58. Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
I remember a few years ago discussing Ishiguro with a friend, and one of us expressing admiration for his genre hopping - he was about to The Buried Giant, and an Arthurian epic seemed like another unusual step for an author who had previously experimented with science fiction (sort of), the English country house novel and a weird experimental book about a pianist. Around the same time, Ishiguro did an interview in which he said that the subject matter of his books didn't really change much:
Just the surface does. The settings, etc. I tend to write the same book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took last time and refine it, or do a slightly different take on it.
Klara is the book, for me, that shows what Ishiguro means. Initially a clear return to territory explored in NLMG, I found while reading it that I was more often reminded of his other books, although their settings are very different.
Ishiguro's characters are limited, incomplete. They start, often, in a restricted environment where things make sense to them; then he sends them out into the world, where they founder. He likes gaps, absences - places in his character's make-up where the reader expects to find something (an emotion, an understanding) and is disorientated by its absence. The outside world is similar enough to the characters' former lives that they attempt to make sense of it, and do so for just long enough to enter into a false sense of security before a mis-step confuses things. And the reader is on the same journey- never completely lost but never completely sure of their surroundings either.
(and personally I think this is where Ishiguro's mis-use of genre fiction comes in. It's another trick in trying to make the reader think they know what to expect, then confounding those expectations).
It's notable that Klara, Ishiguro's unusually observant AI robot, lives in a world where the internet exists, but has no access to it. She learns only from what she sees, and we must do the same. I caught myself a couple of times wanting to google phrases or ideas mentioned by characters in this novel, only to remember that they didn't exist, and that I would have to wait until they were explained later in the book (I still don't feel that I fully understood the deliberately vague troubles that affected Josie, Rick and their families - a re-read to pick up subtly scattered clues might help).
There's an analogy for reading an Ishiguro novel which works almost too neatly - it's like being in a mirror maze. When you think you're making progress, you often aren't; and when you think you're going round in circles, you're moving forward. Mostly you're trying to work out where you are and looking, constantly, at a reflection of yourself. Reading Ishiguro reminds me of reading Camus at school; he deals with the absurd, with lack of meaning, with "wasted" time and effort, repetitiveness and doldrums of time where nothing happens, while at the same time asking some of the biggest questions available - what does it mean to be human? do we control our own destinies? Not always entirely enjoyable to read but certainly gets you thinking.