Review of Klara and the Sun
an exploration of identity, change and love
January 2023. I write this while I am sick with Covid in Byron Bay. my friend Phil gifted me this book as a Christmas present.
Compared to some of my other favourite fictional works (To Kill a Mockingbird, Hamlet), Klara and the Sun is written with more subtlety and nuance. The opening section in the store recapitulates the naivete and angst of adolescence, where the new artifical friends (AFs) hope to be chosen, to be deemed worthy. The B3s even act like cliquey teens, acting genial to the oblivious B2s, but then grouping among themselves. Its symmetry to human affairs evidently aims to help us empathise with Klara, divulging the AFs as vulnerable creatures. The uniqueness of the novel partly lies with the humanisation of Klara. While most fiction tends to characterise AI as a cognitively superior, servant-like, and a potentially sinister entity, Klara is the opposite - innocent, pure of heart, with imaginative fantasies and superstitions (the Sun, the Cootings Machine). It's similar to but more nuanced than films like A.I Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Bicentennial Man (1999) in that regard.
The 'Portrait' for Josie is a great philosophical entry into several lingering questions that Ishiguro poses - what does it mean to be human? Is there some unique 'essence' that lies in the beloved, or is love generalisable, coming out of deep primal instincts? Is love selfish? For instance, forcing Josie to sit through the sessions with Mr Capaldi and making Klara give up her identity to ‘become Josie’ is clearly not for Josie’s sake, but rather, to ease the parents' void if Josie dies and to allow them to continue to project their love.
The idea of loving a clone of someone also touches on Theseus's ship paradox - if every atom in something was replaced or cloned in the same position, would it still be the same thing? Our instinct might be to say no, but of course most atoms in our bodies are not the same as they were when we were kids. Similar to Heraclitus's quip that 'no man crosses the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man', our physical manifestations are constantly subject to flux. I might also pose a paradox in more scientific terms - imagine if a human (let’s call him Phil) could divide like bacteria (by mitosis), splitting into two separate clones, which then is the real Phil? If King Solomon were asked to pick one to live and one to die, would it matter as much as if there were only one?
This is one of the few questions that Ishiguro dares to supply an answer to, right at the end, during Klara’s reflection - ‘I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don’t think it would have worked out so well. Not because I couldn’t have achieved accuracy. But because however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach… There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.’
Klara’s conclusion resonates deeply with our perceptions of love – that there is something metaphysically meaningful and irreplaceable. For instance, to the people we work with or a certain acquaintance, it may not matter too much if we were swapped out with an identical clone. We’re just another person with a set of functions – a person we go to see when we’re sick, a shopkeeper that we buy groceries from. There is nothing perceptibly different and so the uneasy knowledge they are in some sense not the same can be ignored if its undetectable to our senses. But Ishiguro implies that this ruse cannot work for someone that we care about in a deeply meaningful sense, that we perceive and project a ‘soul’ onto them that exceeds functional likeness.
Over the arc of the novel, there is a combination of naïve hope and foreboding that Josie will die and that Klara will have to replace her. We view with scepticism Klara’s plan to call on the divine providence of the Sun (spirituality is conjectured to be one of the hallmarks of homo sapiens compared to prior hominids). Yet somehow Josie gets better and the impending sense of tragedy is parted like clouds after a storm. But there is little celebration at the end of the book because not only do Josie and Rick walk their separate ways, but Klara is eventually left in a junkyard when Josie moves onto College and hence doesn’t need the companionship of an Artificial Friend, nor a clonal replica.
A theme of obsolescence threads through the book – the newer AFs replacing the older models, the father is ‘substituted’ from his old job, the Portrait of Josie, Klara being left in the Yard, and even Rick’s admission that the plan he had made with Josie is not going to work out – ‘I’m saying Josie and I will always be together at some level, some deeper one, even if we go out there and don’t see each other anymore. But once I’m out there, I know I’ll keep searching for someone just like her. At least like the Josie I once knew.’
Ishiguro seems to present the topic of love paradoxically. The promises that Josie and Rick make to each other are brimming with sincerity and hope, the Mother loves Josie ‘like nothing else in the world’, and the old man and woman’s embrace on the street that Klara observes is a recurring image throughout the novel. On the other hand, the story is full of broken relationships among the parents (such as Miss Helen and Mr Vance) and the idea of change works in concert with the theme of obsolescence. Klara is someone who is pure of heart without being naïve. She sacrifices her ‘vital liquids’ in order to save Josie’s life, and while we the reader feel sorry for her as she is left behind, she accepts everything that she has learnt and done with gratitude and appreciation, an ability that makes her in an important role model for the humans.
Thus, love is powerful enough to endow people with a special ‘something’ beyond the reach of mimicry, it is important enough to sacrifice oneself for, and yet it is subject to change, is sometimes unreciprocated, and it is in some cases a destructive liability. We might see the Sun itself is a metaphor for love. Its nurturing rays represent unconditional love, constant and forever, without a need for self-fulfilment and reciprocation. But can humans ever recapitulate the kind of love that Klara and the Sun exemplify?