In the not-so-distant future, some are lifted and live securely, others make do, some have opted out entirely since their jobs went away. Some young people waste away until death. And some have Artificial Friends. Friends like Klara in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun.
The novel is told entirely from Klara's point of view, starting with her days in a store with other AFs, waiting to be sold as companions to young people. Klara runs on solar power, and mainly enjoys watching the sun's path every day. She sees things as groups of boxes, or as if on a grid.
When watching people, her observations are keen, even when the context remains vague. Still, her ability to observe and use that information is noted by the store manager and by other AFs. The day Josie comes in for a closer look is the day Klara finds her destiny.
It takes time, but eventually Klara is sold to go live with the young teen. Josie lives with her divorced mother, a driven career woman, and a housekeeper fierce in wanting to protect her young charge. Josie's health is fragile. She is mainly on her own. She does often see her childhood friend, Rick, and they spend a lot of time captioning cartoons drawn for each other. A party of other young people does not go well, mainly because Josie and Rick are not used to be around others, and because Klara is fascinating to a group of bullies.
A planned outing to a waterfall doesn't happen as planned. Klara ends up going alone with Josie's mother. Some of the things she says to Klara become clear only with time, but they are key to the story.
It isn't until later in the novel that the reader discovers Klara was purchased not only as Josie's companion, but possibly for another duty should it become necessary. The way Josie's mother and visiting father work their way through this situation is crucial to the story Ishiguro is telling us. A subplot involving Rick and his mother trying to bargain with an old flame of hers to guarantee Rick's future adds texture to the story.
That story underlying the plot is how people connect to each other, and whether each person is more than the sum of their parts. The promises we make and how those promises are kept sometimes tell us more about how we feel about the other person involved than they even tell us about ourselves.
When one of the characters realize a sacrifice on their part is required, that character's conclusion gets to the heart of the matter:
I was obliged to give up something. But that doesn't matter at all, because now we can have hope again.
When Klara and the Sun first came out last winter, I put it aside. The writing about loneliness as I worked at home alone (albeit talking to people all day on Zoom for work and my family many evenings) hit too close to the bone. Now that I've read the entire novel, I wish I had continued then. For what I got most out of the story is not the loneliness. It's the reaching out that matters.
As Klara realizes later:
There was something very special, but it wasn't inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.
As the Wizard told the Tin Man, it's not how much you love others that counts, but how much you are loved by others.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
