Amy Isham
25 May 2025
Supporter of ISCAST (Christianity and Science in conversation) Amy Isham reviews Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, and finds that its blending of science fiction with themes of love, hope, and faith, make the reader think deeply about our human lives.
Kazuo Ishiguro. Klara and the Sun. Faber, 2021.
Parents, if there was a procedure to “lift” your child, raising their intellectual capacity, would you?
What if that procedure shortened your child’s life expectancy?
What if “un-lifted” children were excluded from work, college, and friends?
This is the world we are plunged into in Klara and the Sun, a dystopia in which Josie, a “lifted” pre-teen child seeks a human-like, human-created artificial friend (AF) to keep her company while she convalesces from an illness which is deliberately vague.
If you’ve read anything about this novel or the upcoming movie directed by Taika Waititi you may have read about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and their implications for our future. While these are important issues, they can feel distant. This book is really about parenting, love, and providence.
Ishiguro has been quoted in The Guardian as saying he always writes the same book, over and over. Having read four of his books, I can see what he means by this. Ishiguro is a master of the unreliable narrator; the main protagonist seems to be always one step behind the other characters and even the readers themselves.
For example, in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Mr Stevens, the butler, is oblivious to the special bond he shares with Miss Kenton, the housekeeper. Kathy H, in Never Let Me Go, needs it spelled out to her that her dream of a free life is a fantasy made up to keep her kind happy. In Klara and the Sun, the narrator Klara is an AF; she cannot understand human urges and she tends to miss the obvious. In essence she behaves like Ishiguro’s other characters, but I began to intuit that her naivety to the obvious meant that she could see more, not less than his usual protagonist.
When I first read Klara and the Sun in 2021, I had just revisited The Remains of the Day and read Never Let Me Go for the first time. I was deeply moved by both novels and reached for Klara and the Sun eagerly. In 2021 I was in the thick of lockdown life, home educating my children, working four days a week and supporting my husband in his parish work. Klara and the Sun did not land for me the first time. When I read it again this year, it landed, hard.
Klara is a B2 model AF: she’s not the newest model but she has a particular talent for observation and mimicry. Klara takes seriously her programmed purpose, to be a good friend, and she latches onto Josie, a young girl who visits the AF store early in her life. Josie bonds with Klara but does not return to the store for weeks. While Klara waits, she observes her world of the store she lives in. Her social circle is limited to the AFs awaiting sale and the people Klara can see when she is placed in the much-coveted front windows, where the sun streams in.
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Klara worships the sun. She is, after all, a solar-powered machine, and she gives great attention to the sun’s position, contemplating its revitalising power and the movements of its rays across the store throughout the day. In her simple faith, she anthropomorphises the sun as a sovereign force directing the fates and futures of the AFs and humans she can see. In her reliance on the sun’s rays to perform her duties, Klara develops a theology of providence. She is convinced that the sun can bring healing not just to AFs but also to humans when it directs its radiance upon them.
When at last Klara becomes part of Josie’s home life, Klara is determined to ask the sun to have mercy on Josie, seeking [his] presence fervently. In a beautiful scene, Klara petitions the sun to help Josie recover from her illness:
“… fear entered my mind, but then I remembered his great kindness … So I began forming words in my mind, even as I stood there in the intense light.”
As I explained this scene to my 12-year-old son, he asked me if this was a Christian story. I said that it wasn’t. He asked if the author was Christian, and I said I didn’t think so. Ishiguro’s non-sentient character embodies a simple childlike faith which asks, seeks, and waits. She embodies the kind of faith that we all need to face a chaotic world, pleading with a kind and powerful God.
In Klara, Ishiguro presents to us a character of deep compassion, sacrificial friendship, and unfailing generosity. Perhaps it is because Klara is not human that she can follow through on her mission? Greater than her consistency is a capacity for hope which far exceeds that of the humans around her, even Josie’s parents and best friend.
I’m reluctant to spoil the heart of the story, but as a parent there were points in the novel when I almost couldn’t bear to read on. Klara and the Sun forced me to consider: can one ever replace a child if they are lost? Josie’s mother approaches this possibility with a dread that drives her to actions she later regrets.
Viewers of Black Mirror will recognise similarities to the episode Be Right Back in which the bereaved widow engages a chatbot service to imitate the voice of her ex-husband. Later she uploads his social media profiles and voice mail to try and capture his personhood in voice calls, then later she purchases an artificial person programmed with what she can quantify of him. But even as he says the things he would say and appears like her husband, she discovers deep dissatisfaction in the simulacrum of a beloved face.
Klara and the Sun can be read through a lens of Christian faith as a fable of trust, friendship, and deep devotion to a kind and loving God who seeks our good even during unthinkable loss and grief. In a disorienting artificial world, Klara is the true friend you wish your children could have throughout their lives. She is always faithful and always seeking the light of one more powerful and good.
Dr Amy Isham is the Library Manager at Mannix Library at Catholic Theological College.
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