Klara and the Sun (2021)
Why this one?
Pure selfishness. This has been sat on my shelf for about nine months, waiting to be read. It’s by Kazuo Ishiguro, who I evidently love. And look at it, it’s pretty.
I’m sticking this slightly tenuously in the Vanquished Foes category despite the fact that it didn’t make last year’s shortlist (won, of course, by Damon Galgut’s The Promise). A lot of people expected it to, and it was on the longlist, so that’ll do right?
Ishiguro is of course a previous Booker winner, with 1989's The Remains of the Day (one of my top 3 overall) - you can read much more about him over at that linked article. He was also nominated in 1986 for An Artist of the Floating World, which lost to Kingsley Amis' The Old Devils (my least favourite!), in 2000 for When We Were Orphans (which lost out to The Blind Assassin), and most recently in 2005 when he was among the favourites for Never Let Me Go but John Banville's The Sea was a surprise winner.
Klara is also, inevitably, getting the film treatment, with Dahvi Waller (Mad Men, Miss America) slated to adapt.
Thoughts, etc.
Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, released to much anticipation last year at the height of the Covid Pandemic. It’s told from the perspective of an AF (Artificial Friend), a robotic life-form created to help provide company for children in a world in which they are no longer able to (for reasons not initially stated) socialise in school-like settings. As in Never Let Me Go, many key details are withheld. We come to understand via Klara’s limited but perceptive observations that this world is different to our own in ways we don’t quite understand (beyond just the existence of sentient AI-based lifeforms, of course.) Klara is chosen by a child called Josie, who forms an immediate bond with her. As Josie becomes sick, Klara becomes convinced that she knows how to save her. Along the way, we learn more about the world, which (without giving too much away) is one in which genetic engineering and its impact on life chances plays a significant role.
As many have observed, it shares a lot with previous Ishiguro classics. Its most obvious similarities are with Never Let Me Go, with which it shares a lot (perhaps almost too much). Klara’s inevitable but seemingly willingly embraced servitude more interestingly brings to mind Stevens in Remains of the Day. I’m also told the The Buried Giant (another one I’ll come to in the not too distant future) shares some concerns. Ishiguro is open about this - he’s happy to acknowledge the thematic threads that run through his work. Even as someone with relatively limited exposure to his output, though, I did find that structurally there was a degree of predictability to Klara. Whether or not that’s a bad thing depends entirely on perspective - you certainly know that the reveal will be worth waiting for, which makes this an obvious page-turner.
In any case, this is very much worth a read just for the beauty of the prose. I think if anything I love Ishiguro even more as a stylist than a philosopher - his writing is so starkly pared-back, crystal clear and readable that it’s just a joyful place to inhabit. The tour de force in this book for me is the introductory segment, in which Klara is pretty much statically fixed in position in a department store window throughout. The way he brings this unpromising scenario to life, turning a narrow field of vision into an endlessly rich and colourful world of exploration is nothing short of incredible. Of course, it’s the rest of the novel in miniature, finding wonder and consolation in the small things, regardless of what’s going on outside in the world.
In between, it’s a novel of ups and downs. I continued to enjoy spending time with Klara, but found most of the other characters hard to fully care about - with the possible exception of Rick (though maybe that’s the point). Klara’s cutesily naive robotic turns of phrase felt both like a voice I’d heard numerous times before in fiction, and also at times a bit gratingly twee in its repetitiveness. The storytelling is often a little heavy with forced symbolism and coincidence.
Overall, though, it’s book that flew by and was a pleasure to spend time with. After some of the very rewarding but more complex winners I’ve been reading of late, this felt like light relief, and a return to a comforting place. But I can absolutely see why it wasn’t seen as strong enough to be shortlisted - it’s Ishiguro doing Ishiguro very well, but beyond that, there were evidently more deserving works to be shortlisted (not that that’s stopped the judges in the past, to be fair…)
Booker & Nobel Prize winner; all round nice chap; and a pretty mean guitarist to boot. What a guy!
Score
8
Thoroughly recommended, but not entirely essential. I gave 2021’s Booker winner, The Promise, a possibly less than generous 8.5, for reference.
Next up
I’m going to dip my toes in the Women’s/Orange Prize with the first winner, A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore.
