Editorial Assistant L. M. Davenport: Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 2021), Kazuo Ishiguro’s eighth novel, explores some of his thematic mainstays—memory and obsolescence, self-deception, and the doomed nature of our efforts to demonstrate love for one another. Like his dystopian 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, Klara takes place in a near future marked by extreme class stratification and widespread machine- or artificial-intelligence-performed labor.
The narrative follows Klara, an Artificial Friend—the book’s term for an android designed to fulfill a human child’s emotional needs—who cares for Josie, her teenage owner, throughout a long illness. As Klara becomes enmeshed in Josie’s family, she learns about the social hierarchies that warp and constrain human relationships. When it becomes clear that Josie’s mother has purchased Klara as a backup daughter in case Josie’s illness proves fatal, Klara must convince the humans around her that she is not a replacement but a full and complex person who is worthy of care in her own right.
Ishiguro famously dislikes readings of his work that employ a genre lens, and most critics treated Klara as innovative in its use of a nonhuman narrator to provide an outsider’s perspective on human life. But speculative-fiction writers have been using AI characters to explore whether there’s anything special about human interiority for decades, which means Klara is entangled in their legacy, whether Ishiguro likes it or not.
In fact, Ishiguro employs numerous tropes common to AI characters—many reviewers drew attention to the apparent flatness of Klara’s emotions, her literal-mindedness, and her naïveté—while forgoing the worldbuilding that typically scaffolds and contextualizes such narration in a speculative context. This novel contains none of the cultural, political, or historical detail that gives most SF texts material for providing AI characters with depth, motivation, and nuance. In other words: Klara pulls surface elements from an SF toolkit, but without any of the structural techniques required to support them.
This absence is especially troubling given that, as SF scholars and fans have identified, AI characters have historically spoken and acted like stereotyped autistic people. Ishiguro evokes, but does not complicate, a set of recognizably autistic-coded, mechanistic hallmarks, relying on tropes including a literal approach to language, confusion about social behavior, and perceived flatness of affect. (The New Yorker review of Klara makes a similar comparison, likening her to “an autistic adult, looking for signals, trying to copy.”)
Because the novel lacks a fully textured exterior world, Klara’s narration becomes its complete focus—but she serves primarily as a blank slate onto which the novel’s other characters project their own struggles with the nature of humanness. She is also intended to be an object of readerly pity. While she gathers information, weathers Josie’s outbursts of rage or terror, and even sacrifices part of her body (at a significant, though largely subtextual, cost to her cognitive and physical abilities) in a futile attempt to heal the girl she’s been purchased for, Klara does not herself experience significant growth or change, and the novel doesn’t concern itself with the possibility that she might.
Instead, Ishiguro relegates Klara to the roles of confidant, nurse, and occasional mediator. Her inner life is devoted to parsing the experiences of those around her, and her only moment of self-reflection occurs in the novel’s final pages, when Klara admits to her former store manager that “however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach” in imitating an organic consciousness and presentation. But Klara has spent the entire novel doing precisely that, albeit in a way neither Ishiguro nor the book’s inhabitants recognize as human.
And by the end, she’s internalized their judgment of her. In Klara’s sole explicit moment of self-examination, she declares her inferiority to the humans she’s spent her life serving, which is heartbreaking, and all the more so because it neglects the rich, nuanced history of AI characters in the SF tradition in favor of what reads as authorial posturing about humans being, to use one of Klara’s favorite words, “special.” Ishiguro encourages us to feel sorry for Klara in this scene: she’s been abandoned in a junkyard and is now immobile and solitary, a pathetic spectacle who lacks the capacity to understand how badly she’s been treated.
But this only underscores the distance the book establishes between Klara’s form of consciousness and a neurotypical human one. Ishiguro casts her as an object instead of a person; we’re meant to pity her, not to identify with her experience. Given that Klara’s characterization evokes stereotypes of neurodivergence in an effort to present her as nonhuman, this invalidation of her inner life is even more troubling, as it doesn’t recognize autistic people’s humanity. True, Ishiguro doesn’t spare the novel’s human/neurotypical characters—Josie and her mother are both toxically status-oriented, while Josie’s sole human friend develops an outsized martyr complex in caring for his reclusive, unstable mother—but their inability to see Klara as fully sentient is a narrative given, not related to their other shortcomings.
Ultimately, Klara offers the familiar Ishiguro pleasures of subtext and understatement, finely rendered depictions of loss and memory, and a haunted landscape; with them, however, comes the uneasy sense that the novel is not altogether on the side of its most vulnerable inhabitant.
L. M. Davenport is a first-year PhD student in fiction at the University of Cincinnati and an editorial assistant at the Cincinnati Review. She has an MFA from the University of Alabama, where she also served as fiction editor for the Black Warrior Review; her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, BOOTH, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.
