Diary of an Autodidact: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Source of book: Borrowed from the library.

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. Although many of our selection are ones new to me, this was one that was already on my “to read” list. I have previously enjoyed reading two of Ishiguro’s other books, The Buried Giant, and The Remains of the Day, so I wanted to read his newest. (I note that this also made Barack Obama’s reading list for 2021 - which is consistently thoughtful and erudite. I have read quite a few off his list over the years.)

As is the case with any Ishiguro book, it is extremely difficult to discuss them without spoilers. His writing style is to gradually reveal information until the picture becomes clear at the end. But along the way, things remain shrouded in mystery, and it is often difficult to figure out what the book is even about, so to speak. In this case, I am making the deliberate choice to give spoilers, so as to discuss the themes of the book, rather than just quote the cover blurb.

So: SPOILERS!!! If you want to read the book first, do it, then come back here to read my thoughts.

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Klara and the Sun is science fiction, which is a bit of a departure from either of the other Ishiguro books I have read. Although, honestly, all three are so unlike each other in their basic settings.

But I wouldn’t say that they are that different either. Ishiguro has a style. Not just a style of writing, or even mostly that. In fact, his style, while recognizable as his, changes with his narrators quite a lot. The English butler has a very different voice from an old person with possible dementia, or in this case, an “Artificial Friend” - an embodied AI designed to provide companionship to human children.

What is the same from book to book is the narrative style. Ishiguro picks a narrator or central character who is on the fringes of society in some way. In both The Remains of the Day and Klara and the Sun, the narrator is of the servant class. Thus, he or she is part of the society, yet not really of it. They are on the outskirts, the fringes, the margins. As we noted in our club discussion, there is a lot of similarity to the way that Klara offers to stand by the refrigerator to give the family privacy (even though she can clearly hear everything) and the way the butler is expected to wait on the guests without being part of their conversations.

The book is the story of Klara, an “AF” who is purchased for Josie, a tween girl who is ill. As we eventually come to find out (sorry about the spoilers, but they are unavoidable), she has been “lifted” - that is, genetically engineered to boost intelligence. The problem is, the procedure has a risk of causing eventual illness and death, which is what happened to Josie’s older sister. Whether or not Josie will live or die is a key plot point.

But it gets a lot darker than that. Josie is in love with a neighborhood boy who is normal - his mother declined to “lift” him, which means that his future prospects are dim - he will need practically a miracle (or, as his mother hopes, a little nepotism) to get into college. So, you have a potentially doomed romance going on. And some serious classist bullying by other “lifted” kids.

But the darkest part of all isn’t revealed until far later. Josie’s mom selected Klara, because she and an artist have been working on a “portrait” of Josie - which turns out to be a three-dimensional body. Which they intend to house Klara as an imitator and replacement of Josie, should she die.

Klara, who is in many ways the most emotionally intelligent character in the book, decides to try to strike a bargain with the Sun (since AFs are solar powered, she develops a sort of sun-worshipping religious system) to save Josie’s life.

And that is just the plot, before you get into the glimpses of the dystopia Ishiguro envisions. Glimpses, because everything is told from Klara’s viewpoint, and her only way of learning about the society she is in is through what she hears humans say. Machines are well on their way to replacing most human labor, and, as we are seeing in our own time, rather than lead to better lives for workers, this has meant that humans are increasingly dispensable to the capitalist class. In the book, these “post-employed” persons have ended up in ghettos, and have formed rival factions for their own survival. (The book hints at fascist and anarchist groups, but we never get details.) By the end, it appears that society has changed somewhat, and AFs have gone out of style. Or at least been replaced by something more advanced. We never know, though, because Klara’s intended lifespan has run, and she is put out to pasture so to speak. (The similarities to a nursing home are interesting.)

As far as themes, the central one is on the nature of humanity. What makes someone human? Are we really no more than the sum of our biology? Does the mind and will - or even the soul - actually exist outside of brain synapses?

And if we are simply more complex machines, wouldn’t Klara be able to “be” Josie, as long as she can duplicate all the mental and emotional processes?

There are some devastating lines in the book related to all of this. Mr. Capaldi, the artist and scientist, himself has his doubts, even as he drives the project.

“And now Klara’s completed the survey up there, I’ll be able to give you scientific proof of it. Proof she’s already well on her way to accessing quite comprehensively all of Josie’s impulses and desires. The trouble is, Chrissie, you’re like me. We’re both of us sentimental. We can’t help it. Our generation still carry the old feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now. You know that. For people our age, it’s a hard one to let go. We have to let it go, Chrissie. There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of this world to continue.”

Josie’s father (a post-employed divorced from her mother) seems skeptical, although he tends to project his skepticism on to Chrissie rather than own it. He ends up confiding to Klara.

“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? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?”

“Yes, certainly.”

“And that would be difficult, no? Something beyond even your wonderful capabilities. Because an impersonation wouldn’t do, however skillful. You’d have to learn her heart, and learn it fully, or you’ll never become Josie in any sense that matters.”

Klara’s way of analyzing this is like she analyzes the physical world. Objects reduce to simple shapes, mostly boxes, and resolve to detail from there. Thus, Klara thinks at first that she could simply explore all of the boxes, and boxes within boxes, until she learns it all. (This is a wonderfully accurate yet poetic way of describing how various forms of computer recognition work, by reducing things to geometry. Whether we humans do this too at a level we do not notice because of our seamless software is an open question. We can recognize a friend’s face without being able to describe why we know it.) For Josie’s dad, the question is whether those “rooms within rooms” are infinite, or merely finite. Klara seems to think that there is a finite limit somewhere.

“Of course, a human heart is bound to be complex. But it must be limited. Even if Mr Paul is talking in the poetic sense, there’ll be an end to what there is to learn. Josie’s heart may well resemble a strange house with rooms inside rooms. But if this were the best way to save Josie, then I’d do my utmost. And I believe there’s a good chance I’d be able to succeed.”

Even Paul has to admit that this is something he cannot truly be sure about.

“I think I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt that there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better.”

This is one of the existential crises of our scientific age. We still do not understand that much about human brains (or animal brains for that matter), but the idea that there is a self apart from our physical bodies has become more difficult to believe. And yet, it’s complicated.

(Another book I read this year that examines this issue is Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi - it’s an amazing book I highly recommend.)

What further complicates this whole mess is that Klara is such a great character. She is clearly a sentient being, in her own way. Indeed, she often seems the most “human” of the characters. And ultimately, she is capable of what we humans tend to consider the most human, the most noble of acts - self-sacrifice to save another. Certainly, she seems more human in the good sense than the “lifted” kids other than Josie, who lack the basic empathy and humanity to get along socially with other humans. (Josie’s friendship with Rick, the non-lifted friend, has enabled her to act more like a normal human.) Ishiguro’s writing makes Klara the character you root for - and she is supposedly the machine.

We had a long and thrilling discussion of this book at our meeting, in part because those who attended this time were quite into the book. Just a few things from that discussion I haven’t mentioned above.

First, the nature of religious belief. Klara’s “religion” makes sense in light of her experiences. She is solar powered, so her literal source of life is the sun - her god, so to speak. While waiting to be purchased, she observes a homeless man and his dog appear to die, then resurrect by the appearance of the sun. (In reality, this sounds a lot like they overdosed on something, but came out of it.) Klara’s “theology” develops as the book progresses, eventually to the point where she realizes she is asking a favor of the sun, and using both bargaining (“I’ll kill the polluting machine if you save Klara”) and emotional manipulation (“Josie and Rick are in love”) the way humans do with their deities. The thing is, there may be a miracle at the end, although, as with any miracle, how could we know for sure? Correlation and causation are not the same thing, obviously, and proving that something unexpected was or wasn’t a miracle is dicey at best. And, for that matter, is Klara really wrong when she blames pollution that blots out the sun for preventing the sun from its healing work?

Speaking of that, the villain to Klara is the “Cootings Machine,” some generic construction/demolition machine. I was curious about this, because Ishiguro tends to hide “easter eggs” that are references to his Japanese and British roots - anglophiles will often notice references in his books that we Americans might miss. I looked it up, and there is no clear answer here. Maybe he just made up a corporate name. Or, if the numerologists are to be believed, you can rearrange the letters to spell something related to pollution. (Someone on Goodreads suggests “Nicotine+Smog+HCA (hydrocarbon aerosols)”) Or, one could consider it a reference to a sex act, if Urban Dictionary is to be believed. (Honestly, are there any words that haven’t been used for a sex act yet?) Probably all of these are reading a bit much into it. For Klara’s religion, the machine takes the role of the the Devil, as kind of an scapegoat for what are actually human actions. Which is why killing one of the machines doesn’t actually stop the pollution, or reverse the cause of Josie’s illness.

I know I am forgetting to talk about other stuff we hit on, but in any case, this book is quite thought-provoking. Ishiguro deserves his Nobel Prize for the body of his work. Every time I read him, I am amazed at what he does with so little. His books aren’t particularly long, the language is simple, his descriptions sparse. But he creates whole worlds, makes three-dimensional characters come alive, and make the reader feel so deeply. It is writing craft at its finest.

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Just for fun, here is the list of books that our book club has read. At least the ones I have read too. Most of these were read for the club, but a few were ones I read previously - those posts pre-date the club discussion - and some I read afterward, because I missed the discussion. A few of the books were “optional” second books for a given month.

A Dream Called Home by Reyna Grande

Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin