels: the clueless unreliable narrator who knows less about what is happening to them than I, the reader, do. The once-famous artist in denial of his complicity in totalitarianism and repression in Japan, the butler constrained by class and ideas of “dignity”, and the revelation in another novel that I won’t spoil for you because it is such an “A-ha!” (not the band) moment.

Klara in the new novel is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid robot with the ability to observe, draw insight, and develop empathy with her human companions. Like the aforementioned narrators she is recalling the past, indulging in the nostalgia that colors the novel with melancholy. It is established at the outset that Klara is learning about the world by watching it and drawing her own conclusions, and her innocence and naivete are quite touching. The thing is, we know that she is an unreliable narrator. Even if I had expected it, I like having the knowledge creep up on me. We are always aware of Klara’s constraints. We are seeing events unfold and relationships evolve from the POV of a machine. Unlike the butler in The Remains of the Day, she has no sense of humanity to lose. So when she describes a tense, ugly encounter between adult humans in the manner of a naturalist talking about the mating rituals of forest animals, I hear myself telling her to get on with it. I am not in the mood for emotional distancing, it’s already my life.

Her affectlessness dulls the emotional payoff. It’s too neat and polite. Maybe I just need the chaos and randomness that isolation has shut out (though they’re there, they’re always there). In sum, good book, but too much like isolation. It’s not the book, it’s me.