Klara and the Sun is the eighth novel written by Japanese-born British author, Kazuo Ishiguro. It is his second dystopia novel after Never Let Me Go.
Klara is an Artificial Friend, or AF for short, an android designed to be a companion to a teenager. Klara becomes fixated on Josie, a girl who sees the android in the shop window and eventually gets brought by her family. However, Josie has been genetically altered to enhance her intelligence, but this makes the teen ill. Klara resolves to make Josie well again by asking a favour from the Sun, whilst Josie’s mother has her intentions for the android.
Klara and the Sun has been compared to Never Let Me Go since they are both dystopias that focus on a maligned group. In Never Let Me Go the main characters were clones who were conditioned to be living organ donors, whilst Klara and the Sun was about an android that moves in with a family. Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun were in the same genre and there were tonal similarities but there were also a lot of differences.
Never Let Me Go was set in an alternative version of England in the 1970s to 1990s, Klara and the Sun was set in near-future America. The world of Never Let Me Go had been established for a long time and the main characters so conditioned from birth to believe their destiny was to be nothing more than harvested for organs. The societal change in Klara and the Sun was more recent, meaning there was more resistance, as shown in Part Four when Klara went to the city with Josie’s family and friends. There were glimpses of the hostility towards the rise of AFs and the process of ‘Lifting.’ As a fan of dystopian fiction, I am fascinated by worldbuilding and I wanted more, but this book was written from Klara’s perspective and too much information would have felt forced.
Klara’s story was one of slow reveals making it feel like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The first part of the novel was set in a store and Klara’s knowledge of the world was all she could see through the window. The world slowly expanded as she goes to Josie’s family home, Morgan’s Fall, Rick’s home, and eventually the city. Klara acted as a reader’s surrogate since she was a witness to many conversations but remained silent, whether it was watching Josie with her friend Rick to make sure they weren’t getting up to any funny business, or Rick and his mother meeting a college recruiter. Some situations felt more believable than others.
Klara was portrayed as a character of contradictions. She was intelligent and had strong observational skills, but was also naïve. She had a childlike view of the world which was odd considering she was designed to be a companion to a teenager. Klara worshipped the sun like it was a deity since she was solar-powered, leading her to pray and make deals, including one to try and save Josie. This was one of the least believable aspects of the novel since smart and logical characters were willing to help Klara on her vandalism mission to save Josie. Since Klara was an android, she spoke in a formal, robotic manner which meant the novel did have a stilted quality to it.
Klara and the Sun explores a lot of big ideas. The most obvious was about the future of robotics and artificial intelligence, which was particularly fitting because it’s a current issue. There’s a lot of debate about the role of AI in modern society and it’s encroaching on many aspects of life. In the world of Klara and the Sun androids were used to replace friends and social interactions since children were educated online. This idea was felt like it was influenced by the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns it caused, but Ishiguro had finished the novel by the time the pandemic happened.
The other hot topic was the question of genetic engineering. There is an ethical issue about whether it’s right to change someone’s DNA to give them an advantage. For Josie and her family being lifted was a high-risk, high-reward process since she would be set for life, but if it went wrong, she could die. This rise of genetic engineering led to new forms of discrimination since ‘lifted’ people got the best jobs and places at college, at the expense of ‘non-lifted’ people. Rick and Josie’s father suffered from this new world order despite their obvious intelligence.
The final theme in the novel involved Josie’s Mother who had her own agenda. She wanted Klara to be more than a companion for Josie. The Mother asked Klara about Josie and to mimic the teen, leading to questions about what she was planning. This gave Klara and the Sun its human element since anyone could relate with, the desperation of a parent to preserve their child.
Klara and the Sun has ideas that have been explored many times in sci-fi before. Due to Ishiguro’s writing style, the subjects were handled in a more low-key, literary manner and it was a slow-burn novel.
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