Edwardian ladies who lap up deer blood

Leaving their British sisters in corsets, six female anthropologists set off on hair-raising adventures – from Easter Island to Siberia

By Lucy SCHOLES

Is self-knowledge overrated? It’s a question that’s at the heart of Kazuo Ishiguro’s previous seven novels – and posed again by his first since winning the 2017 Nobel Prize.

On the face of it, Ishiguro’s narrators are a disparate bunch: from a Japanese painter (An Artist of the Floating World) to an Anglo-Saxon boatman (The Buried Giant) by way of an English butler (The Remains of the Day), a world-famous pianist (The Unconsoled) and a clone bred to provide organ donations in a dystopian version of the 1990s (Never Let Me Go). One characteristic most of them share, though – together with a determinedly unexcitable prose style – is a suppressed sense of disappointment. So should they try to face up to the truth about their own lives, however painful, or should they continue to place their faith in their old consoling personal myths? By the end of Never Let Me Go, the cloned narrator still can’t quite decide if she was right to “find out things” or if she should have been content simply to “believe in things” instead.

In Klara and the Sun, the eponwith ymous narrator has the same dilemma, although she’s less aware of it than her predecessors, what with being a) more disposed to cheerfulness and b) a robot. Ishiguro has never been afraid to use the trappings of genre fiction – notably with the fantasy setting of The Buried Giant (complete with pixies and a dragon) and the sci-fi framework of Never Let Me Go. Now, in his first return to sci-fi since then, he brings us a fully conscious nonhuman character who, even more than organ-donating clones – and English butlers – has been created to serve others without undue selfreflection.

We first meet Klara in the American city store where she’s on sale as an AF: an abbreviation that, along with much else in an artfully disorientating opening section, goes unexplained for a while. (Only on page 42 do we discover that it stands for “Artificial Friend”.) In the meantime, Klara studies the world outside the shop window, with particular reference to how human emotions work, and waits eagerly for a child to choose her. Eventually, 14-year-old Josie does, and Klara moves to the countryside where Josie lives with her mother Chrissie. In the only other nearby house is teenage Rick, whose lifelong friendship with Josie is edging nervously towards love.

Perhaps it’s coincidence that Rick and Josie share their initials Romeo and Juliet. Either way, this is love across a social divide. Like most middle-class children, Josie has been “lifted”, whereas Rick’s mother has controversially decided he shouldn’t be. Again, we have to wait to discover what lifted means, but it’s no great surprise when it turns out to be genetic enhancement.

What we know immediately is that lifted children are homeeducated via a tablet (not such a scifi idea these days) and meet only at “social integration” meetings. We also know that the lifting process killed Josie’s older sister and has given Josie herself a chronic illness. Before long, in fact, it’s apparent that Chrissie has bought Klara literally to become Josie if Josie dies. For her part, the solar-powered Klara believes the Sun has divine powers that will supply a cure.

As ever, Ishiguro imagines all of this with a thoroughness that borders on the painstaking – although luckily without ever crossing into the full-on punishing, as in the Tolkienian longueurs of The Buried Giant or the 500-page dream narrative of The Unconsoled. And yet, while this book is never as boring as those were, many readers might be left just as baffled.

Granted, Klara’s part of the story does triumphantly achieve the desired effects. Her increasing empathy for people – as well as her eagerness to please them – neatly raises the question of whether we’re all, in a non-pejorative sense, artificial friends, who learn how to shape ourselves according to what other people need. Klara’s planned replacement of Josie leads to an explicit discussion of whether humans, including the ones we love most, are as unique as we like to think. That familiar self-knowledge theme is given a nice twist, with Klara tragicomically unable to notice that, despite their moments of fondness, her beloved humans still regard her as a lesser being, to be used for their own purposes.

The trouble is that this is surrounded – and at times swamped – by so many other ideas that aren’t properly worked through. “Perfunctory” is not a word traditionally associated with Ishiguro’s writing. Nonetheless, beneath the ever

measured prose, that’s what much of the novel’s content unexpectedly proves to be. Some of the loose ends are fairly insignificant, if still a little weird. At one point, for example, we’re told that Klara has no sense of smell: a fact that plays no further part in the novel. But the feeling of things half-formed applies to several bigger elements too. Once or twice, Ishiguro hints at the effects of AFs on wider society, with passing mentions of mass unemployment and white militias, but again these are left hanging. Having acted as a basis for discussion, the plan for Klara to replace Josie conveniently fizzles out. Most strikingly, there’s the whole “lifting” business, which occupies much of the book without really being explained either. Why was Josie’s so damaging to her and her sister’s health but not, it appears, that of any other children? What’s so good about “lifting” anyway that makes Chrissie take such a huge risk, when Rick seems just as able as his lifted peers? Why must lifted children be educated at home? We never find out.

As part of his battle against extraneous material in fiction, Anton Chekhov famously maintained that, if a gun is hanging on a wall in chapter one, it must be fired at some stage in the book. Despite its memorable main character, Klara and the Sun feels in the end like a novel that’s rather too full of unfired Chekhov guns.

Fiona Mozley’s novels have their subtleties and ambiguities, but when it comes to the commodification of land and housing, she is a heartfelt moralist to the point of stridency. Her first novel, the Booker-shortlisted Elmet (2017), depicted a feud between a man living in a self-built woodland home in the West Riding of Yorkshire and a rapacious landlord; one suspects Mozley would have called the latter Sir Graball D’Encloseland if Robert Tressell hadn’t already used the name in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.

Where the mystical, elemental qualities of Elmet earned it comparisons with Lawrence and Hardy, her second novel is a sprawling urban comedy more likely to recall Ben Jonson or Dickens. Once again the central theme is the corrosive effect of irresponsible land ownership, but this time seen through the prism of the gentrification of central London. The book focuses on a group of prostitutes who live and work harmoniously in a cheerily decrepit 17th-century house in Soho. Their contentment is threatened by their landlady, however, who wants to get going on what her estate agents call “blank-slating” – i.e. gutting – the building, and is hiking the ladies’ rent to drive them out. But for a sex worker, the consequence of being priced out of London is to end up in one of the battery farm-style brothels run by unscrupulous men out in the sticks, where nobody can hear you scream; so a protest campaign is launched.

It’s an ambling, episodic storyline, with several other equally dilatory storylines involving tangentially connected characters as its satellites. Mozley also follows the fortunes of a group of Cambridge graduates enduring souldestroying jobs to survive in the city; an actor working on an “Old World” fantasy TV show (allowing Mozley a laboured but justified swipe at the way such programmes make sexual violence titillating); and the nasty landlady, whose scattergun misanthropy and hangups contrast so starkly with the amiability and unfussy sexuality of the women she is trying to evict. Then there are the down-and-outs living a subterranean life in a Soho cellar, led by a sermonising old boy known as The Archbishop, who claims to have posed for Joshua Reynolds and “tells all who will listen that Casanova stole all his stories of seduction from him because he was too dignified to write them down”. This is one of many examples of the mystical sense of the past in the present that characterised Elmet being played here for laughs – another instance is the book’s title, which puns on “stew” as an Elizabethan term for a brothel.

Mozley’s narrative voice is usually fluent and witty but can be grandiloquent (though less so here than in Elmet) and even intrusive, hurrying in to gloss what the characters are saying and thinking when they are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. For the most part, though, she moves easily between mordant satire and warmly eccentric character comedy in this invigorating trumpet blast against London’s increasing homogenisation.