Reading Group Roundup: Klara and the Sun

This month the report comes from HMP Wandsworth where one of the PRG groups read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. It’s a story told by a robot created to be an ‘Artificial Friend’ to a human owner. While Klara stands in a shop window waiting to be noticed, she carefully observes and wonders about the people who pass by. Eventually she is bought and becomes an AF to Josie, a young girl who seems to be suffering from a mysterious weakness.

Through Josie, Klara discovers feelings – friendship even love – which challenge the boundaries between person and machine and force the reader to think about what it is that makes us human. To a man (and woman) the group loved the book. Total agreement doesn’t always produce the best discussions but this time it felt like everyone was sparking off each other with different ideas about Klara as a character and what makes it such a great book.

It has a number of interwoven themes and asks difficult questions about all of them – human v non-human, wealth and inequality, the line between parental love and cruelty. Is it right for parents to be able to buy social advantage for their children?

Almost everyone in the group felt warmly towards Klara and thought her kindness and loyalty ironically set her apart from all the other ‘human’ characters.

We talked a lot about where feelings come from – are they innate or are they learned? At one point Josie’s mother says to Klara, ‘It must be nice sometimes to have no feelings. I envy you.’ But Klara responds, ‘I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me’.

In most of Ishiguro’s books the boundary between knowing and not knowing is blurred and we as readers only gradually come to understand what’s going on. In Klara and the Sun this includes the unclear process of ‘uplift’ and the designs of the ‘artist’ Mr Capaldi on Klara. The novel also questions the opposition between scientific rationality and older mythic beliefs, particularly around primal forces like the sun.

The end of the novel is troubling rather than providing satisfying closure but we (mostly) agreed it was all the more powerful for the uncertainties.

Artificial Intelligence and robotics are themes that pre-occupy our society, from ChatGPT to deep fakes. They have also dominated science fiction books and films, from Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which became Ridley Scott’s iconic Blade Runner, and then to more recent exploration in films like Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is a moving and thought-provoking contribution to the genre.

Prison Reading Groups (PRG) was created in 1999 to set up, support and fund informal reading groups in prisons. We currently support more than 110 groups in over 80 prisons nationwide. PRG is part of registered charity Give a Book.