Ishiguro is very interested in delay and restoration. Klara must wait, which she does with great patience. She has already seen Josie, the girl whose friend she instantly wants to become, but Josie has not come back to make the purchase.
“Sometimes,” her manager says, “at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness.” Out in the street, a man and a woman see each other, perhaps for the first time in many years, and they embrace so tightly Klara wonders if they are more upset than delighted. She is also an exceptionally talented AF, because she is able to grasp emotional contradiction. Klara is already a little self-conscious, for a machine. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The GuardianĪt the start of the novel, we see Klara being moved into the window display of her store in the city in order to attract customers (Ishiguro makes this less pervy than it sounds), and she speaks in gentle tones about what she sees outside. Kazuo Ishiguro is at his most moving when he writes about the meek. Both also contain a secret moral shift: an advance in technology that has changed people’s sense of what it is to be human, and the emotional punch of Klara, as with Never Let Me Go, comes from the fact that the central character doesn’t know what is going on. Both novels are set in a speculative future that feels quite like the present.
The themes of replication and authenticity are similar to those in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, published in 2005. Klara and the Sun captures this poignancy exactly – not because of the way people believe in Klara, but because of the way she starts to believe in the sun. The credulity of the reader is a hopeful and sometimes beautiful thing. Because even the most rounded fictional character is also a kind of animated doll a code made out of language and the readers’ goodwill, which makes us smile or cry because we believe in it. We love her the way we loved our childhood teddy bear, perhaps, or even in the way we love a fictional character. So we, the readers, love Klara the way we love what is good. Her role, as she describes it, is to prevent loneliness and to serve. Klara is loyal and tactful, she is able to absorb difficulty and return care. Klara is an AF, or artificial friend, who is bought as a companion for 14-year-old Josie, a girl suffering from a mysterious, perhaps terminal illness.
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