by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro probes the nature of humanity and altruism in new sci-fi book
What a compelling character Ishiguro has created in Klara, a robot purchased as a companion to a gravely-ill girl. Klara is intelligent, perceptive, empathetic, wise, and, at the same time, naive, ill-informed and childlike. Her first person narration mirrors these qualities—using language constrained by her programming to be simple, sometimes stilted and overly-correct.
As Klara seeks to understand her world, both in the store where we initially encounter her and in the family home where she comes to reside, she uses her superior, we are told, observational faculty to build up her knowledge base. While insightful, it borders on, what used to be labeled, the primitive. As the title suggests, she has an animistic reverence for her energy source, the sun, pleading with it to intercede on the behalf of the people she loves. For she is programmed to love, just as we are.
There is a long list of stories where robots serve as paradigms for exploring the human condition. Ishiguro breathes life into this well-worn trope by keeping the action simple, focusing on the emotional ebbs and flows in the two households where most of the novel is set.
While giving a world similar to our own a sci-fi spin, the particulars are lightly sketched, requiring the reader to infer their meanings, just as Klara must. Our only guides are snippets of overheard conversations, body language suggestive of family dynamics, signs and objects of unknown or misconstrued significance.
The literal-mindedness that Klara brings to this task, though underpinned by an inherent kindness, reinforces her magical thinking, one that leads to the story’s climax.
The message Ishiguro delivers in the final bittersweet pages seems heavy-handed. He can be forgiven, though, for having given us the complex and deeply human character of Klara. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }