Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel has fun with human foibles,
Book features solar-powered artificial friend built to offer teenagers companionship
We’re here, Kazuo Ishiguro and I, in our various countries and abodes of pandemic isolation, connecting over a Zoom call — I’m seeing his office, he’s seeing my living room.
“The last time we spoke we were at the Penguin Random House offices in Toronto,” he says from London, England. “I remember takeout containers of food over the table.” Such was the book tour in the Before days — so busy going from interview to meeting that there was no time for lunch.
But this time, on some levels, meeting is more intimate. We’re seeing a more personal side of each other. Which is an interesting thing given the themes he explores in his new book, “Klara and the Sun.” It’s a book in which, the 2017 Nobel Prize winner says, “I might be asking … about loneliness.”
It started off as a children’s book, with Klara as a “dog or a doll” — where the character is anthropomorphized. We laugh as talks about how he stumbled over the word in a previous interview, this time getting it right. The attraction of that kind of children’s literature is that it allows for what he calls “foreshortened logic.”
“I kind of like the world that is allowed to exist in these young children’s books,” he says. “All of this crazy logic is allowed very naturally, so the moon could be a person that talks, or you can open the window and put up a ladder and walk to the moon.”
But Ishiguro’s daughter, Naomi, who is also a novelist, put a stop to that idea very early.
“She knew quite a lot about children’s literature … And she said, ‘No, no, that is not a suitable story for young children. You will traumatize them. In fact, you must not go anywhere near a young child with that story,’” he says.
Klara is an AF, an artificial friend. She stands in the window of a toy store, yearning for the sun — she is solar-powered, after all, and the sun provides her “nourishment.” Her function is to be a friend to a young person, whichever young person happens to come in, choose her and buy her.
“I suppose she’s a creature that’s been created to help with human emotions,” Ishiguro says. “She’s been created specifically to help teenagers not get lonely.”
He hesitates on the word creature, it seems to me; I felt the same way. It’s hard to see Klara as a machine primarily because Klara is a first-person narrator and we are seeing and hearing everything from her point of view.
“From the word go, when she still knows very little about the world, she’s seeing everything through the lens of human loneliness because she thinks that’s what she has to tackle,” he says.
Which makes her very perceptive. And so, from her spot in the window, her view of the outside world limited, she begins to form impressions about humankind. She is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, coming to her task with no assumptions, describing her world as she sees it to us.
“This is where this foreshortened logic idea came in, I thought you can start building her world view just out of what’s visible,” Ishiguro says.
Which is actually quite refreshing sometimes — and allows Ishiguro to be poignant but also have some fun with human foibles.
Klara sees two old people meet up, in tears, for example, and creates in her mind a logical reason for their apparently conflicting emotions of joy and sorrow. Does it have anything to do with reality?
She sees a homeless man and his dog grow silent in a doorway as darkness falls — she assumes they have died. But then the sun comes up through the buildings and they get up and start their day. She assumes the sun has given them energy and brought them to life.
The other thing Klara provides is a structure for telling a story about life — because of the way she learns, she starts off as a toddler, learning fresh, Ishiguro says, “then very quickly she can become like a teenager; she can become like a parent. And, in a very short space of time toward the end, she’ll be like an elderly person, whose usefulness to the person she’s been helping is gone.
“So I thought I could get the whole kind of different stages of human experience just compressed into just a few short years if I had a creature like Klara,” he says.
While Klara doesn’t approach the world with preconceived notions, neither does the reader approach Klara with preconceived ideas about what her character must be like. (“Well, maybe a few little things about fearing machines or robots will take us over,” Ishiguro says, “but nothing compared to “the kind of prejudices we bring toward most human characters in fiction.”)
And so there’s a blank slate for the reader, too. This, again, is where Ishiguro is having a little fun. He introduces us right from the start to the expectation that the character or experience is quite detached from us.
“I quite like doing that to readers,” he laughs. “By the time the reader realizes there is something incredibly familiar about what’s going on they’ve let down their defences. It blindsides them.”
Klara is eventually bought by a young girl named Josie. There’s a sadness to Josie that Klara intuits; she has a grave illness and she is lonely. Her mother is divorced from her father and there have been other family tragedies.
“It’s not quite dystopian,” Ishiguro says, “but it’s getting there.” He references another earlier novel, “Never Let Me Go,” which he describes as having a very cruel backdrop.
“But within that kind of cruel fate, I wanted to show human beings behaving decently toward each other,” he says. “The story up front is one of human decency even though, societally, things are quite bleak and dark.”
Any resemblance to the current pandemic is strictly coincidental, he says. Although the similarities are quite remarkable: Josie takes her school lessons online, isolated from her peers, missing out on the necessary social meetings that allow them to grow and learn about each other and the world.
In mid-sentence I break into a coughing fit. “Excuse me,” I say. “Are you OK?” Ishiguro asks. “Would you like a glass of water?” He says this latter with a small laugh, knowing he can’t get me one, but wanting to extend the kindness.
We had begun talking about one of the other interesting things about Klara: that she doesn’t have an inner voice. And yet, she is building on what she knows, hearkening back to previous things we’ve seen in the book. It allows Ishiguro a way to point out quirks in human behaviour, even in how we build impressions — and mistaken impressions — of each other and the world around us.
And as she builds impressions the lens she’s looking through becomes wider.
“Klara is wondering if there is something fundamentally lonely about human beings,” he says. “Each individual human being is so complex, and each person builds up a whole kind of complicated edifice around himself or herself which makes each person unique and individual. But, by the same token, it makes it very difficult to build bridges to the neighbouring edifice, even if you’re sharing a home.”
When Klara moves in with Josie, she moves from the city to the country, seeing an unbroken horizon — and lots of sun. There’s a play on moving from the city to the pastoral, contrast and paradox being reinforced again.
“I wanted a very important dimension to Klara’s vision to be something that was outside of technology and science. That was almost irrational,” he says.
She also gets a lot more sun. And she begins to turn to the sun in the hopes that it will nourish Josie, too. Make her better. Take away her pain.
“It is sort of like pagan sun worship, in a way,” Ishiguro says. “But I think it’s a deep instinct in human beings and that’s her source of hope.”
Still, we are reminded every once in a while that Klara is a machine. Whenever she wants to give Josie and her family “privacy” she goes and stands by the fridge — of course, another machine, with a comfortable bulk and hum. It’s a very funny touch, the AI needing comfort. But it does reinforce what Ishiguro had said earlier about what the book was about. Loneliness. And connection. And love.
So what are we left with? Hope. Acts of kindness. Like those Klara shows to Josie, or like Klara experiences — no spoilers here — at the end of the book. Or like offering a glass of water, by reflex, even though its impossible to do, because we want to be kind to each other.
And so after chatting some more about the pandemic, how he’s doing, what he thinks, I click “leave meeting” on the bottom of my Zoom screen and am alone in my living room, looking at a blank screen where, just a moment ago, one of the greats of modern literature and I connected.