Book Review: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

“It’s not faith that you need but rationality.” This sentence touches upon one of the central themes in Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest book, Klara and the Sun. Released on March 02, 2021 and longlisted for the Booker Prize, this book is an extension of some of the areas that the Nobel Prize winning writer has previously explored.

The current work, which can be regarded as science fiction, provides a glimpse of a dystopian future in which machines potentially replace human beings not merely for technical purposes but also social ones. Machines now possess the emotional capacity to become friends with human children, specifically those who have been genetically engineered to become more intelligent, or as the book terms it, have been ‘lifted’. This may seem far-fetched but the phenomenon of being ‘lifted’ has parallels in contemporary society: Just as better education for children today is connected to socio-economic status and increased opportunities in life, being ‘lifted’ in Ishiguro’s novel signals higher status and a better chance at life.

Klara, a robot engineered to be an Artificial Friend (AF), narrates the story and it is through her worldview that events unfold. Rather like Ishiguro’s narrators in other books – a butler in The Remains of the Day and a cloned human in Never Let Me Go – her narration brings to the fore the perspective of the ‘other’, making the reader see the world in unfamiliar ways.

A core aspect of the story is the question of what it means to be a person. AF Klara is purchased from a store as a ‘friend’ for a human child, Josie. It is through Klara that the reader learns about Josie’s strange and mysterious illness, attributed potentially to her being ‘lifted’. Through Klara’s eyes, we catch a glimpse of the conundrum that Josie’s mother experiences as she realizes the adverse consequences of ‘lifting’ her child, facing the possibility of Josie dying. But Klara, powered through solar energy, believes that she can save Josie by asking the Sun for magical help. Josie’s mother, however, has an additional motive for buying Klara. She wants Klara to learn every aspect of Josie so that when she dies, Klara can replace her in a new robotic body identical to Josie’s. This is where Ishiguro points his readers to a difficult question: Is it possible for science and technology to replicate an individual in entirety, to fully capture their true essence? As Josie’s father asks, “Do you believe in the human heart? I am speaking in the poetic sense…Something that makes each of us special and individual?”

Ishiguro closely connects issues of personhood and humanity to the contemporary fear that machines will replace human beings. A passerby remarks to Klara in a hostile fashion when she accompanies Josie to a mall, “First they take the jobs. Then they take the seats at the theatre.” Josie’s father is also forced to conclude, “That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy or transfer.”

Towards the end of the novel, Klara ruminates,“But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. It wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.” Klara reaches a conclusion about what it means to be human, but questions about her own potential personhood remain.