Our generation still carry the old feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now. [p. 277]
Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend. We first meet her in the shop, waiting to be bought. While she's part of a window display she witnesses a Beggar Man and his dog apparently dying and then being resurrected by the Sun: also, a vile machine that pumps out Pollution. (The capitals are Klara's.)
Eventually Klara is purchased and goes home with her new family: Josie, who is suffering side-effects of a genetic uplift programme, and her Mother. Josie is often ill, but she has a friend, Rick, who lives nearby. Rick is not uplifted and this limits his options in life. Klara strikes up a sort of friendship with him, as she learns more about Josie, and the Mother, and Josie's dead sister Sal. She realises that she will have to intercede to have Josie made well: that a sacrifice is needed.
Klara and the Sun is sometimes rather sentimental, but that's because Klara was designed to be sentimental. She doesn't understand much about the world, and she misinterprets or simply doesn't rationalise some of what she sees. She is devoted to Josie, even when she understands what her own role might be. And though one character refers to 'AF superstition', I think that Klara has developed something like religion: I'm certain that aspect of her story wasn't in the original specification. The novel's ending is bittersweet and brought tears to my eyes, but Klara at least seems happy.
The worldbuilding is very lightly sketched, mostly because Klara isn't interested: but there are elements that feel familiar (such as bereavement dolls) and themes that resonate: jobs vanishing because of AI, increasing social divisions between the wealthy and the poor, communities defending themselves 'when the time comes', nepotism ...
With hindsight, this reminded me of Never Let Me Go, which I feel also dealt with a non-human protagonist and the questions of whether she was a person, whether she possessed a soul. And I think there's a theme there too, of people seeing things they perhaps shouldn't see, and drawing erroneous conclusions from them -- something that children, of course, do all the time.
Fulfils the ‘title begins with K’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge.
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