Rarely do I finish a book with more questions than I started, but I did with Klara and the Sun. My early questions—what is this book about? what is an AF? is Ishiguro going to explore the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI)? Will AI turn out to be evil, like Kubrick’s HAL? What’s up with Josie and her family—where do they live, how does Josie really feel about her mother (and vice versa), where is Josie’s father? And, last but not least, what the heck is a COOTINGS machine?
The one touchpoint I found between this book and Ishiguro’s celebrated The Remains of the Day is his allusion to fascism, which figures prominently in RD, set during WWII. But Klara and the Sun is futuristic. It posits a world with a huge AI presence in the form of intelligent robots. And it fills this world with current conflicts about education, financial inequality between populations, the threat of increasing pollution, and the achievement of one’s life-goals.
The main thing we learn about Klara, Josie’s AF (artificial friend) is that she’s a wonderful, kind, sincere individual/robot. She puts Josie’s needs before her own, always trying to improve her interactions with humans. Which begs the question—is Ishiguro suggesting ever-evolving AI presents a threat to the human race? By the novel’s end, it’s clear he is not. On the contrary, Klara is the most compassionate character in the book, and Josie a typical, maturing teenager (though her off-handed way of phrasing often seems out-of-place: Klara and the Sun is set in Britain, yet Josie sounds as if she’s from a small midwestern town in the US).
Ultimately, we realize Klara and the Sun is about is the danger of placing too much stock in parents striving for their children to excel. Josie and her sister have been genetically modified, or ‘lifted,’ as Klara explains, to give them an educational advantage over ‘regular’ kids. The downside of this lifting, however, is illness and potential death. SPOILER Alert: Josie’s sister is a case in point. Josie, on the other hand, manages to survive thanks to the healing power of the sun, her only loss being the future she plans with her best friend, Rick. And that is tragic. Their dream of running away together is sacrificed to the parochial goal of educational and financial success. Josie will have a good life, Rick *may* have a good life (because he’s naturally smart and talented despite being ‘un-lifted’), and Klara, sadly, will simply devolve into recycling detritus, because she’s sacrificed her ‘secret sauce’ to stave off the pollution created by the dreaded COOTINGS machine.
All in all, I admired this book, though the questions it raised remained largely unanswered until the very end. jgk.
Children's Book Writer
Julie Krantz 