The Faith of Androids: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

The Faith of Androids: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
New York: Vintage International, 2022; 320 pp., $16.95

To age is to watch old worlds fade away, see our perceptions of others (and ourselves) alter shape, and grapple with the uncertainty of memory, which is why the voice of Kazuo Ishiguro, the 2017 Nobel Prize winner for literature, so resonates. Ishiguro’s novels feature unreliable narrators living in lost or vanishing worlds—the Shanghai of the 1930s (When We Were Orphans), the Nagasaki of the 1940s (A Pale View of Hills), a post-plague England of aging knights (The Buried Giant), and the time of a twentieth-century English lord (The Remains of the Day). Ishiguro has also looked forward: to a troubled new world of cloning (Never Let Me Go) and now, in Klara and the Sun (2021), to a world of genetic engineering, and androids who serve as artificial friends. The old may inevitably pass away, but Ishiguro reminds us that the real question is what parts of the past will anchor our future.

Klara and the Sun begins when Klara, an AF or “artificial friend,” who will be the android narrator of the story, stands waiting mid-store for a child to befriend. Klara spends her days gazing through the window at people passing outside and watching the rays of the sun as they make their way through the store. Klara’s life mission, to befriend, is anchored in her understanding of the sun, who she anthropomorphizes, calling him Sun rather than sun.

The Sun is good, Klara knows, and she gives thanks for “his special nourishment” and “his kindness to us.” Solar-powered, Klara depends on the Sun for energy, but Sun is not an impersonal force or distant benefactor, but a someone who sees Klara even as she sees the Sun:

“I could tell that the Sun was smiling towards me kindly,” Klara muses, “as he went down for his rest.”

The child for whom Klara waits finally arrives in the form of Josie, a 14-year-old from an affluent family. Once selected, Josie and Klara head off to the country to live with Josie’s mother Chrissie and “Melania Housekeeper.” Josie, we soon learn, is one of the “lifted,” a child who has been genetically “advanced” to give her superior abilities, which will make possible greater opportunities. Yet the choice to lift has not been without its risks, for as we soon learn, Josie’s sister was lifted and then died, and Josie herself is now in physical decline.

In Ishiguro’s telling, Klara has been wonderfully created to be a friend. She is kind and empathetic, with keen powers of observation. “The more I observe,” Klara says, “the more feelings become available to me.” To befriend Josie well, Klara becomes a student of people, who “in their wish to escape loneliness,” she sees, sometimes make “maneuvers” that are “complex and hard to fathom.” Klara also studies Josie’s mother, who wrestles with anxiety and guilt over Josie’s frailty and possible death.

To “advance” a child, as all parents eventually learn, is a subtle mission, for the best parts of being human cannot be engineered (and certainly not genetically). Parents can only put children on paths, and then watch as young lives precariously build in fits and starts. Perhaps this is why we will always be drawn to stories of engineered human advancement, for they suggest achievement can be made easy, or at least easier, when in our experience it so often proves hard. In the character of Josie, Ishiguro gives us a young woman who has been enhanced for success, and yet whose very breath turns out to be dependent on what is completely outside her control.

Yet, as the title makes clear, Klara and the Sun is not just a novel about Klara and Josie; it’s a story about the light and power of the Sun, too. Klara may be a manufactured android, but in Ishiguro’s telling she is, quite remarkably, a believer. Her eyes see goodness and light in the Sun, and her moral world is rounded, for she recognizes darkness too, such as in the eyes of an angry bull in a field, on whom, quite improbably, the sun’s rays still rest:

Its face, its horns, its cold eyes watching me all brought fear into my mind, but I felt something more, something stranger and deeper. At that moment it felt to me some great error had been made that the creature should be allowed to stand in the Sun’s pattern at all, that this bull belonged somewhere deep in the ground far within the mud and darkness, and its presence on the grass could only have awful consequences.

Ishiguro’s narrators are sometimes unable to act—as in Stevens the butler in The Remains of the Day, whose sense of duty prevents him from choosing love—but in Klara he gives us a protagonist in motion. Klara takes risks, hoping to save Josie, and when Klara’s best efforts fail, Ishiguro gives us the privilege of looking over Klara’s shoulder as she offers an intercessory prayer to the Sun:

Josie herself is completely innocent . . .  And now she’s becoming weaker and weaker every day. I’ve come here this evening like this because I’ve never forgotten how kind the Sun can be. If only he would show his great compassion to Josie . . .  if only he’d send Josie the special nourishment she so desperately requires . . .  Please show your special kindness to Josie . . .

Brilliant writers like Ishiguro can point their talent in any direction they wish. Will they tear down? Will they lower us? Or will they build us up, or help us look up? What makes Ishiguro such a wonderful gift to us is that even as he shines light on our disabilities, our problem with reality, and our failures to remember truly, he always writes with an underlying sympathy. His characters may be lost, but they are usually well-meaning. In his Nobel laureate address, Ishiguro spoke of a childhood spent in Sunday school and serving as head chorister in his church, and whatever his theological views today, he writes with a generosity of spirit about others. In Klara and the Sun and his preceding novel, The Buried Giant, he also brings God to the center of the story.

In The Buried Giant, Ishiguro’s lead characters, the old man Axl and his wife Beatrice, cannot recall what has happened to their son, and much else of their past, so they set out on a journey to find their son. Is the mist that so clouds their mind a curse? Or rather, as Beatrice suggests, is the mist sometimes a form of grace? Perhaps, Beatrice says, they have forgotten parts of their past because God himself has forgotten parts of it. Still, they want to see truths hidden in the mist, good and bad. As Beatrice puts it: “What’s to fear. It’s like a tale with a happy end, when even a child knows not to fear the twists and turns before.” It is a hopeful note about the truth, and in the end, this is what Ishiguro gives us in Klara and the Sun––a story of difficult truths and underlying hope. Klara is a small android of sharp limitations who will soon be rendered obsolete by shiny new android models, but for one short and shining season, she has been given the enormously important calling of being friend and companion to another, and Ishiguro shows her stepping fully into it.

At the novel’s end, we find Klara experiencing what Josie’s mother terms Klara’s “slow fade.” Klara lies discarded in a junkyard. “You’ve been just great,” Josie tells Klara, an honest sentiment, and yet Josie remains oblivious to what Klara’s friendship has meant for her, or what risks Klara took to fulfill her calling to be friend to Josie. For Josie it is time to move on, as children inevitably move on, and Klara accepts this without bitterness, anchored in the underlying reality that had animated all her days.

“The Sun was very kind to me,” she says to a junkyard visitor. “He was always kind to me from the start. But when I was with Josie, he was particularly kind.”

Still, Klara has more work to do: “I have my memories to go through and place in the right order,” Klara says. And so do we all.