He is, though, not one of the “lifted” – the genetically improved “high-rank” class – and therefore denied access to the life of education and advancement that, should she survive, lies ahead for Josie. Rick is decent, devoted to Josie, an amateur designer of drones.
We learn a little more about the nightmarish scientism of this world when we meet Rick, Josie’s neighbour, who lives with his mother in the only house for miles around. Ishiguro has clearly thought hard about those elements of a nascent mechanical consciousness that would be more or less developed It’s just one of a series of ways in which Ishiguro takes us into the existence of the sentient non-human, one of the subtle touches that hint towards the deeper themes that are being explored. Here we become aware of one of the quirks of the novel: AFs see things differently to humans, perceiving the world as a series of squares or boxes, occasionally glitching out so that perspectives are skewed, everything given a migraine-ish slant. Josie and her mother take solar-powered Klara from the department store where she had spent her days being moved from one stand to another, watching the sun on its path across the shop floor, to a house in the countryside. We are left to do much of the imagining ourselves, and this makes the novel a satisfyingly collaborative read.
As with Never Let Me Go, one of the enormous pleasures of Klara and the Sun is the way Ishiguro only drip-feeds to the reader hints and suggestions about the shape of this futuristic world, the reasons for its strangeness. Klara is chosen by Josie, a fragile young woman who we soon learn has an illness that may kill her as it killed her sister. Klara is an AF – an Artificial Friend – androids bought by parents to provide companionship for their teenage children, who, for reasons that become clearer over the course of the book, are home-schooled by “screen professors” in the novel’s polluted and anxious future America. This is a book – a brilliant one, by the way – that feels very much of a piece with Never Let Me Go, again exploring what it means to be not-quite-human, drawing its power from the darkest shadows of the uncanny valley. With Klara and the Sun, his eighth novel, though, it feels like Ishiguro is bringing that dirty secret slightly more into the light. It seemed a particularly ludicrous statement from a writer who had just followed a clone romance ( Never Let Me Go) with an Arthurian epic ( The Buried Giant).
“I tend to write the same book over and over,” he said. I n a 2015 interview with the Guardian, Kazuo Ishiguro revealed what he claimed was his “ dirty secret”: that his novels are more alike than they might initially seem.
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