Ishiguro’s latest work1 is one that meshes dystopia with science fiction, narrated from the point of view of Artificial Friend Klara. It has a distinct vagueness to its worldbuilding that speaks of the necessarily limited worldview of a machine, and the sparing glimpses into the history of a fictional world which privileges genetically edited children by gambling their lives are provided solely by the novel’s human characters. It is therefore only natural that the character of Ricky, the ‘unlifted’ friend of Klara’s child charge, is sidelined in the narrative; it seems fitting that he, along with his mother, retain a very human history—and in doing so, they marginalise themselves in a world which seeks to leave humanity in yesteryear’s dust.
A hallmark of dystopian literature is unhappiness—an emotion that Klara, as an AF, is incapable of feeling. At certain points throughout the novel, it seems as though the human characters, at least the ‘lifted’ ones, are more alike with Klara in this regard than with their ‘unlifted’ counterparts. The scene in which Ricky attends a party hosted by Josie with her other friends does well to indicate the rift between the two sides of humanity portrayed in ‘Klara and the Sun’:
‘Then a woman whose shape resembled the food blending machine said: ‘Seems so bright too. Such a shame a boy like that should have missed out.’
‘I wouldn’t even have known,’ another voice said. ‘He presents himself so well. Is that a British accent he has?’
‘What’s important,’ the food blending woman said, ‘is that this next generation learn how to be comfortable with every sort of person. That’s what Peter always says.’
Then as other voices murmured in agreement, she asked the Mother: ‘Did his folks just…decide not to go ahead? Lose their nerve?’’
Above is an excerpt from the conversation held between the parents of the children in attendance at Josie’s party concerning Ricky. That aforementioned vagueness is palpable here, as we are given little indication of what, precisely, is ‘wrong’ with Ricky, and yet despite this the implication of something being gravely amiss with him is impossible to ignore. We, as readers, temporarily assume the viewpoint of a machine, as we attempt to deduce from the sparse clues given what the ‘issue’ may be.
The question nagging at us concerns the idea of ‘missing out’: some sort of class divide is obviously implied, but the boundaries of that divide are unclear at this early stage in the novel. Later, we come to know that as an ‘unlifted’ child—a child whose genetics haven’t been altered in order to enhance his intelligence—Ricky’s options in life are severely limited, and his chances of attending higher education are minimal.
Returning to the party scene, the strange behaviour of the ‘lifted’ children brings to mind questions regarding their ability to relate to each other; the insistence of one girl that Ricky ‘must like action movies’ points to a fairly one-dimensional understanding of her fellow humans, as she is seen to box Ricky into one stereotype—that being that boys like ‘car chases and stuff’—and insist, doggedly, that she is correct. Thus demonstrated is both a limited understanding of people, and a refusal to review her opinions. This seems to be a common trait in the ‘lifted’ children—it is demonstrated quite often in Josie and Ricky’s interactions as well as the other children’s interactions with him and with each other.
Contrasting the view presented of these children is the view of Ricky’s mother, and their relationship to each other. As told by various other characters in the novel, Ricky’s mother, Helen, is ‘strange […] damaged’; she ‘refuses to drive [anymore]’. Her relationship with her son is a frequent source of friction between him and Josie:
‘[…] Your mom, she doesn’t have society. My mom doesn’t have so many friends either. But she does have society.’
‘Society? That sounds rather quaint. What’s it mean?’
‘It means you walk into a store or get into a taxi and people take you seriously. Treat you well. Having society. Important, right?’
‘Look, Josie, you know my mother’s not always so well. It’s not as if she made a decision about it.’
‘But she does make decisions, right? One thing, she made a decision about you. Back whenever.’
‘I don’t know why we’re talking about this.’
‘You know what I think, Ricky? Stop me if this is unfair. I think your mom never went ahead with you because she wanted to keep you for herself. And now it’s too late.’’
The decision, it becomes clear, is the source of Ricky’s limitations, and also the source of his comparatively rich humanness. In choosing to not put her son forward for genetic editing, Helen ensured that he would remain forever on the outside of society, along with herself. Josie appears to acknowledge that Ricky’s mother is outside society, but is unwilling to realise, or perhaps is unable to realise, that Ricky too exists in this area. The ‘plan’ that the two of them have—to marry and to live together—is unfeasible because the differences in their circumstances are insurmountable, through neither of their faults.
Ishiguro comments on the power and futility of childhood promises here, by having Ricky and Josie cling to a promise made to each other as children—a promise that is shown to exist solely in the history between the two. Josie’s inability to understand the chasm in their circumstances can be read as a manifestation of her lack of history, or lack of heritage; her view of the world is the same as is held by the friends she claims to disdain: largely one-dimensional. It is a world in which things ought to happen because they were once promised to. Thus she appears to process ideas in a way fairly similar to a machine’s programming.
That she and her friends are never canonically considered ‘strange’, but Helen is, speaks, implicitly, of the dangers of erasing history; as readers, we are struck by the strangeness of the lifted children, and read Helen’s very familiar description of Ricky’s schooling as ‘rough […] with all sorts’ with a sense of pity for the lifted children, who don’t realise that their existence is a mere shadow of life.
Helen’s longing for the hedges of England provides a neat juxtaposition with Chrissie’s silence on the matter of history: Helen says to Klara that ‘hedges give a sense of history properly set down in the land’, and laments the lack of hedges—and, it is implied, of history—in her new country. And so, for all her weirdness, she comes across as so much more natural, and so much more human, than the other parents. The choice she made that left Ricky with nearly no options in life is a very human one, and it becomes obvious that in this dystopian world, the people must relinquish all of their history and heritage in order to have any hope of not living life in hiding on the sidelines.
With this in mind, a key point of the novel concerning Ricky is his meeting with his mother’s ‘old flame’, Mr Vance—someone who holds much weight in the admissions process of Atlas Brookings, the only college said to accept a small percentage of ‘unlifted’ children. From the moment that the meeting is suggested by Helen, we, as readers, experience a sort of ‘clash of loyalties’: the word ‘bribery’ is danced around, but is clearly the aim of the meeting, and the very human ideas of morality and righteousness taint our sympathy; Ricky’s discomfort with the idea aligns him once again with us readers. But it goes to show the depths to which Helen and Ricky, and presumably other parents and ‘unlifted’ children, must stoop in order to have any hope at a life on par with the genetically edited members of society; in other words, it shows the degradation of morality that must occur in order for people with intact history and heritage to live alongside those without.
It is interesting, therefore, that they should need to call upon history—in this case, Helen’s history with Mr Vance—in their attempt to realise this. That history is of a very intimate nature, concerning a past romantic relationship between the two adults: their meeting quickly devolves into a display of score-settling by Mr Vance. It is glaringly obvious that he is still caught up in his history with Helen, over a decade later. His tone is rushed, juxtaposing the superficially relaxing situation of sitting in a cafe, and we get the sense that his words result from years of pent-up emotions; it seems cruelly unfair that Ricky, not even born at the time of the old romance, should have to exchange his future for his mother’s past.
And yet, here lies the crux of his storyline. In ‘Klara and the Sun’, history must be erased in order for a future to be possible; humanness must be shunned in order for progress, on an individual scale as well as a societal one, is to be made. Ricky refuses to do both, and accordingly pays with his future.
