By Aidan O’Sullivan
Is love not the most misunderstood term in the human language?
Has it not endlessly been portrayed, challenged, reinterpreted time and again throughout film, music, and literature.
Angry love, passionate love, jealous love, lustful love, filial love. Even a long line of self-help books, an entire self-perpetuating industry tasked at teaching us to love ourselves. Tell me, do you not feel loved?
Perhaps love doesn’t exist. After all, if one looks up a scientific definition of the term, one receives a myriad of flat colourless descriptions just falling short of denying its existence—a ‘mental function interacting with other mental functions like memory, attraction, and perception—’and yet, it dominates our cultural output as a species.
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 8th novel, Klara, an artificial friend (AF) has the sole function of resolving human loneliness. However, when bought for a young critically ill teenager, ‘Josie,’ she must question what love really is and therefore must ask if there is anything unique about being an individual at all?
Most books assume in some shape or form that their character’s feelings are special, unique in quality—that love is an individualised phenomenon. The central question of Klara and the Sun is: What if this isn’t true?
According to the author, the book’s conception began in a children’s story with pictures that he was told by his own (now adult) daughter would be too traumatising for children.
Those origins have left their mark. As an A.I. Klara is the ideal observer to act as narrator. She is at once both super intelligent while at the same time childlike, A young program who struggles to understand the world and yet like many children can describe things more clearly and directly than any adult may be willing to do. This childlike quality makes her a poignant narrator as she is caught in the emotional turmoil of the humans around her.
This contrasting narrative is at times difficult to read. Klara is not just a child but an object, a commercial entity whose function is to serve. She is continually disregarded by others who see her as nothing more than a tool. The other children treat her as a toy. Josie’s mother denies her ability to feel while also acknowledging that perhaps Klara as an advanced machine can ‘see things the rest of us can’t.’In fact we are continually told that Klara is special. That she is more observant than other AFs and that she is unique. This can feel almost confrontational. We are made to feel for Klara, to empathise with her as all the while she is denied the same love and treatment as other AFs.
Perhaps it is immature to complain. After all the point presumably is that as the reader is forced to come to question what about Klara warrants her not receiving the same treatment as others, the other characters are forced to grapple with whether their love for those in their lives is warranted in the face of their diminishing uniqueness.
As one character explains, ‘Our generation still carries the old feelings…the part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us…but there’s nothing like that, we know that now.’
The language of the book too is tellingly from a book designed to be accompanied by pictures. While never the most prosaic of writer’s Ishiguro’s stripped back text sometimes verges on the non-descript.
Outside of a few phrases the language’s removed nature creates a tone wherein the environment feels unlived in. While this may suit the emotional terrain of the book, the style may not engage all readers.
Finally, the book’s answer is not entirely satisfactory. It does attempt to innovate, to go beyond literature’s traditional scope of searching for answers within to pondering that perhaps they exist without and between us as a collective as much as individuals. How far one can actually take this in the face of the potential challenges of A.I. remains to be seen.