mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

In the near future, an android named Klara begins her existence in a retail shop, observing what little she can see of the outside world through the front display window where she is often placed. Eventually she is purchased as a companion for Josie, a teenage girl with a life-threatening health condition. Klara quickly bonds with Josie and comes to believe there must be a way to save her. But even with her keen observational abilities, there is much that Klara doesn't understand, both about the truth of Josie's condition, and about the fact that others may have different ideas than she does about what saving someone means.

This is a thematically complex and nuanced book that invites contemplation of what it means to be a person, what it means to love someone, and how people cope when the accelerating pace of technology leaves our human concepts of community and ethics reeling in the dust. It's also a very personal book with a sympathetic and fascinatingly nonhuman protagonist. Through Klara's limited perspective, we get glimpses that this is a dystopia, and that the development of androids has led to social upheaval, with mass displacement for many and a life of isolation for the privileged few. But the stakes remain personal—Klara isn't on a quest to fix the ills of the world, she just wants Josie to be okay.

The setup reminded me a lot of the movie A.I., but this book takes a subtler approach to the tensions between humans and machines. The way humans relate to and feel about Klara is complicated, but often unexamined on the part of the human characters, which seems true to life. Like a TV or a smartphone, Klara is just there, a part of the increasingly bewildering modern world that the humans have no choice but to adapt to. Sometimes when characters talk to her, it's like they're confiding in her specifically because they don't see her as "real", like they're really talking to themselves.

Meanwhile, Klara doesn't know very much because nobody teaches her very much (the humans often assume she knows a lot more than she does), so she doesn't have many preconceptions about things or about herself. At one point a character casually remarks that Klara has no feelings, to which Klara replies that she thinks she actually does. This makes an interesting comparison to a character like Data on TNG, who possesses massive amounts of knowledge but believes nothing he experiences counts as an emotion because that's what he's been told. Klara is... not exactly neglected, but people don't engage with her as intensely as Data's humans do, and in some ways that frees her to come up with her own ideas about herself.

There is an interesting thing done with Klara's POV where, when she is overwhelmed by complexity of terrain or of people's feelings, her sensory processing lags or buffers and she sees things as disconnected pieces rather than a whole. You get the sense that she is hitting up against technical limitations of how she functions, and yet she keeps going, stays focused on her goals, as if she doesn't know she's exceeding her limits because nobody ever told her what her limits were.

The only other Ishiguro I've read is The Remains of the Day, and it's been a while, but I think I see thematic connections. Klara's place in the family is not framed as her being a servant, but that's really what she is, and she is committed to that role, knowing and wanting nothing else (presumably because she's programmed that way, though it's not spelled out). Similarly to the servant protagonist of Remains, there's a question about who/what Klara would/could be if she stepped outside of that role, and if her life of service really gives her everything she needs.

Klara's unique way of understanding things also interweaves with the book's religious themes and imagery. Klara is solar-powered, and over the course of the story she basically creates her own form of solar worship, seeking the sun's favor as if it is a god. I was reminded of a book I read ages ago that discussed how young children often independently invent religious concepts in the absence of any specific instruction, like imagining that when the dead are buried they should have food in their graves so they don't go hungry. Klara's private spiritual development proceeds in parallel with the human characters' grappling with questions about what it means, in the age of artificial intelligence, to have a soul.

plot spoilers

Some of the human characters believe that science has disproven the existence of a soul as such (and it's not explained exactly how, because it's not that kind of book) which is why they perceive it as a valid option for Klara to not only take Josie's place in the family after her death, but to literally become Josie. The theory is that if Klara understands Josie so deeply that she can act exactly as Josie would in every situation, then there's no difference. Klara is initially willing to try this, but her eventual reasoning for why it wouldn't work was fascinating to me:

'Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn't be continued. He told the Mother he'd searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn't inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That's why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn't have succeeded. So I'm glad I decided as I did.'

I think what Klara is saying here is that the soul is an emergent phenomenon that stems from your relationships with others. This seems akin to the message of The Velveteen Rabbit—that being loved makes you real.

The closest relationship Klara has in the book is with her god, the Sun, I think (hence the title). After finishing the book I spent some time thinking about whether the solar miracles in the story are meant to be real, or just coincidences. Klara believes the Sun saved the homeless man's life at the beginning of the book, and she certainly believes the Sun saved Josie at the end. And both of those characters do survive, and in Klara's POV there's no doubt about what happened. The uncertainty only comes from the reader's real-world "knowledge" that there are no miracles, or perhaps their genre knowledge that this is science fiction and not fantasy.

The conclusion that I came to is that it doesn't matter, because the important thing for the story is that Klara believes her prayers to the Sun were answered—her hope never wavers, and the narrative rewards her for that—and asking whether it was "real" only underlines that asking whether anything is "real" is sometimes the wrong question. Maybe the ambiguity of their respective realness is precisely why it makes sense for Klara and the Sun to have the connection that they do.

I really liked this book and I think there's a lot more that could be said about it. I suspect I'll be thinking about it for a long time. (Note to self: Nominate it if turingfest runs this year.)