Klara says...We started off
really liking this book. By the end of the second part, it was a contender for one of our favorite Ishiguro novels (admittedly, though, we've only read two others:
Never Let Me Go and
The Remains of the Day).
Ultimately, though, the book left us feeling disappointed. It introduced themes/plot points it never followed through on, and ultimately ended up focusing on themes that were less interesting and a bit disconnected from the setup.
The emotional climax (for us, though maybe not the intended climax of the novel) was the visit to the waterfall in Part Two that Klara and the Mother take without Josie. The Mother's fear really shines poignantly through when she starts asking Klara to talk like and act out Josie. It was
heartbreaking. It was crazy, but it was also an honest reflection of the denial that the human heart/mind is capable of, and the crazy solutions we'll place our hopes in.
Throughout the story, there's mention of this portrait that the Mother is having commissioned of Josie. The big plot twist (again,
stop reading if you don't want spoilers) is that it isn't a portrait at all. It's a robotic skin that Klara is expected to assume after Josie dies — because the science of this alternate world has determined that there is nothing humanly unique about humans that can't be duplicated in robots.
We
loved this plot twist. We
loved this concept.
But from here, there were several things we didn't love. There's a subplot in which Klara (because she herself is solar powered) decides that the sun's "nourishment" can heal Josie, and she promises to destroy a machine that creates pollution in exchange for the sun working his healing magic. Though Klara is highly intelligent, this shows the limitations of her understandings (which is the only reason we find that it makes it into the final draft of this novel; it could otherwise be completely lifted out and change nothing).
The reader knows Klara is being foolish and that sunshine can't save Josie. All roads lead in one direction: Josie will die by the end of this novel.
(Side gripe: It makes no sense that the Father is totally cool with Klara's plan to destroy city property. She tells him it'll save Josie (but she can't tell
why that is; he just needs to trust her), and the dad's like, "Sure! That makes logical sense to me!" It's a big plot point that the chemical they use to destroy the machine is the same chemical that powers Klara. They extract it from Klara's "brain" with the understanding that it
could render her unable to perform her duty of one day becoming Josie. Yet Klara ultimately emerges unscathed—so why make that a plot point at all, when it's only relevant for several pages? Why not just destroy the machine with a crowbar?)
But Josie lives. By some miracle (certainly not the sun's nourishment), Josie recovers, goes off to college, etc., and Klara is sent to the dump. That's how the book ends. (There's also the implication that society has become uncomfortable with how intelligent AFs are, and so the dump will be the ultimate fate of all robots in this world. It felt like we arrived at this conclusion way too easily. Also, it's boring. That's how society feels
right now. We would much rather have read a book that grapples with the fact that this technology is here to stay, which is what we thought was the promise of this book.)
The fact that Josie lives, and we
barely explored what it would mean for Klara to become Josie after Klara (and we, the readers) were brought in on the plan, just leaves us feeling like the book set up a story it didn't finish. It would have been really interesting, for example, to see Klara grapple with the fact that her destroying the machine
didn't save Josie — can her robot brain comprehend this? Or Rick grapple with the fact that the mother of his dead girlfriend (for lack of a better word) has replaced his girlfriend with a robot. Or the mother grapple with the fact that Klara (because she sacrificed some of her brain chemical for Josie) is unable to become Josie.
These are some of the questions/concerns we wished the novel had focused on, rather than taking us down these rabbit holes that ultimately didn't have any last effects. Josie, the Mother, and Klara are more or less in the same position (physically and psychologically) that they are when the novel starts.
Also, there was a distinct lack of dogs—especially after we were teased by one in the first part.
This might seem like a super critical review of the book—and it is—but we do have a lot of admiration for this novel. Perhaps we most admire Ishiguro's mastery of "show, don't tell" (which we hesitate to even say, because this literary "golden rule" is, in my human's humble writerly opinion, a rule that, in the right hands, can and should be broken). As readers, we could safely trust Ishiguro to take us through his world, even though we had many questions about it. For example, it was unclear what "lifted" meant the first few times it was mentioned. But by the time it was
finally spelled out (some ~50 pages from the end of the novel), we had already figured it out from context clues. We also slowly learn that the reason Josie is sick is a side effect of her lifting — which is a gamble the parents of this world take in order to give their children a better future/life.
We love a book that centers on a good moral quandary. We just wish the moral quandaries had more dire consequences for our characters.