Book review: Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

This review contains spoilers

Klara and the Sun is a novel by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, it’s set in a world somewhere along the future in which there is a clear class difference which has resulted in rich people having access to genetic editing, the recipients are called lifted and get to enter proper universities, and have their kids privately tutored over the internet. The kids, as a result, are quite lonely and are thus provided with AF’s, artificial friends. The protagonist of the story, Klara, is one such an AF for Josie. Josie has been lifted but has gotten very sick as a result of it. Ishiguro takes the perspective of Klara and we read about the world through her distinctive naïve, unaccustomed, perspective. She’s a keen observer of social situations and will say things like: “Not only had I learned that ‘changes’ were a part of Josie … 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 for passers-by”. Then there’s the neighborhood boy Rick, who hasn’t been lifted and is the best friend of Josie, living with his somewhat unstable mother and finally there’s Josie’s mother who works a lot and struggles with Josie’s sickness.

Frankly, I think this is not a good book. It’s written as if it’s a children’s book: first of all, there’s the constant explaining of all social situations through the naïve but observant eyes of Klara, there’s only a very comical mention of sex[1], and most of the conflict is reduced to caricature. Ishiguro has a lot of interesting material to work with: what’s the power dynamic between the AF and the family? There’s talk about Klara getting to know Josie well enough so that she might replace her in case Josie dies but this would assume some sort of capacity to grow emotionally as Josie would. There’s these constant allusions that Klara is a very curious AF but she at no point even questions her servility to the household, even being content staying in a storage space during the last section of the book. She seems to experience all sorts of emotions but only in relation to what happens to Josie. The question about whether Josie’s being can be transferred into a robot/ machine/ AF is of course about the hard problem in consciousness[2] but it is not really discussed or dealt with. What’s the line between AF and human, especially when the AF’s purpose is to deal with the loneliness the children experience as a result of not being embedded in social situations.

Klara and the Sun is a feel good children story, it’s world raises all sorts of interesting questions about class, servility, free will and ethics but the book carefully avoids dealing with any of them.

[1] That’s not to say that adult novels require sex but the way it’s referred to here (hanky-panky) is so obtuse that I can only read it as an attempt to actively disqualify any possibility of intimacy between these two teenagers who are supposedly in love.

[2] Coined by Dennet in the 90’s the hard problem of consciousness refers to the seeming impossibility(?) of captuing the subjective experience of being in physical matter. As such it might not be transferrable.