Nobel winner Kazuo Ishiguro reaches for the sun

FICTION
Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro
Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature places him back on safe ground with gentle, maudlin, speculative fiction. Our narrator, Klara, is a robot, an “Artificial Friend”, or AF, designed as a subservient companion for children.

When we meet Klara, she is sitting in a retail store, waiting. She spends her day watching the sun track across shopfronts and longing to be adopted by the children who visit, browse, and overlook her in favour of more advanced models. She is chosen at last by Josie, a sickly child who lives a cloistered life in a well-appointed country home with a brusque housekeeper and her distracted, vaguely sinister mother. She has little social contact, takes school remotely through digital devices and suffers from a debilitating illness.

Practically every page of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel works overtime.Credit: AP

This is slowly revealed to be a side effect of being “lifted”, some kind of gene-editing process that privileged parents are obliged to subject their children to or risk them failing to excel in society. Josie’s only friend, Rick, is “unlifted”, putting a strain on their relationship as they slouch towards adulthood.

Like the public/private school dilemma presented to upwardly mobile families today, it’s a matter of keeping up with the Joneses, only in Ishiguro’s dystopia, the Joneses are genetically engineered, eugenicist ubermensch.

It is hinted, although never made explicit, that this society has fascist leanings. Nobody is better than Ishiguro at finding genteel euphemisms for chilling concepts. Children are “lifted” or left behind. Public intellectuals have been “substituted. Well-dressed people are described as “high rank″⁣.

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In this there are echoes of Ishiguro’s previous speculative fiction masterpiece, Never Let Me Go – in which hapless clones look forward to the day they can “complete” after their organs are harvested – but the horrific meaning of this term is only slowly revealed to the reader.

In this way, it re-treads ground well-worn by Ishiguro’s body of work. Each novel is in some way a genre re-skin of the last. In Klara we have a pure-hearted narrator driven by a misguided sense of duty – and a point where the reader begins to understand the tragic nature of our protagonist’s existence in a way that she will never be capable of.

There’s a plot, but through Klara’s blinkered worldview it is strangely peripheral. There’s a quest, of sorts, in which Klara (who is solar powered) becomes obsessed with the idea that the sun can cure Josie’s illness, and attempts to win the sun’s favour. There is, as you’d expect, a deeply disquieting revelation towards the end of the book that throws the rest of the narrative into focus, although the import of it is lost on Klara. In a banal dystopia, Klara just wants to be the best companion to a sick girl she possibly can.

For all its sophistication, it’s somewhat shaggier than Ishiguro’s earlier work. Digressions and little narrative cul de sacs dot the novel, and it’s rather heavy on dialogue, which has never been the author’s strength. Ishiguro’s characters have always had a tendency to speak like robots, so to make his protagonist a lonely, loveable robot is a stroke of brilliance.

Klara’s perception of the world is a mix of acute observation, analytical analysis and child-like naivety. From her point of view, objects, events and people in the world around her shift in and out of prominence depending on her emotional state and current goals.

The way she’s written is an astonishing technical feat, at once a poetic rendering of a nascent soul’s attempt make sense of a chaotic, opaque world and a commentary on the way modern life is mediated by technology and algorithms.

Practically every page of Klara and the Sun works overtime. There’s so much going on, all with understated elegance. Everything is at once a metaphor, plot point, and glancing observation of a bottomless reservoir of melancholy at the heart of the human condition.

Ishiguro’s latest is perfectly tuned, technically adept, emotionally devastating. To read the final pages feels like reaching the end of a love affair, or crashing a motorcycle. One is surprised, exhilarated, walks away feeling fortunate, and is unaware until sometime later that one is limping.

It’s a bruising – strangely uplifting – elegy to the very possibility of love, and the finest work to date by an already deified novelist. Hyperbole doesn’t do it justice. Read it.

Liam Pieper’s most recent novel, Sweetness and Light, is published by Hamish Hamilton.

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