I was out to lunch the other day and a friend spoke about their robot vacuum as if it were a new housemate. It had a character of its own and was not ‘just a machine’. As humans become more isolated and individualistic, our lives become more computerised. Do we impose greater meaning on this human-robot interface?

In the morning when the Sun returns. It’s possible for us to hope.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of the human-machine relationship. The story is from the perspective of an almost human android called Klara. Klara is a solar powered artificial friend. After a long time as a display in an android shop, she is purchased as a companion for Josie. Josie is a 14 year old girl with an unnamed illness and a dead sister. Josie warns Klara that there is something strange in her household. This comment sets up a creeping anxiety in the story. Hints are dropped about the nature of the strangeness but it doesn’t become apparent for some time what it is. The tension is heightened by the narrators limited and slightly naive perspective.

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.

Klara is designed to observe, learn, understand and serve her human. She is more than a friend – loyal, good and selfless. Klara also has the ability to learn about the emotional contradictions of humans. Yet, she also believes the sun has special powers that provide life giving nourishment. When Klara becomes increasingly concerned about Josie’s deteriorating health she seeks the suns help to heal her friend.

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.

The constructed world in which Klara lives is a hierarchical society of the ‘lifted’ and ‘uplifted’. The former have access to special privileges. And as one would expect, they are prone to be entitled brats. Klara’s charge Josie is lifted and more compassionate than her other lifted friends, perhaps due to her illness. Josie’s best friend and neighbour, Rick, is ‘unlifted’ and their relationship becomes something that Klara also protects and nurtures.

As I say, these were helpful lessons for me. Not only had I learnt 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 passersby – as they might in a store window, and that such display needn’t be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.”

As Klara learns to understand humans more and more, she seems to become more human herself. However fully grasping them always remains just out of reach. Though her observations do enable the reader to fully experience what she cannot. Klara observes, analyses and reports but the reader overlays meaning to connect the dots.

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

Klara and the Sun is a speculative fiction novel that explores what it means to be human, loneliness and love. Beautifully written with an eloquent subtlety that expresses complexity through simplicity.