That's to say: it's hard to discuss this novel without giving away its ‘reveal’. Not that Ishiguro is an M. Night Shyamalan type of author, of course; we don't read him for his startling plot-twists. Perhaps spoilers don't matter. What he's doing in this novel doesn't depend upon his reveal, which ought to mean it would be possible to include spoilers in my discussion without actually spoiling the reading experience. Nevertheless, you probably don't want to read this review if you haven't read the novel. And you should read the novel! It's a good novel. Only ...
And there you have it. Good, but. Start with the good. Ishiguro writes a certain kind of book. His is a dialled-down, even chilly manner. It's possible to bounce-off that (this, indeed, was my first reaction to reading him) but dismissing his fiction because it's not hotter, in a McLuhan-y sense, because it's not more melodramatically styled, or eventful, or gnashing, or because everyone is so on-the-surface polite, really is to miss the point of him. His books are about these important, sometimes eloquent repressions. About the way that, in both our love and our animosity, we understand less than we think we do. He thinks we are outsiders looking in. Or, more precisely, that though we are all outsiders looking in, there isn't really an ‘in’ to observe: there's no big central meaning, or mystery, that defines life, or if there is something ‘in’ there—if fascism is on the rise in 1930s Continental Europe, if there is an ongoing holocaust of cloned teeangers being murdered so as to harvest their organs, if there are ogres and dragons lurking in the mist—then such things are not at the centre of the stories Ishiguro tells, because such things are not, whatever we might tell ourselves, actually at the centre of our lives.
He writes about characters on the edge of things, quiescent figures navigating the small-scale difficulties of their world, who spend more time observing than acting, are more passive than active, patients rather than agents. This, Ishiguro is saying, is how things are, and this is the ground against which he makes his subtle, affecting etudes of sanity (in The Unconsoled), memory (in The Buried Giant) or innocence and hope (in this novel). If you don't like his books because they are not pungently-enough written, or because the characterisation isn't jolting-joe enough for you, that's your perogative. But you're missing an utterly distinctive, often moving and penetrating voice. Craig Raine says somewhere that dubeity and conviction are the twin poles of dreaming (he was talking about Kafka, I think) and there's a gleam along precisely that fault line with which Ishiguro at his best illuminates.
That's not to say that he's not sometimes a boring writer. On the contrary, he is often a boring writer. But dreams are often boring too (we can be honest) and there are truths, and effects, and indeed affects, that are only articulable via boredom. The point is that Ishiguro balances a relentless, sometimes tedious clarity of apperception—hence Klara as a name, here—with a kind of obliquity, an uncertitude, a haziness. An eloquent reticence. When it works, this balance manages things no other writer achieves; but that's not to say that Ishiguro's schtick (dismissive word, I know) is equally effective in each of his novels. I didn't love The Buried Giant for instance, and although I enjoyed the process of reading Klara and the Sun rather more than that previous novel I can't say that I think it entirely works, as a novel. It may be, as has been the case with other novels by him, I need to let it settle, to let its ironies and uncanninesses to steep for a while in my imagination. I don't know though.
Klara is a robot, although nobody at any point in the story uses that word: her kind are ‘Artificial Friends’, or ‘AFs’. This, in a small way, is symptomatic of a larger problem. It's one of the tells of a less sfnally confident writer I think, a superstitious shying-away from the over-obvious, as when a story about vampires or zombies scrupulously avoids the v-word or the z-word and instead refers to ‘feeders’ or ‘walkers’ or whatever. Actually in real life we call our robots robots, because obviousness is part of who we are as a species. And (actually) it seems to me this trivial thing is an element of a larger two-fold problem with Ishiguro's robots. Which two folds? Well, one is the sheer derivativeness of the story he is telling here, a perennial problem for writers who work in SF. The other is about the way the robot figures, the semiotic of ‘the robot’ as such, and that's a bigger problem. [This, incidentally, is where the spoilers begin].
The first of these two folds is the more noticeable, especially to a reader who happens to have read widely in the SF backlist. Reading Klara and the Sun reminded me of reading a hundred pulp SF stories about robots, and although few of those were as elegantly written as this I wasn't sure Ishiguro adds all that much to this tradition. We start in a old-style shop that sells robots as companions, seen entirely from the perspective of Klara, one of the items of stock. She is a mild, charming and observant individual, possessed of (we are told) ‘wonderful mental capabilities’, although at the same time she is culpably naïve to the point of actual simple-mindedness.
Klara is bought as a companion to a clever but sickly girl called Josie who lives with her mother in an expensive house in the countryside. Josie's parents are separated, and her mother's high-flying job does not leave much time for Josie, who spends most of her days alone—hence, we suppose, the need for an artificial friend. There is a neighbouring house in which an English boy called Rick lives. Rick and Josie have declared their love for one another and are planning an adult life together, although Rick is poor where Josie is rich. From time to time Josie's mother takes her into the city so she can have her portrait painted. Josie had an older sister called Sal who died. For about half its length the novel bubbles along with all this, and the reader is borne along the bubbles. The mother, Chrissie, is nicely drawn (her love for her daughter complicated by her fear of losing her which leads to some sharp and even cruel treatment) and both Klara and Rick feel like teenagers, or so I thought.
Then the twist: Josie is not just sickly, she is dying. The portrait Chrissie has commissioned is not a painting but a looky-likey robot body. Klara has been purchased not as a companion for Josie but in order to observe her closely enough to be able to mimic her, such that after her death Klara's programme can be transferred into this Josie-robot and Chrissie can assuage her grief by continuing to live with a simulacrum of her daughter.
It is, in other words, a retread of Aldiss's story ‘Super Toys Last All Summer Long’ (made into the much baggier 2001 Spielberg movie A.I.), via about a dozen Asimov robot stories (slogan: “I, Robot: the ‘I’ stands for Ishiguro!”) and a standard Black Mirror plotline. The stiffly formal politesse with which Ishiguro's robots talk is part of this pulp tradition too: I was somewhat reminded of another Aldiss story, 1958's ‘Who Can Replace a Man?’, which does much of the work of Klara and the Sun, only funnier and in ten pages rather than 300.
This twist is shadowed by Klara's own leap of robo-faith. She herself is solar powered, and needs only to sit in the sun for a short time to be recharged. From the display window of the store, before she is bought, she sees a tramp die (as she thinks) in the shadows of the alleyway opposite. The next day the tramp is up and about again and she deduces that the sun has restored him, just as it does her. When she realises that Jodie is dying she strikes a bargain with the sun: in return for a small sacrifice on her part (specifically, sabotaging a polluting city truck, since she believes the sun hates pollution) let the sun cure Josie of her sickness. This episode and its consequences are at the heart of the novel, and include some very striking and beautiful writing. If Klara's mission feels a little arbitrary, then faith sometimes manifests that way: like Gorchakov struggling repeatedly to cross the swimming pool without extinguishing the candle he is carrying in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia.
This, though, brings me to the second and bigger problem. It's not that Klara's hopeless prayers to the sun-god aren't affecting, because they are. And the ambiguous ending of the novel, where it seems a miracle cure has indeed been effected, doesn't diminish this (indeed, the final chapter, in which Klara, still as ingenuously curious and observant as ever, seems to have been abandoned in a junk-yard of some kind is beautiful and touchingly done). But Klara herself is a bad robot. Not morally bad, or badly written, but badly conceived. Bad in the sense that she has to be two absolutely incompatible things for the story to work. She has to be both an amazingly complex machine whose chips and programming pass the Turing Test and actualise genuine personhood, a technological marvel capable of superhuman processing feats—and she has to be the village fucking idiot, who observes human beings eating and drinking and still thinks they are somehow solar-powered, who thinks bulls rise up out of the ground into their fields and who believes that the sun literally lives in a half-built barn visible from Josie's house. I don't mean to taunt Ishiguro with failing to satisfy a hobgoblin-of-little-minds consistency with this. This second, foolish Klara is really the point of the novel. It's is a book about innocence, and the selfless love and profound hope such innocence enables; and Ishiguro has a sensitive and (I think) true apperception of the ways innocence and ignorance blur one into the other. But ‘the robot’ is the wrong figure for this Prince-Myshkinosity.
Let me put it this way: there is an old-fashioned vibe to Klara and the Sun. The near-future America Ishiguro describes smacks of the 1950s. That's not a problem in itself (the same could be said about Phil Dick's best work) except in one regard. Ishiguro has observed that teenagers spend all their time on their phones, a detail reproduced in this novel. But Klara herself is entirely cut-off from the world wide web. Her programming is sophisticated enough to enable her to mimic human behaviour and speech precisely, but her programmers didn't think to fit her with a database explaining how the world works on the most basic level, such that she might understand that the sun is a giant ball of nuclear-scalding gas in space and not an orange deity that lives in a barn. Ishiguro groks that teens are online all the time, but he hasn't grokked the Internet of Things.
My objection is not a worldbuilding one (although, I have to say: of course a robot like Klara would be connected to the internet). I can see that a Klara with access to even the most basic information about how the world works wouldn't be a Klara who would trek to a barn to offer a sacrifical deal to the Sun that lives there. If Ishiguro's solution to this is a bodge, well alright, sometimes writers must bodge. No: my objection is that ‘the robot’ just doesn't figure what Ishiguro needs it to figure for Klara and the Sun to work. He is a writer fascinated by outsiders, by individuals who combine unusual observational insight with a kind of blindness to looming obviousnesses. He returns again and again to the disengaged and disenfranchised in order to construe a vision of life in terms of disengagement and disenfranchisement. In the English servant class of the 1930s of Remains of the Day, or in the clones of Never Let Me Go, or even in the very elderly, alzheimery couple of The Buried Giant he selects viable vehicles with which to explore and dramatise this fascination. But robots don't work that way. The thing about contemporary technology is not that it stands outside human life, watching with loving but slightly baffled innocence; it's that it absolutely interpenetrates our lives. That it is the pharmakon that simultaneously enables and poisons all our intrapersonal connections. The technology of which ‘the robot’ is the fictive avatar, the technology that manifests in our actual lives in all the ways it does (from Alexa and Roombas to our ever-present phones and screens, from the agorithms that steer us about the internet to the hundreds of labour-saving automated systems in our homes) just isn't the coolly disengaged observer that Ishiguro, in this novel, needs it to be.
There are a couple of other, less central but clumsy false steps in the book too, I think. I mean, pity the editor tasked with returning constructive criticism on the new manuscript by their publishing house's only Nobel Laureate: can't be easy. Still: Josie's father, separated from her mother, joins them in the latter third of the novel for a trip into town, and we discover that the breakdown of the marriage was a function of him leaving his high-prestige job and joining a group of fascists. This far-right political strand, though, is undeveloped, and hangs awkwardly. Perhaps Ishiguro introduced it because he felt, having premised his book on intelligent robots, he had to run a line about slavery (because, you see, intelligent robots would be slaves, do you see? do you?) alongside the novel's major themes of innocence and hope. Klara and the Sun is set in a sketchily-rendered future America, and it can't be denied that the heritage of slavery is still a major, malign shaping force in American politics.
The problem is that Ishiguro isn't really interested in politics—another underdeveloped strand in the novel is that some kids have been genetically altered to be smarter and some haven't, although none of the societal or even existential implications of this are developed—and his treatment of race is awkward to the point of being actively problematic. So it is that Klara, a robot and therefore by definition neither white nor black, notices the skin-colour of the humans she observes, but only when that colour is black: ‘a black-skinned woman stepped forward’ [68] ‘I saw the Diner Manager, a large, black-skinned man, standing very still behind [the counter]’ [245] and so on. So it is that Josie's mum has a bossy housekeeper called, ahem, Melania, who speaks like this: ‘“Listen A.F. Ma'am take Miss Josie to see Mr Capaldi. Portrait guy. That Mr Capaldi is one creep son bitch ... Ma'am love Miss Josie. But Miss Sal die and mess Ma'am up bad. Get me, A.F.?”’ [177]. Like the cook in old Tom and Jerry cartoons we never see her face, and she remains entirely marginal. If I say Klara and the Sun just doesn't get race in contemporary America right, you might counter with: well, it's not really a novel about race. Perhaps so; but in that case it would probably have been better for Ishiguro to have left out these half-done gestures.
It also seemed to me that the novel is too long, and too slow. That's a trickier call, since overlong, repetitive and slow has been part of the Ishiguro USP since at least The Unconsoled. The difference, though, is that elongation, repetition and a morass of triviality (as evasion) is the point of The Unconsoled, where it doesn't strike me as the point of this novel.
In sum: despite some wonderful portions, this seems to me a near-miss from Ish. But perhaps I'll change my mind on it. I've done so before on Ishiguro's writing.
