Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)

 

Rating: Admirable

I'm in two minds about Klara and the Sun. Ishiguro has produced a fine novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, and the breadth of his ambition is to be admired, with some intriguing themes dealt with in a subtle and intelligent manner, however I did not actually enjoy the novel particularly. Klara and the Sun is another stab at 'literary science fiction', in a similar vein to Never Let Me Go (2005), as has been noted by some critics, which is a reasonable summation, although to be fair to Ishiguro there are some fairly significant differences. The eponymous protagonist is an AF (artificial friend), an AI humanoid android, who is purchased by the mother of fourteen year old Josie to keep her from being lonely while she spends her days isolated, learning online and being afflicted by a mysterious illness. The illness, once you come to understand its nature, is not so mysterious and is one of the more morally ambiguous themes explored in the novel. Klara is a very capable AF, both intelligent and benign, but also surprisingly naive. Although as the novel progresses you learn just how society has been negatively transformed by humanoid AI androids, Klara herself is shown to be nothing but kind to those around her, in fact she is much more caring than the stressed out and fickle humans. The human characters are mostly average people living in what appears to be a radically altered culture, although the reader is never privy to the mechanisms behind these changes, they are only hinted at. The majority of the human characters are merely the end users of these radical technologies, trying to cope with the moral and practical challenges they present. 

Although Klara is a fascinating protagonist, the fact that the story is related from her point of view means that the novel has an almost flat one dimensional tone that does not easily allow narrative tension to build. Klara's narrative voice is predominately observational in nature, so that often the novel is weighed down by excessive descriptions of what the characters are doing, how they are relating to each other and why they are doing the things they are doing. A trip in the car becomes a tedious affair due to the fact that Klara relates every single thing about it. I often found myself speed reading or skipping ahead to more significant portions of the narrative, which is always an unfortunate outcome for the reader. The novel is also imbued with a melancholic tone and a feeling of quiet desperation on the part of the human characters. Sometimes there is an ominous, bordering on disturbing aspect to some of the more curious parts of the novel, however it occurred to me that Klara and the Sun is like a 'light' version of a J G Ballard novel, relatively unsettling, but ultimately not unsettling enough, which is a shame really, as there are important themes at play that could have made a greater impact if the narrative had been more dynamic.

As a postscript yesterday I facilitated the last of three library book club session to discuss this novel and the groups were roughly split into thirds, with one third loving the novel, another third opining that it is a failure and the final third being somewhere in-between, which is where I stood. It's certainly a divisive novel, which, as is often the case, led to in depth discussions and quite a few people coming away with a greater appreciation of the novel's finer points. I came away from these discussions thinking that, despite its flaws, Klara and the Sun is a subtle and thematically sophisticated novel. It makes me wonder how the novel will be regarded in, say, ten years time. As an important novel? Or as an underrated cult classic? Given Ishiguro's status it will probably not fade away and perhaps it will glow more brightly in its afterlife. Part of me kind of hopes so...

An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)

Twelve years ago the very first book read for the Subiaco Library Book Club was Kazuo Ishiguro’s then recent novel Never Let Me Go (2005). I recall that most of the attendees agreed that it is an excellent novel; a consensus that was similarly reached with this novel. An Artist of the Floating World is Ishiguro’s second novel and was inspired by Marcel Proust’s Modernist classic In Search of Lost Time (1913). Appropriately the novel features the unreliable recollections of artist Masuji Ono, who is struggling to come to terms with life in post war Japan. Ono’s memories and musings provide the basis for the novel’s thematic centre, which focuses on both the inherent subjectivity of perception and the pressures that society and culture bring to bear on the individual, particularly during times of great upheaval.

Throughout the novel we learn, through numerous flashbacks, that Masuji Ono enjoyed a career as a fairly prominent artist during the decades leading up to the Second World War. The beginning of novel, set in 1948, finds him retired and pondering both his life and the state of Japan as the country begins to recover from bitter defeat. The novel is beautifully written, with spare, almost poetic prose that is always hinting at Ono’s subconscious stirrings. Clues of a barely buried past come early in the novel when Ono’s grandchild, the precocious Ichiro, asks Ono where his paintings are and Ono swiftly indicates that they are stored away. Ono acts as a subtle personification of Japan itself, wavering between denial about the past and full awareness of the actions and decisions that ultimately led the country to ruin. Ishiguro establishes and then maintains a subtle tension throughout the narrative by not fully revealing Ono’s exact role in the country’s imperialist past until the last third of the novel.

An Artist of the Floating World is a compelling novel despite containing little in the way of drama. Instead the novel is deeply psychological and highly symbolic. Ono is, by his very nature, an unreliable narrator, and often his perception of both the past and the present is called into question. Ono’s plight is summed up beautifully during a scene in which he is sitting with his daughters on his back porch and one daughter comments that Ono should leave the garden alone, that he had pruned some trees too harshly and had ruined the symmetry of the garden. Ono can’t see her perspective at all and totally disagrees with his daughter. This brief interaction sums up the whole thematic thrust of the novel, but due to Ishiguro’s subtle style the point is never laboured. Even the repeated scenes of Ono sitting in his favourite pre-war bar, somehow still standing among the bombed-out ruins, are poignant rather than obvious.

Aside from Ishiguro’s brilliant writing style, An Artist of the Floating World works so well because Ono is such a sympathetic character.  At the end of the novel five years has passed since the end of the war and Japan has undergone significant changes. These changes are shown through Ono’s point of view, an old man pondering both the past and the future and wondering if the young people he sees around him as he sits on a bench that approximates a bar he once loved feel the same as he did when the will of the nation, and his world view, seemed so certain. It is a fittingly poignant conclusion to a novel of subtlety,  stylistic elegance and emotional complexity.