60 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
in the hope for, and meaning of, lon-
gevity, but, seen from a cosmic view-
point—by God, or by an intelligent
robot—a long life is still a short life,
whether one dies at nineteen or ninety.
“Never Let Me Go” wrung a profound
parable out of such questions: the em-
bodied suggestion of that novel is that
a free, long, human life is, in the end,
just an unfree, short, cloned life.
“
K
lara and the Sun” continues this
meditation, powerfully and af-
fectingly. Ishiguro uses his inhuman,
all too human narrators to gaze upon
the theological heft of our lives, and to
call its bluff. When Pascal wrote that
“an image of men’s condition” was “a
number of men in chains, all condemned
to death, some of whom are slaugh-
tered daily within view of the others,
so that those who are left see their own
condition in that of their fellows, and,
regarding one another with sorrow and
without hope, wait their turn,” the vi-
sion was saved from darkest tragedy
by God’s certain presence and salva-
tion. Ishiguro offers no such promise.
We learn, late in the book, that Arti-
ficial Friends are all subject to what is
called a “slow fade,” as their batteries
expire. Of course, we, too, are subject
to a slow fade; it might be the defini-
tion of a life.
Klara wants to save Josie from early
death, but she can do this only within
her understanding and her means,
which is where the novel’s title becomes
movingly significant. Because the AFs
are solar-powered, they lose energy and
vitality without the sun’s rays; so, quite
logically, the sun is a life-giving pagan
god to them. Klara capitalizes the Sun,
and speaks often of “a special kind of
nourishment from the Sun,” “the Sun
and his kindness to us,” and so on.
When Klara joins Josie’s household,
she assesses the kitchen as “an excel-
lent room for the Sun to look into.”
Before she left the store, a troubling
incident had occurred. Roadwork had
started outside the shop, and the work-
ers had parked a smoke-belching ma-
chine on the street. Klara knows only
that the machine’s three short funnels
create enough smoke to blot out sun-
light. It has a name, Cootings, on its
side, so Klara takes to calling it the
Cootings Machine. There are several
days of smoke and fumes. When a cus-
tomer mentions “pollution” (which
Klara capitalizes), and points through
the shopwindow at the machine, add-
ing “how dangerous Pollution was
for everyone,” Klara gets the idea that
the Cootings Machine “might be a
machine to fight Pollution.” But an-
other AF tells her that “it was some-
thing specially designed to make more
of it.” Klara begins to see the battle
between the sinister Cootings Ma-
chine and the Sun as one between rival
forces of darkness and light: “The Sun,
I knew, was trying his utmost, and to-
wards the end of the second bad after-
noon, even though the smoke was worse
than ever, his patterns appeared again,
though only faintly. I became worried
and asked Manager if we’d still get all
our nourishment.”
So Klara begins to construct a world
view—a cosmogony, really—around her
life-giving god. If the Sun nourishes
AFs, it must nourish humans, too. If
the Sun is a god, then perhaps one might
pray to this god; one might, eventually,
bargain and cajole, as Abraham did
with the Lord. So Klara prays to the
Sun: “Please make Josie better.... Josie’s
still a child and she’s done nothing un-
kind.” And she has a specific bargain
in mind. She tells the Sun that she
knows how much he dislikes Pollution.
“Supposing I were able somehow to
find this machine and destroy it,” she
says. “To put an end to its Pollution.
Would you then consider, in return,
giving your special help to Josie?” Klara
sets about vandalizing the first Cootings
Machine she comes across, apparently
unaware that it’s not the only one in
the world.
Other writers might labor to make
their science fiction more coherent.
Ishiguro seems unconcerned that our
AF somehow understands godly mercy
and “sin” (“she’s done nothing unkind”)
but can’t work out why houses are
painted different colors. Another nov-
elist might play up the dystopian eco-
logical implications of a world in which
the sun is beset by forces of life-quench-
ing darkness. These implications are
certainly present here. But Ishiguro
keeps his eye on the human connection.
Only Ishiguro, I think, would insist on
grounding this speculative narrative so
deeply in the ordinary; only he would
add, to a description of a battle between
sunlight and darkness, Klara’s prosaic
and plaintive coda: “I became worried
and asked Manager if we’d still get all
our nourishment.”
Ishiguro invites us to share the logic
and the partiality of Klara’s world view
by making plain that its logic flows
from its partiality—sun equals life
equals God—and by making plain
how closely her world resembles ours.
Her estrangement is ours, a reminder
of the provisional nature of our own
grasp on reality. No more than Klara
can we understand—theologically
speaking—why children die, which is
why we, from the merely superstitious
to the orthodoxly religious, construct
our own systems of petition and bar-
gain. If it is time for a child’s slow fade
to become an unbearably faster fade,
there is nothing, theologically speak-
ing, we can do about it: the sun will
continue to shine down—“having no
alternative, on the nothing new,” as
Beckett had it—on the just and un-
just alike. Our prayers evaporate into
the solar heat.
At one moment in her pleading on
behalf of Josie, Klara wheedlingly says
to the Sun, “I know favoritism isn’t de-
sirable.” The word has resonance, but
weak leverage, in a world premised on
systematic favoritism, in which whole
classes of society are “lifted” and oth-
ers are not. In Klara’s world, favoritism
is considered not just desirable but ap-
parently essential; she is a product of
it. The relation between society’s in-
creasingly invidious, focussed, and sin-
ister patterns of selection (fascism, ge-
netic engineering, “lifting”) and the
cosmic arbitrariness of our ultimate
destinies has been Ishiguro’s great
theme: our nasty efforts at “favoritism”
versus God’s or the universe’s inscru-
table lack of it. For we die unequally
but finally equally, in ways whose ran-
domness seems to challenge all notions
of pattern, design, selection. Theology
is, in some guises, just the metaphys-
ics of favoritism: a prayer is a postcard
asking for a favor, sent upward. Whether
our postcards are read by anyone has
become the searching doubt of Ishi-
guro’s recent novels, in which this mas-
ter, so utterly unlike his peers, goes
about creating his ordinary, strange,
godless allegories.
