Klara is an AF (“Artificial Friend”) who sits in a store and eagerly awaits the arrival of the child who will choose to take her home. Because she has emotional intelligence that most AFs lack, Klara loves being placed in the store’s front window and getting a detailed look at all the human interactions that are taking place outside. At long last, Klara is chosen to be a companion for a child named Josie, but as she adjusts to life in Josie’s home, she learns that Josie’s family has unusual plans for her.
As an author, Kazuo Ishiguro is interested in unpacking what it means to be “human” and questioning the ethics of uninhibited technological growth. In Never Let Me Go, he forces readers to confront the possibility of cloning people and considers whether a clone can have a soul; he raises similar questions and concerns in Klara and the Sun, this time about the sentience of Artificial Intelligence and the possibility that AI might become too “human” for people to simply build, use, and discard with impunity.
Klara’s narration is opaque enough that readers never truly lose sight of the fact that she is a machine, yet she has a sensitivity to nuance in human interactions and a detailed understanding of complex qualities, such as pathos, that make the line between her conscience and a regular person’s conscience seem quite thin. Klara’s emotional sophistication first comes to light when she is standing at a display window in the store; upon observing an elderly couple reuniting, she is able to detect almost instantly that they feel a combination of elation and sorrow. “You never miss a thing, do you?” asks the Manager who looks after Klara and her fellow AFs in the store. Klara truly doesn’t miss a thing, and that is what makes her subsequent situation with Josie’s family so tragic.
Through Klara’s eyes, readers become acquainted with a child who suffers from the side effects of novel genetic editing and the people who are desperately trying to care for her in conflicting ways. Josie’s ambitious mom, whom Klara refers to as “The Mother,” has a foil in Nick, Josie’s childhood friend. Nick has not undergone the same genetic editing as Josie and seeks to comfort her with the familiarity of a “normal” childhood friendship. The Mother, on the other hand, attempts to “preserve” Josie’s personality and intelligence by harnessing the latest technology and purchasing Klara as a partial caregiver. Klara also wants Josie to recover and thrive, but instead of copying the tactics adopted by The Mother or imitating the close friendship provided by Nick, she uses a rational decision-making process to come up with her own plan to save Josie’s life. It’s breathtaking, yet also highly unsettling, for a piece of technology to think and behave in the way that Klara does.
I would recommend Klara and the Sun for anyone who is curious about the ways in which technology could alter the world or those who wonder how people might behave with remarkable technological advancements at their disposal. Ishiguro is a master of writing “alternate realities,” which means that his characters and settings feel eerily close to our own lives and give us ample food for thought as we navigate our rapidly-evolving world. I finished the book feeling an odd combination of sad, sickened, thoughtful, and spellbound; only an author with an imagination like Ishiguro’s could leave me with so much to chew on.
