Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, 303 pages)
If you tell Alexa to turn on your lights, have named a Roomba or asked Siri to navigate around the Suez Canal, you already have a sense of what it’s like to have an “artificial friend.”
However, while we readily embraced using artificial intelligence to do work for us, we’ve been more hesitant to rush along the path where this ultimately leads, where “social robots”— robots that serve primarily as companions — await. Social robots already exist, of course, but they mostly look like toys, even ones like ElliQ that have been designed to serve as companions to the elderly. But in his eighth novel, Kazuo Ishiguro leaps ahead to a time in which artificial friends (or AFs) are commonplace in our homes, not for seniors, but for children and teens.
The world of Klara and the Sun is not quite a dystopia but feels like one, as children have been divided into groups of “lifted” and “unlifted,” learn from home on devices called “oblongs” and get together sporadically in formal “interaction meetings” so they can learn to get along with their peers.
In this world exists Klara, an AF who narrates the story, first from the store where she waits to be purchased, where she is already a generation behind the newest models. Although as a B2, fourth series, model, Klara is not as technologically advanced as the latest B3s, she is extraordinarily sensitive and observant and the store manager considers her to have the most “sophisticated understanding” of any of the AFs in the store.
She is, in a way, like Good Janet from the TV show The Good Place — human looking, or at least human enough, yet robotically “off,” speaking as if English was a third or fourth language, while constantly processing new information. After brief interactions with a teen who is interested in her, Klara can give the girl’s eye color (gray), the pitch of her voice (a “range between A-flat above Middle C to C octave”) and identify a weakness she notes in the girl’s left hip.
She can not only “think” but also feel and philosophize, as when she says this of a bull she spots in a field: “Its face, its horns, its cold eyes watching me all brought fear into my mind, but I felt something more, something stranger and deeper. At that moment it felt to me some great error had been made that the creature should be allowed to stand in the Sun’s pattern at all, that this bull belonged somewhere deep in the ground far within the mud and darkness.”
The girl with the weak hip is Josie, and she feels a bond to Klara and after several visits convinces her mother to buy Klara. Klara is happy, inasmuch as AFs can be happy — indeed, that is one of the intriguing questions that runs through the novel — how much, if at all, AI can acquire of the human heart and its emotions. But soon, she realizes that there is more wrong with Josie than the physical weakness she detected in the girl’s hip and shoulder.
Josie, it is gradually revealed, is suffering from a worsening illness that appears to have been caused by something her mother did when deciding whether to “lift” her daughter through some sort of genetic editing. She is desperate to help Josie, as she has already lost another daughter to illness and a husband to divorce. Josie’s father is among the “Post-Employed” (presumably displaced by all the robots in a radical reshuffling of society) and now lives in a community enamoured of fascism.
Klara is not Josie’s only friend; she is also close to a teenage boy named Rick, who lives nearby with his mother. When Klara, who runs on solar power, decides to help Josie by asking the sun for his help, Rick helps Klara, as much as she will allow him. But to Klara, the sun is essentially God, a mysterious but occasionally benevolent being whose “nourishment” bestows energy and healing. She makes a short pilgrimage to where she believes the sun goes to rest, to strike a deal with him in order to ask for Josie’s healing.
This simple act of faith sets into motion a series of events that are not overtly religious but still evoke ancient stories of sacrifice and redemption. (Also, it’s hard not to puzzle over Ishiguro’s intentions when the conversation involves “the Father” and “the Sun.”) But that is but one layer of many in this fine-grained examination of what could well be a realistic future for many people who are alive today. It’s much easier to imagine a Klara than it was a time-traveling Delorean. The Klaras are not here, but they are unnervingly near. What will become of them, and of us, is worth contemplation, maybe while taking in the nourishment of the sun. A
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• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75.
• MICHAEL TOUGIAS Author of The Waters Between Us presents. Virtual, via Zoom. Part of Concord’s Walker Lecture Series. Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Free. Call 333-0035 or visit walkerlecture.org.
• SCOTT WEIDENSAUL Author presents A World on the Wing. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. The Music Hall, Historic Theater, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth. Tickets cost $46. Visit themusichall.org or call 436-2400.
• ERIN BOWMAN Author presents Dustborn. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Virtual, via Zoom. Tues., April 20, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562
Featured photo: Klara and the Sun