I've read a few of Ishiguro's books and always thought that he's one of those authors that flips "Show, don't tell" on its head, instead of assuming that the reader NEEDS to be shown everything in achingly picked-over detail, he leaps straight into the story assuming that we have half a brain, and are capable of constructing book worlds using nought but our imagination.
The story of Klara, an AF (artificial friend), and the little girl - Josie - who is enchanted by her, begins without colossal amounts of world building, it doesn't labour over each character, and in fact it barely even casts a nod at a timeframe. Instead it lets you get down to the important business of finding out what makes Klara tick (literally, as the book begins to dig into the finer details of what we - as a society - would treat AFs like if they were real.
Josie has a dark secret that begins to emerge early on in the tale. She is gravely ill. On some days she's a normal bright little girl, and on others she can barely sum up the strength to climb out of bed. Klara is partially there to care for her and be an ever-present friend, though Josie's real-life human friend Rick treats this newcomer with suspicion at first.
Later though, it's the relationship with Josie's mother that begins to pay off in a fascinating way, as we discover that Josie wasn't an only child - and that her older sister died of a similar illness. Not only that, but Josie's mother has a plan to deal with the grief and consequences should Josie succumb to the same fate as her sister. A plan that directly involves Klara, and throws into sharp perspective the ethical and moral arguments surrounding artificial life forms, even as the world as we know it today begins to wrestle with the technological challenge of perfecting the science.
There are times when the book meanders along like a gentle stream, and other times when it begins to get its teeth into you, particularly as the story is told through Klara's eyes rather than a human character, so we almost feel like voyeurs for our own species, seen through the eyes of an alien, but one constructed by the very species it is observing and learning from.
As the book draws to a close, with a hopeful message, and constantly reinforcing a core message of the joy-bringing and life-giving properties of the sun (though if you're like me, you spend most of the summer cursing how the planet is cooking in its own skin thanks again to us), we're left wondering whether the likes of Elon Musk, or other scientists working in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence quite know what they're letting themselves in for, as we have another perfect example of a near-science-fiction story tackling a new normality of artificial beings in a truly original and thought provoking way.
Thoroughly recommended.
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