Nothing new under the sun

This is an ideal setup for Ishiguro, a great poet of what the sociologist Erving Goffman termed “interaction ritual,” the complex and high-stakes tango of “face-to-face behavior.” The art and craft of “bantering,” which preoccupied the butler Stevens in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, is reconsidered in Klara from a vantage of even greater devotion, caution, and reserve. But Klara doesn’t just serve Josie. She loves her in, it seems, a profound and maternal way.

Sophisticated AI in fiction requires a big suspension not only of disbelief but also of comprehension. AI categorically cannot become self-aware, though it may achieve a simulation of self-awareness sufficient to dupe a human. (A pessimist might suppose that by the time this occurs, humans will have grown too stupid and predictable for such a feat to be all that impressive.) This means that even the most advanced AI possesses all the genuine consciousness of a Roomba, or a broom, for that matter, so using AI to craft an allegory about slaves or second-class citizens arguably makes no sense at all.

Whether the mistreatment of something that seems human has its own moral implications is a question that Klara suggests in subtle ways. Like many dystopias, the world of this novel is one in which people fear the things that make humans human: death and loss, and the knowledge that death and loss are final. Josie is having her portrait done by a Mr. Capaldi, but this “portrait” will turn out to be ghastly evidence of a refusal to accept human limitations. A world in which simulacra are accepted as real is one in which the things we do to or with our simulacra have moral valence.

Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, in which some people turn out to be clones who turn out to be spare parts, earned him a reputation as something of a thinking man’s M. Night Shyamalan. He is a master of pacing, of seeding his narrative with puzzles and clues, and of gradual, superbly controlled revelation. The first hundred pages of Klara are slow and awkward, like a robot learning to tie its shoelaces or peel garlic, but they keep a vise grip on the reader’s curiosity. Only a writer as assured as Ishiguro could afford to take such a risk. Klara then builds toward the most satisfying kind of twist: not the one you didn’t see coming, but the one that dawns on you a fraction of a second before the story gives it away.

Much of the book’s action could serve, though Ishiguro’s intentions are characteristically ambiguous, as a parody of human religiosity and prayer. In Klara’s “free” time, she devises ways to beg or bargain for the sun’s mercy on Josie. Klara fixates on something she calls the Cootings Machine (a piece of road work equipment; Cootings is the manufacturer’s name emblazoned on the side), which, because it produces pollution, Klara suspects the sun would be pleased to see destroyed in sacrifice. She also grapples with theodicy, just like a human being, appealing to the sun to spare Josie on the (we know irrelevant) grounds that she is young and blameless.

Klara’s halting crawl toward a metaphysics is reflected in her physical movements. An older-model AF, she struggles with swampy or rocky terrain, and Ishiguro draws passages of great vividness and pathos out of, for instance, Klara’s attempt to cross a field to a barn behind which the sun sets each day. (She wants to speak to him in person, you see.) She also forms an alliance with Rick, Josie’s best friend and love interest, and the image of Rick carrying this android piggyback is one of the book’s most uncanny, not to mention alarming.

This is a world in which technological progress has roared past the ability to use it responsibly. Rick, we come to learn, is poor and “unlifted” — that is, he hasn’t undergone the genetic editing that steers promising rich children toward elite institutions. Mention is made that such editing is “not without risks,” the suggestion being that Josie and her now-late older sibling, Sal, were made unwell by it. Just as the domestic tranquility of The Remains of the Day existed like an island amid the rise of fascism and world war, so does the blandly bucolic Anywhere of Klara and the Sun persist despite automation-driven mass unemployment and civil strife. (Josie’s estranged father, an engineer laid off amid “the substitutions,” lives in a “Community” that sounds like the answer to, “What if QAnon had its own town?”)

Everything is here: the meticulously paced and deceptively simple story, the lucid prose, and the stimulating moral seriousness that one expects from Ishiguro. Yet Klara and the Sun lacks something. It stands in the same relation to its promise as a simulated intelligence does to a human consciousness. What it’s missing is people: characters to care about deeply without being instructed to, characters it’s possible to distinguish from robots. We cannot love Josie just because Klara loves her or because she loves Rick or because she says things like, “Don’t want to die, Mom. I don’t want that.” The bare-bones language; the children’s show dialogue, difficult not to read in a monotone, in which people are forever chirping variations of, “Hi, how are you?” and “See you later!”, the overall absence of personality, wears painfully on the reader. Ishiguro can keep our interest in the story but not the people to whom the story happens.

“Deceptively simple” is a tag that can give only so much cover to such a deficiency. Too often, a brilliant conceit and twist like Klara’s are squandered on characters and scenarios so smooth and bloodless that they might as well be injection-molded. We can read a great deal into Klara and the Sun. It gently encourages us to think about the human condition, about cognitions, about technology, and about the perilous collisions that can and will occur between them. But we shouldn’t have to do all the imaginative work, and as the book reaches its cheerful love-is-love-is-love conclusion, we can only think: What a relief this might have been had any of these people seemed real in the first place.

Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.