Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun

 Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun (Faber)

This would have been 'science fiction' in the 1970's but the science has caught up with the fiction and so, by 2021, it is fiction. It's not the big, green monsters with all kinds of lethal weaponry endlessly warring over the planet Xarg, it's much gentler and more powerful than that. I have been told by Science Fiction readers that the inter-galactic settings were used to reflect on human issues. Well, obviously. Human issues are all we know. There was no need of the spacecraft, monsters and ray guns, then. And so, when a proper writer writes it, it is on earth and very specifically about 'being human'.

Klara is an AF, Artificial Friend, bought for teenage Josie, who is seriously ill. Her elder sister has already died, possibly from a similar disorder. What humans most fear, it seems, is loneliness and a robot to interact with is the artificial solution. Hearing the story from Klara's innocent, ever obliging point of view, we might be reminded of The Catcher in the Rye and not wanting to grow up but it is Ishiguro's own The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go that bear the closest comparisons with their parallels of lives sacrificed entirely to provide for others. 

The 'portrait' that Josie is sitting for is not so much a portrait as a statue. But not a statue at all, it is intended that Klara becomes a replacement Josie if the girl, as is likely, dies. For the benefit mainly of The Mother,

what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom,

and if Never Let Me Go was unbearably bleak, Klara is only less so due to the 'humanity' of the AF. While the story is straightforward, the issues it causes to be raised are not. Klara is required to learn Josie's walk, to become her and become so her so completely that she must learn her 'heart', that essence that makes her individual, human and Josie. It's Klara that doesn't think she can so, if the humans thought she could, the line between what's a machine and what is human have become blurred.

In Klara's stilted understanding of the world the smart phones that people habitually refer to are 'oblongs' in the same way that 'Martian' poets, mainly Craig Raine, described books as,

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings,

and, like Holden Caulfield, she becomes fixated on such detail as the Cootings Machine that is polluting the world. While her human associates fall out or are plagued with tensions, rivalries and tantrums, she is unfailingly respectful and caring. If this is Ishiguro's view of human nature it's a dim one but entirely recognizable.

I wasn't completely convinced for at least 250 of its 307 pages but if I can usually remember the premises of novels and how they begin but not always the endings, the point of Klara and the Sun is how it ends which is how it is in Dubliners, The Remains of the Day and all the best fiction. That stands to reason. Otherwise they'd have finished sooner.

It is emotional and one has to wonder why it is. I don't think it's sentimental. That would ruin it. Ishiguro's too good for that. I was moved by it as one is meant to be. Having been shown what being human was all about, much of which had been awful, I wasn't sure whether that made me 'human' or not.

We might be less precious than we thought we were.