ON KAZUO ISHIGURO’S KLARA AND THE SUN
New York, NY: Knopf, 2021. 307 pages.
Ashlyn Mooney
What can robots know? Then again, what can people know? These are the questions—and maybe they’re really the same question—at the core of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, Klara and the Sun.
Klara, Ishiguro’s narrator, is a robot—an AF, or Artificial Friend. Designed to keep children company, she spends the first weeks of her life in a store, waiting to be bought. She’s a doll, a governess, a friend. Readers might recognize her as a plausible evolution of today’s artificial intelligence technology: she can walk, talk, and learn. She can recognize and respond to human emotions. And she runs an algorithm complex enough to render her and the other AFs “sealed black boxes,” in one character’s words, to the people who programmed her. Created in our image, they are as mysterious to us as we are to each other and to ourselves. This is typical Ishiguran irony: in the future, we have replicated consciousness--but we still don’t understand it.
Klara is a missive from the black box. The fun of this novel is that Ishiguro imagines the iterative, interactive process of machine learning as a kind of fairy tale heroine’s quest. Klara is an AI in Wonderland. From her place in the storefront window, she tries to reason out her world. Klara has superhuman capabilities—she can identify the exact pitch of a voice, perform complex arithmetic instantly—but her dataset is limited.We watch Klara’s heuristic whir on at a progress bar’s steady and sometimes tedious, if tantalizing, pace: she observes and aggregates data, makes inferences, applies them. The effect can be silly: she names an orotund passerby “Coffee Cup Lady.” But sometimes, Klara’s observations are sharp and startling, like shards of mirror: “Humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom.” Everything she learns, Klara puts toward her hardwired purpose: to “be as kind and helpful an AF as possible” to the child who chooses her.
That child is Josie, a fourteen-year old girl who lives in a large house outside the city with her mother and housekeeper. There, Klara’s dataset expands, and we discern the vague outlines of Ishiguro’s dystopia. Automation has “substituted” even the most brilliant human workers, leaving them to form violent, armed communities along racial and ideological lines, communities where wealthy, “high-status” parents routinely subject their children to dangerous “lifting” procedures in order to assure them a spot at top institutions. There’s been no singularity, no cyborg revolution: Klara’s future is a funhouse image of our present.
Shadows and silhouettes flit across the pages of this book. Wherever she goes, Klara looks for “the Sun’s patterns”—that is, the shadows cast by sunlight—on the floor or walls. In Josie’s room, Klara regularly turns her back and faces the window in order to “give privacy” to Josie and her friends, and she watches their ghostly half-reflections in the pane. Sometimes, Klara’s visual processing glitches, fracturing into a kind of mechanical cubism: Klara sees the children’s block shapes—blocks, cones, triangles—that, overlaid on a grid, are the basis of her visual perceptions. At one point, she sees “so many fragments they appeared like a solid wall. I’d also started to suspect that many of these shapes weren’t really even three-dimensional, but had been sketched onto flat surfaces using clever shading techniques to give the illusion of roundness and depth.” Ishiguro has mentioned his admiration for Plato in multiple interviews. Klara stares at shadows and reflections, trying to make sense of what she sees, mistaking those shaded shapes for the things themselves, less a creature of the uncanny valley than a prisoner of Plato’s Cave.
The moment passes; Klara never questions the world she inhabits. Our nightmare is her datapoint, and she sustains a tone of diffident cheer. Ishiguro often chooses limited, unreliable narrators, characters whose subdued, sometimes stilted narrations serve to elide and repress horrors like human organ harvesting (Never Let Me Go) or Naziism (Remains of the Day). Here, as in those novels, he wrings dramatic irony from his narrator’s readings and misreadings. When Klara sees a “Beggar Man” and his dog lying prone in the shadow of a street awning, she concludes that “it’s a good thing that they died together, holding each other and trying to help each other.” It’s all very touching, except that Klara, in her programmed innocence, asks no questions of the passersby who don’t stop and never wonders why the man and his dog are unhoused, unmourned.
As much as Klara’s narration is a reflection on, it’s a reflection of. Unlike Ishiguro’s other narrators, Klara has no capacity for elision or repression—it’s not in her programming. Her capacity for feeling is rudimentary: mostly, she just wants to make Josie’s life convenient and comfortable. She only “has” emotions in that she stores them: “The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.” She sorts details into binary categories of “kind” and “unkind,” shadow and light. When Josie leaves her in a utility closet, Klara doesn’t mind. She even speaks to humans in the third person: she is programmed to understand herself as an object, and to be untroubled by it. The discomfiting implications there—the ease with which we can consign thinking, talking beings to the status of things—belongs not to Klara, but to us. The human characters in this novel are the ones who emote and ruminate, who project their pathos onto Klara’s blankness. “Are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?” asks one woman. Is there a soul or an essence to human beings, another character wonders, that “our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer”? Klara’s isn’t programmed to answer those questions. But then, neither are we.
The Sun, the second half of the novel’s title, is Klara’s only answer to the bigger questions she encounters. Josie is sick with an unnamed disease, an illness her mother feels responsible for. Josie is also in love with a childhood friend, but he isn’t “lifted” and she is—their future is uncertain. As Klara applies her algorithm to helping Josie, we witness her construct a cosmology of her own. Klara is solar-powered; she runs on batteries. It follows that she would associate sunlight with life—with charge. But she also personifies the Sun; capitalizing his name and addressing him directly in gratitude for his “special nourishment,” she assumes that his benevolence extends to humans. And so she prays to him, bargains with him, offers to sacrifice a part of herself to him: “Would you then consider, in return, giving your special help to Josie?” she asks. Another irony—the apotheosis of human innovation, the worldview of a hyper intelligent artificial being, is sun worship. Before we can dismiss Klara’s faith, we have to recognize its resonance with our own. Humans endowed Klara with superhuman reasoning, but it seems that they also wrote their capacity for faith into her code. And whether you judge her faith is a fallibility or a strength—well, that reflects on you.
If the details of Ishiguro’s dystopian vision don’t quite add up (Why isn’t Klara networked? Why haven’t cars evolved alongside other technologies? How exactly does “lifting” work? For goodness’ sake, why are there still Tow Away Zones?), it’s because the speculative frame of Klara and the Sun is a pretense—the narrator is a machine, but her journey is human. The clones of Never Let Me Go, doomed to die as organ donors, spend much of the novel searching for a stay of their sentence; to read their story is to remember, slowly, eerily, that our lives are just as finite, our hope just as futile. Ishiguro is up to something similar in Klara, though this novel reads much more overtly as a parable. In a way, Ishiguro has given the allegory of the Cave a software update: Klara reminds us of the provisional nature of our own perceptions, of the way we mistake our systems of knowledge—robotic, religious, relational—for an understanding of reality itself. We think we see the sun, but we’re looking at a shadow; we think we see each other, but we’re looking in a mirror.
Ashlyn Mooney is a teacher and writer. She lives in New York.