Kiran Dass reviews Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, Klara and the Sun

Writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Photo / Supplied

Love and machines intersect in this quietly unsettling and beautifully observed novel from Booker Prize-winning Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. Set in a remote area in America over a compressed few years in the not-too-distant future, it's narrated by an Artificial Friend (AF) named Klara, and examines empathy as a powerful but potentially dangerous tool.

AFs are special life-like machines created to keep home-schooled children company. Their sole function is to prevent loneliness, and they begin "life" displayed in a shop front, in the hope that they will be selected by a child to go and live with them. They are solar-powered so gain nourishment from the sun and start to feel lethargic after a few hours away from its vibrant rays.

Klara is an exceptional AF in that she has an appetite for observing, and has an extraordinary ability to rapidly absorb information. She has the most sophisticated understanding out of any of her fellow AFs, who are under threat of being made redundant by the upgraded and flashier B3s, who have excellent cognitive and recall skills but are less empathetic.

Klara is so sharp that when she observes a man and a woman greet each other and embrace on the street outside the display window, she wonders if they are more upset than happy to see each other. When she expresses frustration at interpreting the nuanced "mysterious emotions" she sees, Klara's manager explains how at special moments people can also feel pain alongside their happiness.

Klara is selected by 14-year-old Josie and moves into the sun-filled home she shares with her mother. Josie has an unnamed serious illness and her mother has quicksilver moods, anxious and grief-struck after the death of Josie's sister. Klara immediately registers the low-level hum of anxiety and tension that crackles under the surface.

Acutely tuned in and hypersensitive to the strained formality, codes and cues that she picks up from the humans around her, Klara is a loyal companion, optimistic that Josie will recover. Klara wonders what it means when a human says they love somebody. Is it based on philosophy or superstition? Her own superstition is her belief in the sun as a sort of higher deity to be bargained with.

When some of Josie's peers visit, Klara learns that there are two types of children - those who have been "lifted" or enhanced, and the "unlifted". And here lies the quietly unsettling edge to this superbly crafted novel: How far would a parent go to clone a child to avoid grief? Or to mould the perfect child? And what happens when science and technology's rapid advancement in algorithms and gene editing, which can remove illness or imperfections, go rogue? It's an alarming and starkly real prospect.

Klara observes her surroundings through a filter of the fear of loneliness and grief. But remember, she has been built. Are her emotions genuine or is her behaviour simply programmed and learned? And if machines can "learn" empathy, what happens when this is used for more dangerous and sinister purposes? It's a dystopian vision that bleakly considers how there's nothing that modern science cannot excavate, replicate or transfer.

Klara and the Sun unfolds slowly but surely under the careful and exacting control of Ishiguro. It's infused with melancholy and, in these times of social isolation and homeschooling, is profoundly resonant. Here, he is a master of world-building and creating imagined futures in a realistic domestic setting in a way not dissimilar to his 2005 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel Never Let Me Go. And similarly, he presents the moral and ethical implications of what can happen when technology interferes with the emotional and inner world of human beings.

- Reviewed by Kiran Dass

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, $37)