The Massachusetts Medievalist couldn't put down Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, which appeared in March 2021 but had escaped my notice and my library holds list until now. Like any good dystopian fiction, this novel presents us with a world eerily similar to ours, and it's not too difficult to see how a few more advances in artificial intelligence and hypercompetitive parenting would produce a world like Klara's.
Klara's full name is Girl AF Klara, and she's an Artificial Friend, a constructed human-like machine whose literary lineage includes the Creature in Shelley's Frankenstein and Tik-Tok in Baum's Oz books. Klara is programmed to be a friend/caretaker for a young teenager, and Ishiguro neatly sidesteps the reader's question of why an AF might be necessary or desirable, leaving us to puzzle out the answer to that question through Klara's first-person narrative.
Because I'm a year late to this party, a lot of reviewers have already commented on the horrifically familiar socioeconomics of Klara's society, where wealthy parents pay to have their children "lifted" - which means that they are genetically enhanced after birth to be academically hyper-achieving. The process of "lifting" -- like Frankenstein's scientific process, never fully described -- entails potentially serious health risks, but when successful it guarantees entrance to a high-status university and subsequent financial security. Lifted children have AFs as part of a status display of both wealth and intelligence, perhaps somewhat analogous to the high-priced college admissions "coaches" currently hired by affluent families to shepherd their high schooler's applications to super-selective universities.
Klara is indeed a good AF to Josie, the human girl who chooses Klara in the AF store. We discover Klara's interior life only through her narrative and descriptions, since none of the characters is interested in Klara as an individual and she rarely, if ever, speaks about herself to them. Through Klara's thoughts about the sun, Ishiguro reveals a flaw in the programmers who designed Klara -- she seems to know nothing about religion, and yet she believes in the power of the Sun, referring to the Sun as if he (she uses the masculine, singular pronoun) is a God. Klara is solar-powered, so it makes oddly logical sense that she would think of the Sun as an omnipotent deity without any pre-programmed information to tell her otherwise.
Klara constantly informs us of the Sun's presence and activities; for example, when Josie hosts a party (hauntingly termed an "interaction meeting"), Klara thinks to herself that, "The Sun, noticing there were so many children in the one place, was pouring in his nourishment through the wide windows" (71). Klara hopes that the Sun will help Josie, who is seriously ill from the after-effects of the lifting. Standing in a barn, Klara watches the sun set, telling us that, "I gathered my thoughts and began to speak. I didn't actually say the words out loud, for I knew the Sun had no need of words as such. But I wished to be as clear as possible, so I formed the words, or something close to them, quickly and quietly in my mind" (162). Like any supplicant pilgrim looking for divine assistance, Klara’s prayer offers the Sun a deal, as she thinks that "I could do something special to please you…If I could achieve such a thing, then would you consider, in return, showing special kindness to Josie?" (164).
By not programming any awareness of religious belief into Klara's hardware and software, her Creators then did not prevent her from developing her own religion. As in many cultures throughout human history, Klara believes that the Sun is a powerful deity that controls both human and non-human affairs. She watches the sun's movements carefully and attributes cause-and-effect relationships between the sun's appearance and other events. (No spoilers, so no more detail on that thought!)
Readers of this blog who have read Frankenstein with me in a class at Lesley know that "Is the Creature human?" is one of my favorite discussion questions. Klara in many ways is not as human-like as Shelley's Creature: she is made of inorganic materials, she knew how to speak and communicate when she was "born"/ booted up, she does not eat or drink or sleep or smell. But she seems to me very Human in that she has created a system of religious beliefs about a divine, all-powerful figure who controls an otherwise frightfully random world. As usual, it's the robot, the droid, the AF, who reveals the most about humanity.
Great little fable although not his best. Klara is perhaps the only truly caring creature in the book.