Klara and the Sun

I love Kazuo Ishiguro and this is the fourth book of his that I've read. This one, his latest, feels closely related to his previous Never Let Me Go and even in some ways his masterpiece The Remains of the Day (I still find The Buried Giant to be out of place among his bibliography). They all wrestle with questions of the construction and formation of identity, as well as service and sacrifice. They reveal their fuller implications only gradually. In this novel, it's the near future and the titular Klara is an Artificial Friend, carefully taking in the world around her to be best prepared for her eventual role as, well, a robot friend to the teenager whose family will eventually buy her. That teenager turns out to be Josie, a sweet-natured girl with a mysterious serious illness. As a solar powered android, Klara regards the sun as essentially a deity, and seeks out his intervention for Josie. An artificial intelligence could have been a tricky choice for a narrator, but Ishiguro doesn't make significant changes to his usual writing style to accommodate and his elegant, removed prose proves well-suited to the task. The narrative raises interesting questions about how the self can be defined, especially when there is arguably not a “self” at all and one's entire purpose is to be useful to others. It does not answer these questions, but presents us with Klara and lets us think for ourselves. The plot unfolds at the typical leisurely pace for an Ishiguro novel, and as usual not much actually “happens”. I found it a pleasingly reflective experience to read. It does definitely tread familiar territory, though, and is not of higher quality than the previous work that it echoes.