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“They fought as though the most important thing was to damage each other as much as possible.”

 

A big wrasse (with a friend). Agincourt Reef, the Great Barrier Reef, Far North Queensland. April 2021.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro 

Like Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant, Ishiguro's conceit here presents the perfect opportunity to explore some weighty and troubling themes through a fresh lens.

In choosing Klara, an AI robot fresh out of the factory, as narrator, Ishiguro has a guide who is at once innocent and unworldly yet possesses outstanding observational qualities (it is what she is designed to do, after all). This gives the author access to a narrator possessing both the tabula rasa of a naïf and the vocabulary and intelligence to progress the story and complex themes engagingly and believably.

I found this a better modern take on the issue than Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me. With his usual deftness of touch, Ishiguro explores what it means to be human, the ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the corrosive course of history as civilisation marches onward via a kind of "progress" that is destroying our planet.

While not a perfect novel by any means, I don't agree with those critics that have found Ishiguro's muted approach underwhelming. While there is a distinct lack of fireworks, I found the understated drift towards a quite crushing denouement both effective and affecting. In this regard, it reminded me of a more polished examination of the themes than Water Tevis's Mockingbird, which I also enjoyed very much.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2
 

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