Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun

Almost the first thing I think of with Kazuo Ishiguro is the beguiling, perplexing mixture of the innocence and craftiness of his narrators, the puzzle of what they do and don’t know and what they are willing to tell us at any given moment. But today I find myself thinking about the ways in which the world looks back at those narrators, as in Never Let Me Go, which Ishiguro has described as an “alternate history,” and in Klara and the Sun, an emotionally realist approach to sci-fi.

With both Never Let Me Go (16 years ago) and Klara and the Sun (newly published), I managed to not read anything about the works, including the book jackets, before I started and so knew nothing but the author and title. I think that’s the ideal way to read, though it’s not always possible (I love reading insightful reviews, but only after I’ve read the book itself). So in case you’ve also managed this for either book, the only plotty information I’ll include is that the narrators, Kathy and Klara, do not understand the world in conventional ways. This is in part because both of these books are realistic novels where Ishiguro has slightly torqued some aspects of the world to make them speculative. The narrators’ perceptions and misperceptions are based in their natures and what they take for granted about their worlds. Various significant facts have been concealed from them along the way, and between that and the difference between what they know and what we know about their worlds, the reader has to grope for and guess at information.  

Unlike the narrators of some other Ishiguro novels, Klara and Kathy are not refusing knowledge that would be available to them if they were willing to accept it—they are not in denial. Both of them are hungrily dedicated to learning everything they can and to solving the mysteries created by people around them. This means that they watch the world with great acuteness (and those people keeping information from them will sometimes praise them for this acuity). 

Never Let Me Go

In one of the key scenes in Never Let Me Go, Kathy, a little girl at the time, is dancing to her favorite song, “Never Let Me Go,” her eyes closed, holding a pillow to her breast, imagining it as a baby, singing along with the song. 

The song was almost over when something made me realise I wasn’t alone, and I opened my eyes to find myself staring at Madame framed in the doorway.  

I froze in shock. Then within a second or two, I began to feel a new kind of alarm, because I could see there was something strange about the situation. The door was almost half open—it was a sort of rule we couldn’t close dorm doors completely except for when we were sleeping—but Madame hadn’t nearly come up to the threshold. She was out in the corridor, standing very still, her head angled to one side to give her a view of what I was doing inside. And the odd thing was she was crying. It might even have been one of her sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream.  

When I think about this now, it seems to me, even if she wasn’t a guardian, she was the adult, and she should have said or done something, even if it was just to tell me off. Then I’d have known how to behave. But she just went on standing out there, sobbing and sobbing, staring at me through the doorway with that same look in her eyes she always had when she looked at us, like she was seeing something that gave her the creeps. Except this time there was something else, something extra in that look I couldn’t fathom.

The first-time reader of Never Let Me Go may understand very little of what’s happening at this point, will still be trying to come to grips with the society in which this occurs. And Madame’s own complicated role in relation to the students has its own layers of mystery. But though Kathy doesn’t understand what’s happening, she’s not wrong in her perceptions. She’s the opposite of one of the self-deceiving Ishiguro characters like Stevens—the perfect butler in Remains of the Day—characters who refuse to know, refuse to admit to themselves, what they know. Instead, she knows what she doesn’t know: she perceives the world acutely without having an explanation for what she perceives. 

Klara and the Sun

Klara, like Kathy, studies the world—the people, the Sun, her surroundings, the machinery, and the animals—according to the belief systems she seems to have developed by putting together 2 and 2 and coming up with complicated and often numinous ideas of reality:

Just at this point, I happened to look to my left, over the fence running beside us, and saw the bull in the field, watching us carefully. I had seen photos of bulls in magazines, but of course never in reality, and even though this one was standing quite far from us, and I knew it couldn’t cross the fence, I was so alarmed by its appearance I gave an exclamation and came to a halt. I’d never before seen anything that gave, all at once, so many signals of anger and the wish to destroy. Its face, its horns, its cold eyes watching me all brought fear into my mind, but I felt something more, something stranger and deeper. At that moment it felt to me some great error had been made that the creature should be allowed to stand in the Sun’s pattern at all, that this bull belonged somewhere deep in the ground far within the mud and darkness, and its presence on the grass could only have awful consequences. 

Something quite terrible may be happening, or may not be happening. Klara isn’t literally right about what there is to fear, but she has an extraordinary capacity to perceive emotional undercurrents without responding to them in the usual ways, without knowing what they mean to those around her. 

“Things like love”

 “What happens to things like love in an age when we are changing our views about the human individual and the individual’s uniqueness?” [Ishiguro] asks. “There was this question – it always sounds very pompous – about the human soul: do we actually have one or not?”

 “Kazuo Ishiguro: 'AI, gene-editing, big data ... I worry we are not in control of these things any more',” Lisa Allardice, The Guardian

Both books consider what it might mean to be human, what it might mean to have a soul, who has what kinds of feelings, and who has the capacity to sacrifice for those they care about (including sacrificing for those who may not perceive or value what they’ve been given and what it has cost the giver).  

Ishiguro’s sense of the possible has evolved over time. The world is so full of promise, even now. The main thing in the way of getting there is ourselves, which is both encouraging and alarming. The older Ishiguro, the Ishiguro of Klara and the Sun, knows even more than his brilliant younger self about what human beings are like. Although the barely restrained rage over oppression, cruelty, and the rapacious use of others remains, there’s now an increased kindness and complexity in his portrayals, which feels distinct from the stringent, if tacit, judgments of his early novels.  

I’ve always thought it was one of the highest forms of adulthood to reach the point where one knows what people are like, seeing us without denial, while holding that knowledge in a place of calm warmth. Creating the space for people to learn to do better, at least some people, at least some of the time. Our awareness of everyone outside ourselves is one of the best aspects of the quality that could be thought of as a soul. With luck and practice, perhaps we can look at the world like Klara and Kathy, holding steady as the world returns our gaze.