Book Review: Klara and the Sun

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021)

I can’t exactly say I was in the mood for a heaping helping of existential dread. But when Kazuo Ishiguro releases a new book, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the mood or not—you go get it. (That is, I go get it.)

Ishiguro has bounced around among genres throughout his long career. Some of you might know him best for the classic repressed-English-butler story The Remains of the Day. On the other hand, Klara and the Sun (his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature) is science fiction, leaning ever so slightly on the dystopian side. As such, it’s earned comparisons to his 2005 sci-fi novel Never Let Me Go. The comparisons are justified to an extent. But only to an extent.

Both Klara and Never Let Me Go posit a future in which humanity has vastly improved itself in a scientific sense, aided by a willingness to throw ethics out the window. Hence the dystopian leanings and the dread. Never Let Me Go dealt with cloning; Klara deals with artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Both books look at their shiny new society through the eyes of a character who’s being asked to pay part of the steep price for achieving it.

It may be difficult to figure out exactly how artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are related in this context, but Ishiguro has a gift for juxtaposing different themes as sharply and memorably as he juxtaposes different images. We know from the start that the titular Klara is an “Artificial Friend,” built to be the life-size, lifelike plaything of a child; what we don’t immediately know is why Josie, the child who takes her home, needs such a friend. Or why Josie gets sick all the time. Or why Josie’s mother acts so strangely toward Klara.

As these mysteries slowly unravel themselves, the dread inexorably creeps in. But here’s where Klara starts to diverge from its predecessor, for Ishiguro ends up using his innocent narrator in a wholly different way here. Klara observes the world closely—she has an “ability to absorb and blend everything she sees around her,” according to the manager of the store that sells her—and draws conclusions that seem logical to her but wildly naive, at best, to us readers. But while Kathy, the clone at the center of Never Let Me Go, had her innocence brutally stolen, Klara . . . doesn’t.

What makes the story so striking is how Klara, the product of technology, knows so very little of that field that her thinking doesn’t take it into account at all. She is a young woman, in effect, with a simple (but not simplistic) view of the world, who perceives deep significance and connections in everything—you might almost say a young woman of faith. Where Klara’s faith takes her is a story that’s not entirely free of bleakness, but at the same time it offers a strange sort of hope, a hope that was missing from the grim world of Never Let Me Go. How Ishiguro’s ideas have developed and changed since 2005, I’m not entirely sure, but I do know I’ll be thinking about Klara and the Sun for a long time. And not in an existential dread kind of way.

Book Links:

Klara and the Sun on Amazon

Klara and the Sun on Bookshop

Other Links:

Here’s part two of my interview with Lindsey Anne Scholl on The Dorothy L. Sayers Podcast.

One final note: With Easter coming up, I’m changing the schedule a little. There’ll be another book review next Sunday, March 28, and then I’ll skip Easter Sunday and be back on April 11.