[Some low-tier spoilers for Klara and the Sun]
Klara is an ‘AF,’ an android that is designed to be an “Artificial Friend” for children. She eagerly awaits sale, watching with interest the world outside the shop window. In my copy (which is the mass paperback)1 we spend the next 40 pages getting to know Klara, looking through her eyes, confined to the store’s four walls. In this time, we become emotionally attached to her, hoping that someone will finally see that she is special.2 The first-person POV on Klara allows us access to her thoughts and feelings; we are also dependent on her understandings of the futuristic world. (How to avoid exposition feeling like exposition: funnel it through a character who is actively discovering the world with the reader.)
One day, a mother and child, the latter ill with a mysterious disease, enters the store. It appears that Klara’s hopes have been answered—but the Mother isn’t yet convinced to buy the AF for her daughter. The following scene is an example of what Ishiguro does so well, with such seemingly simple prose.
Immediately what stands out is the capitalization and use of the definite article “the” in “the Mother.” It suggests that Klara thinks of people in terms of how she should relate to them. It also sounds oddly childlike. Last, it introduces the power dynamic, emphasized by what I call “chess”—the blocking and movement of the characters in the space.3 Klara carefully notes the Mother’s three steps towards her, indicating a shift in tension. The Mother is her role, monolithic, authoritative.
Ishiguro plays on the reader’s expectations: we think the Mother is testing Klara to see if she will make a good friend for her daughter. The Mother’s love for her daughter and concern that Klara won’t be fit lends the Mother some vulnerability.
Foremost in our minds is the stakes of the scene. Klara has been moved to the back of the store, where she is unlikely to be sold to a family, especially as there are now newer, more technologically advanced AFs displayed at the window. We want Klara to do well on the Mother’s test.
Then the test changes tone.
In asking Klara to mimic her daughter’s walk, and thus to mimic her daughter’s disability, the Mother puts Klara (whether she understands it or not) in a difficult situation. Here the power dynamic shapes the scene: that Klara is a machine with limited comprehension and freedom; that the Mother is not only the customer, but a rich one at that; that Manager (capitalized, referenced by role as well) is incentivized to make the sale. Suddenly the reader is aware of an audience. There is Manager’s reaction, Josie’s presence, and the wider audience of “the whole store.”
The reader is suddenly aware of the distance between Klara and themselves.
This is the delayed dramatic irony that Ishiguro deploys throughout the novel: he immerses you deeply in a character’s point of view, and then at a critical moment, throws you back into yourself. Who is the witness, and who is implicated by their actions?
What else does Klara not see?
Let’s look at one more scene, which occurs a bit later. We’ve since learned that Josie might die from her illness, and that her older sister died from it.4 This contextualizes the Mother’s seemingly cold behavior.
The scene setup: Josie was looking forward to a trip to a waterfall, and pretending that she felt better than she did. When the Mother finds out Josie was faking feeling well enough to go, the Mother becomes angry. To punish Josie, she takes Klara on the trip instead. Klara is here used as an object, a tool.
But this also gives Klara a chance to get to know the Mother.
See how the tension builds, and breaks, to allow the Mother multiple facets. The power dynamic is elastic.
Suddenly that earlier scene reads differently, as Klara is asked again to mimic Josie.
The scene comes to a head as the Mother becomes most vulnerable, and yet at the same time, the most manipulative.
The scene tugs on the power dynamic until finally, the characters are taken to their most honest place—through, it’s worth mentioning, the artifice of play, of a lie.
I love how Ishiguro makes the parent who is the most sympathetic in summary (the Mother who has lost one child and might lose another) the most complicated character on the page. Meanwhile when we later meet the Father, he seems the most likable on the page, especially when we first meet him, but becomes in summary quite gray. Their motivations gradually become clear. But what exactly do these characters intend?
What makes the story work is that Ishiguro’s AI is smart, perceptive, but very naive. She often misses clues and misjudges situations. She has very human emotions; she acts impulsively, and is guided more by faith than logic. Meanwhile, the humans in her orbit hope she knows more than they do, reading wisdom into her enigmatic statements.5
Ultimately, the world grows more strange, the characters more layered, as Klara’s (and our) understanding of the world broadens. What kind of world is it? The reader asks. "All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no," writes Susan Sontag (of another technology, the photograph). The dramatic irony returns, because Klara—for all her humanity—cannot say no. Only we can.6
My cat, Lyra, for scale.
This is why I always recommend that writers who are interested in learning structure go back and create a “reverse outline” for novels they admire. By reverse outline, I mean only: mark what important events occur on what pages. In doing so, you find that your recollection of the story rarely matches; often the long arc of the novel gets going much later than you would’ve guessed.
The short line of tension (will someone bring Klara home? what kind of owner will they be?) provides enough of a plot promise that, in the mean time, we learn all sorts of things about Klara and her world. The simplicity of the beginning scenario allows for complexity elsewhere, for the focus to remain on Klara’s strange POV, and so the reader—especially the reader who is more used to realism/literary fiction than genre—has a smooth immersion into the story.
Perhaps because visual storytelling has become such a major medium, many writers rely on “chess” more than is useful to the story, or even artful. Lincoln Michel has a great analysis of the phenomenon in his substack, Counter Craft.
There’s another layer here, of the Mother’s guilt, but it’s too great a spoiler to share.
It was interesting to read this novel (first published March, 2021) in today’s context of ChatGPT. Humans, even well-intentioned ones, will read intelligence in mystery, and wisdom in intelligence.
Further reading: This great profile of Ishiguro in the nytimes.