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Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is about a sick but genetically modified girl and her kindly-but-limited robot friend. It brings the convergence of AI and gene-splicing home.

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When it comes to first person narration in fiction, is it the writer who crafts an external, separate voice, or is it the author’s voice that inevitably funnels into the character? Even in my own writing, I never know for sure, and as with most things, I doubt there’s one, simplistic answer. Though, while reading Klara and the Sun, Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel (Knopf, 2021), I find myself constantly asking the question.

Klara, the first-person narrator of this sci-fi novel, is AI (or, in this book, an “AF”—artificial friend). In this world, lightweight, solar-powered androids are purchased as playmates for privileged children. The child in this case is Josie, a fourteen-year-old girl who’s raised by her single mother and “Melania Housekeeper.” Melania is not AI. She’s a real woman. A servant, really. But her purpose is much like Klara’s—keep Josie happy and safe, which is not easy because Josie is frequently ill.

Ishiguro is well-known for tightly controlled language, and Klara’s voice is a perfect conduit to tell this story because, well, she’s a robot. That’s not to say she lacks human qualities. She just seems to lack many of the bad ones. Klara is hyper-observant, obedient, generous, and cautious. She never gets angry or jealous, she’s incapable of cynicism, and she spends way more time looking out than looking in. Her voice is steady and never flowery or overwrought. Figurative language is scarce. Sound familiar? She’s the perfect observer for Ishiguro’s style. This is one of the most audacious sentences in the book:

“And Josie became part of a shape the five girls made together.”

That’s it. 

This novel is elegantly sparse. In the first half of its 312 pages, I count four settings. The department store where Klara is purchased; Josie’s house; a brief trip to a park with a waterfall; and a visit to a neighbor’s house. The rest of the world is not really shown. It’s inferred, which makes perfect sense because Klara’s not from the outside world. She’s essentially born from packaging. Just like Klara, we can only deduct how the world works by witnessing what we do from the confines of Josie’s house. We know that Josie’s mom is rich. We know that wealth disparities approach dystopic levels (Josie’s neighbor, Ricky, along with Melania Housekeeper, service the story by gradually revealing this). We know that Josie, like most children of the wealthy, has been genetically enhanced to heighten her intelligence. We know that this procedure is the cause of her illness. We know that Josie’s mother was intimately aware of the risks:

“I wonder… Why Sal passed away?”

The mother’s eyes changed, and something cruel appeared around her mouth. “What kind of a question is that?”

“I’m sorry. I was merely curious to know.”

“It’s not your business to be curious.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“What’s it to you? It happened. That’s all.”

Sal is Josie’s deceased older sister who was enhanced and became ill because of it as well.

Reading Klara and the Sun is like watching a bizarre episode of Naked and Afraid. Give Ishiguro a handful of settings and characters, 1,000 different words, a simple premise, and leave him out in the wilderness. Come back later and find that he’s somehow lying in a hammock that fronts his newly built palatial sad house. It’s wildly impressive. While Klara and the Sun doesn’t achieve the level of audacious, original world-building of, say, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Dan Simmons’s Hyperion, it’s sort of unfair to compare. Ishiguro is not attempting to do that. It’s not his style. 

What is? I hesitate to use the term “literary.” Literary unfairly suggests that every book that falls under its banner starts off with a head start over those that aren’t so refined. That hasn’t been my experience. Good is good. It’s not a genre.

And Klara and the Sun is a damn good book.

Even when it’s slow, like when Klara first visits a neighboring barn, and everything in the barn is meticulously described, we forgive the narrative because it makes sense. It’s the first time Klara’s ever been in a barn. When Klara begins her Quixotic mission to help Josie get well in the second half of the book, nothing is funny about it. It’s cringe-worthy. And when it’s revealed that Josie’s mother is on a dark, Quixotic mission of her own, I was blown away by the book’s simple sadness. 

As fans of, well, anything, we clearly admire those who can do what we cannot do. For me, Prince. Lebron James. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier. Anyone who can sail across the Pacific being guided by just the stars. I admire Kazuo Ishiguro because I can’t do what he does. Limit me to a single house as the setting for the vast majority of a novel, and I’ll create worm holes, bulldozers, drug-induced hallucinations, doors that lead to alternate universes—anything to break out. Especially during these times.

Not Ishiguro. He’s able to unfold complexity and emotion from the simplest of things. A sick girl. Her toy robot who is so much more. How much of Klara is Ishiguro? I can’t tell you. But this much is sure. There should be more Klara in all of us.

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Image by Louis Reed.