Nobel winner imagines our friends electric
KLARA And The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, is a distillation of everything that has made him such a tender geographer of love, memory and loss.
It’s also a companion piece to 2005’s dystopian Never Let Me Go, which focused on the lives – and deaths – of three human clones and was adapted for the big screen with Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield.
Ishiguro’s shift into what was, ostensibly, sci-fi territory was mildly alarming but it was just a pretext to write about what most newly middle-aged writers find themselves unable to ignore – the sudden terror of ageing.
Never Let Me Go was also concerned with the bafflement of adolescence, which we drift through waiting for an adult signal as to when ‘real life’ starts.
This theme of teenage bewilderment also cascades through the narrative of Klara And The Sun. And in a lesser writer’s hands, this story of Klara, an AF – artificial friend – designed purely to guide children through the loneliness of their teens, would be slathered in cynicism. But Ishiguro’s treatment of his robotoid narrator is generous and finespun. We first meet her in a shop window where her curiosity is noted by the store manager: ‘Klara has so many unique qualities, we could be here all morning,’ the manager tells a customer. ‘But if I had to emphasise just one, well, it would have to be her appetite for observing and learning.’
Klara is bought by the mother of Josie, a teenager with health problems. As Klara’s ‘intelligence’ develops, she tries to find a cure for Josie’s illness. Klara is solar-powered, so her relationship to the sun is that of a devotee to a god. But the sun cannot cure Josie. And Josie’s melancholic mother, who’s already lost one daughter to illness, seems to be lining up Klara to replace Josie. Ishiguro’s somewhat unheralded knack for cramming his novels with thriller-ish narrative hooks is on full peacock-tail display here and this, coupled with his flat, simple writing style, will ensure that many will rip through Klara And The Sun in one sitting. But it would be better to linger, to savour this sumptuously moving and, yes, optimistic novel.
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