There’s a certain boldness in Klara and the Sun — the first aspect of this boldness is that it examines artificial intelligence, something I think Ishiguro knew would grow in its prominence. The second is that there is something within the book that is deeply evocative of his previous science fiction work, Never Let Me Go. They don’t quite use the same formula but those who have read both will see the similarities.
Ishiguro has quite clearly thought long and hard about the implications of artificial intelligence on society, and he carefully crafted a dystopia that in many ways feels like it could be replicated here in the future. It’s a little wild how much care he’s put into his world - imagining an AI system when we don’t have true AI right now. Many human ideas or perceptions are ported carefully to our AI narrator - how, indeed, would concepts like loyalty or love look in the eyes of a machine?
This novel is very much a product of its time - like Never Let Me Go exploring human cloning (when it was all the rage), Klara and the Sun’s exploration of AI comes at a time of massive breakthroughs in the field, and of talk of large language models like ChatGPT. Ishiguro, of course, takes it a step further. He imagines sentience at a time our notion of AI cannot even think (and indeed, ChatGPT is just a very good statistical prediction model and cannot think the way we do). Somewhere also in the tech industry is talk of how AI personalisation will revolutionise the way people live their lives: how they’re educated, how they work, how the media they consume is made. Ishiguro’s novel came out before much of this discussion hit the mainstream, so many clear connections are almost predictive.
The prose is pretty boring - this isn’t even bad here, I think this idea of our main character being an outside observer, perhaps someone trained in human tendencies but not really fully aware of them, is a really interesting idea. Ishiguro, just like in Never Let Me Go, hints at a dystopia from the beginning, but doesn’t fully explore it. He drip feeds it to you and leaves it to the reader to slowly uncover his world. There are times when both of these aspects make the book feel needlessly slow but the world unfolds in such a gloriously rich way. The dystopia he alludes to in the beginning is unveiled and so are the people trying to carve out their own life in it, making a true testament to the uniqueness of human life and of just how fragile we are in relation to the technology we build. There are no recycled sci-fi tropes - this is a massively original story, and perhaps even one of the supreme achievements of English literature of recent years.
There are things that aren’t fully explored - but I think you can make the argument that Klara wasn’t meant to see it all, just the things she is able to. Ishiguro perhaps recognises this, and at times strategically has her in places with people listening to conversations she has no place to be listening in to. He reveals a little too much of his world at times like this.
Really, I should have given Never Let Me Go more of an honest chance. The New York Times review by Radhika Jones and The New Yorker review by James Wood are especially good.
4.5/5
Written 9 May 2023
Adapted from my review on Goodreads.