"Klara and the Sun"

This book makes a nice entry-level Kazuo Ishiguro. As always, the author does stilted conversation to perfection -- witness all those jagged rocks under the wash of pleasant platitudes during Josie's interaction meeting. Audiobook narrator Sura Siu did a brilliant job with the young voices.

• every one of us had specifications that guaranteed we couldn’t be affected by factors such as our positioning within a room. Even so, an AF would feel himself growing lethargic after a few hours away from the Sun, and start to worry there was something wrong with him – that he had some fault unique to him and that if it became known, he’d never find a home.
• ‘Perhaps not. Certainly not one like you. So if sometimes a child looks at you in an odd way, with bitterness or sadness, says something unpleasant through the glass, don’t think anything of it. Just remember. A child like that is most likely frustrated.’
  ‘A child like that, with no AF, would surely be lonely.’
  ‘Yes, that too,’ Manager said quietly. ‘Lonely. Yes.’
• ‘I guess for you guys, where you are, the Sun must go down behind that big building, right? That must mean you never get to see where he really goes down. That building must always get in the way.’ She looked over quickly to check the adults were still inside the taxi, then went on: ‘Where we live, there’s nothing in the way. From up in my room you can see exactly where the Sun goes down. The exact place he goes to at night.’
• The boy AF had accepted this, even though other passers-by would see and conclude he wasn’t loved by the girl. And I could see the weariness in the boy AF’s walk, and wondered what it might be like to have found a home and yet to know that your child didn’t want you. Until I saw this pair it hadn’t occurred to me an AF could be with a child who despised him and wanted him gone, and that they could nevertheless carry on together.
• Then at last she moved. She went towards the crossing – as the man had been signaling for her to do – taking slow steps at first, then hurrying. She had to stop again, to wait like everyone else at the lights, and the man stopped waving, but he was watching her so anxiously, I again thought he might step out in front of the taxis. But he calmed himself and walked towards his end of the crossing to wait for her. And as the taxis stopped, and the Coffee Cup Lady began to cross with the rest, I saw the man raise a fist to one of his eyes, in the way I’d seen some children do in the store when they got upset. Then the Coffee Cup Lady reached the RPO Building side, and she and the man were holding each other so tightly they were like one large person, and the Sun, noticing, was pouring his nourishment on them.
• ‘It can’t be, can it, Klara? That you believe you’ve made an arrangement?’
  I thought Manager was about to reprimand me, the way she’d reprimanded two boy AFs once for laughing at Beggar Man from the window. But Manager placed a hand on my shoulder and said, in a quieter voice than before:
  ‘Let me tell you something, Klara. Children make promises all the time. They come to the window, they promise all kinds of things. They promise to come back, they ask you not to let anyone else take you away. It happens all the time. But more often than not, the child never comes back. Or worse, the child comes back and ignores the poor AF who’s waited, and instead chooses another. It’s just the way children are. You’ve been watching and learning so much, Klara. Well, here’s another lesson for you. Do you understand?’
• She had by now both hands on Rick’s left shoulder, resting her weight there as if trying to make him less tall and the two of them the same height. But Rick seemed not to mind her nearness – in fact he seemed to think it normal – and the idea occurred to me that perhaps, in his own way, this boy was as important to Josie as was the Mother; and that his aims and mine might in some ways be almost parallel, and that I should observe him carefully to understand how he belonged within the pattern of Josie’s life.
• The Sun, noticing there were so many children in the one place, was pouring in his nourishment through the wide windows of the Open Plan. Its network of sofas, soft rectangles, low tables, plant pots, photograph books, had taken me a long time to master, yet now it had been so transformed it might have been a new room.
• ‘She insisted I came. But I suppose she’s too busy now to come back in here, see how I’m enjoying this part of the party.’ He leaned back into the sofa till the Sun’s pattern was over his face, obliging him to close his eyes. ‘The trouble is,’ he went on, ‘she doesn’t stay the same. I thought if I came today – stupid, really – I thought she might not…change. Might stay the same Josie.’
  When he said this, I saw again Josie’s hands at various points during the interaction meeting – welcome hands, offering hands, tension hands – and her face, and her voice when someone had asked why she hadn’t chosen a B3 and she’d laughed and said, ‘Now I’m starting to think I should have.’
• ‘I can see Rick is afraid Josie might become like the others. But even though she behaved strangely just now, I believe Josie is kind underneath. And those other children. They have rough ways, but they may not be so unkind. They fear loneliness and that’s why they behave as they do. Perhaps Josie too.’
• For all these reasons, I feared the interaction meeting might place shadows over our friendship. But as the days went by, Josie remained as cheerful and kind to me as she’d ever been. I waited for her to bring up the events of the meeting, but she never did so.
  As I say, these were helpful lessons for me. Not only had I learned that ‘changes’ were a part of Josie, and that I should be ready to accommodate them, I’d begun to understand also that this wasn’t a trait peculiar just to Josie; that people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passers-by – as they might in a store window – and that such a display needn’t be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.
• ‘I sometimes think about the store,’ I said. ‘The view from the window. The other AFs. But not often. I’m very pleased to be here.’
  The Mother looked at me for a moment. Then she said: ‘It must be great. Not to miss things. Not to long to get back to something. Not to be looking back all the time. Everything must be so much more…’
• while this sometimes made both Josie and the Mother speak sharply to each other, the breakfast couldn’t become loaded with signals. But on a Sunday, when the Mother wasn’t about to go anywhere, there was the feeling that each question she asked could lead to an uncomfortable conversation. When I was still new in the house, I believed there were particular danger topics for Josie, and that if only the Mother could be prevented from finding routes to these topics, the Sunday breakfasts would remain comfortable. But on further observation, I saw that even if the danger topics were avoided – topics like Josie’s education assignments, or her social interaction scores – the uncomfortable feeling could still be there because it really had to do with something beneath these topics; that the danger topics were themselves ways the Mother had devised to make certain emotions appear inside Josie’s mind.
• ‘Mom,’ Josie said. ‘Please can we go? Please don’t do this.’
  ‘Do you think I like this? Any of this? Okay, you’re sick. That’s not your fault. But not telling anyone. Keeping it to yourself this way, so we all get in the car, the whole day before us. That’s not nice, Josie.’
• I was glad of the chance to sit down and orient myself, and as I waited at the rough table for the Mother to return, I found the surroundings settling into order. The waterfall no longer took up so many boxes, and I watched children and their AFs passing easily from one box to another with barely any interruption.
• I remembered what Josie had said about sitting close to the waterfall, how your back could get wet without your noticing, and I wondered about mentioning this to the Mother. But something in her manner told me she didn’t wish me to speak just yet.
  She was gazing straight at my face, the way she’d done from the sidewalk when Rosa and I had been in the window. She drank coffee, all the time looking at me, till I found the Mother’s face filled six boxes by itself, her narrowed eyes recurring in three of them, each time at a different angle.
• ‘No. That’s Klara. I want Josie.’
  ‘Hi, Mom. Josie here.’
  ‘Good. More. Come on.’
  ‘Hi, Mom. Nothing to worry about, right? I got here and I’m fine.’
  The Mother leaned even further across the table, and I could see joy, fear, sadness, laughter in the boxes. Because everything else had gone silent, I could hear her repeating under her breath: ‘That’s good, that’s good, that’s good.’
  ‘I told you I’d be fine,’ I said. ‘Melania was right. Nothing wrong with me. A little tired, that’s all.’
• Naturally then, in the days that followed, I thought often about why the interaction meeting should cast no shadows at all, but Morgan’s Falls, despite my complying with Josie’s and the Mother’s wishes, had produced such consequences. Again, the possibility came into my mind that my limitations, in comparison to a B3’s, had somehow made themselves obvious that day, causing both Josie and the Mother to regret the choice they’d made. If this were so, I knew my best course was to work harder than ever to be a good AF to Josie until the shadows receded. At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom, and I saw it was possible that the consequences of Morgan’s Falls had at no stage been within my control.
• I could understand that for all his kindness, the Sun was very busy; that there were many people besides Josie who required his attention; that even the Sun could be expected to miss individual cases like Josie, especially if she appeared well looked after by a mother, a housekeeper and an AF. The idea came into my mind, then, that for her to receive the Sun’s special help, it might be necessary to draw his attention to Josie’s situation in some particular and noticeable way.
• ‘These folks surrounding her. Am I to assume they’re aliens? It almost looks like instead of a head, they have, well, a giant eyeball. I’m sorry if I have this all wrong.’
  ‘You haven’t got it all wrong.’ There was a coldness in her voice, and also a small fear. ‘Well, at least not really. They’re not aliens. They’re just…what they are.’
  ‘All right. They’re an eyeball tribe. But what’s rather troubling is the way they’re all staring at her.’
• ‘Then what’s all this? All this no shape, hiding stuff? I don’t see what’s kind about it. That’s Rick’s problem. He doesn’t want to grow up. At least, his mother doesn’t want him to and he goes along with it. The idea is he lives with his mom for ever and ever. How’s that going to help our plan? Any time I show any sign of trying to grow up, he gets sulky.’
  I said nothing to this, and Josie continued to lie there with her eyes closed. She did fall asleep then, but just before she did, she said quietly:
  ‘Maybe. Maybe he did mean it to be kind.’
  I wondered if Josie would bring up this particular picture – and the words inside the bubble – during Rick’s next visit. But she didn’t, and I realized there was a kind of rule between them not to talk directly about any of the pictures or bubble words once they’d been completed. Perhaps such an understanding was necessary in allowing them to draw and write freely. Even so, as I have said, I considered from the start that their bubble game was filled with danger,
• ‘That’s not really what I mean. Anyone can have one or two individual friends. But your mom, she doesn’t have society. My mom doesn’t have so many friends either. But she does have society.’
  ‘Society? That sounds rather quaint. What’s it mean?’
  ‘It means you walk into a store or get into a taxi and people take you seriously. Treat you well.
• ‘You can tear down a fence in a moment,’ she said. ‘Then put up another somewhere else. Change the entire configuration of the land in a day or two. A land of fences is so temporary. You can change things as easily as a stage set.
• ‘Well, I…Frankly, I’m surprised because Miss Helen’s request concerning Rick appears very sincere. I’m surprised someone would desire so much a path that would leave her in loneliness.’
  ‘And that’s what surprises you?’
  ‘Yes. Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.’
• I formed an apology in my mind, but the shadows were now even longer, so that were I to spread my fingers out before me, I knew their shadows would reach right the way back to the entrance of the barn. And it was clear the Sun was unwilling to make any promise about Josie, because for all his kindness, he wasn’t yet able to see Josie separately from the other humans, some of whom had angered him very much on account of their Pollution and inconsideration, and I suddenly felt foolish to have come to this place to make such a request.
• We’re both of us sentimental. We can’t help it. 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. You know that. For people our age it’s a hard one to let go. We have to let it go, Chrissie. There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of this world to continue. The second Josie won’t be a copy. She’ll be the exact same and you’ll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now. It’s not faith you need. Only rationality.
• ‘And that could be difficult, no? Something beyond even your wonderful capabilities. Because an impersonation wouldn’t do, however skillful. You’d have to learn her heart, and learn it fully, or you’ll never become Josie in any sense that matters.’...
  ‘The heart you speak of,’ I said. ‘It might indeed be the hardest part of Josie to learn. It might be like a house with many rooms. Even so, a devoted AF, given time, could walk through each of those rooms, studying them carefully in turn, until they became like her own home.’
• ‘That’s beside the point,’ Cindy said. ‘I’m angry about this.’ Then to the lady she said: ‘I don’t know you! Who are you? Just coming up and speaking to us that way…’
  ‘So this is your machine?’ the lady asked Josie.
  ‘Klara’s my AF, if that’s what you’re asking.’
  ‘First they take the jobs. Then they take the seats at the theater?’
• ‘And what price have I paid, Vance? Do you refer to my being poor? Because I don’t mind that so much, you know.’
  ‘You may not mind being poor, Helen. But you’ve become fragile. And I think you mind that a whole lot more.’
• And although Mr Vance isn’t visible, I can hear his unkind words coming from across the aisle. Meanwhile, above the Mother and the waterfall, the dark clouds have gathered, the same dark clouds that gathered the morning the Sun saved Josie, small cylinders and pyramids flying by in the wind.
  I know this isn’t disorientation, because if I wish to, I can always distinguish one memory from another, and place each one back in its true context. Besides, even when such composite memories come into my mind, I remain conscious of their rough borders – such as might have been created by an impatient child tearing with her fingers instead of cutting with scissors – separating, say, the Mother at the waterfall and my diner booth. And if I looked closely at the dark clouds, I would notice they were not, in fact, quite in scale in relation to the Mother or the waterfall. Even so, such composite memories have sometimes filled my mind so vividly, I’ve forgotten for long moments that I am, in reality, sitting here in the Yard, on this hard ground.
• ‘Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.