Unconsoled Consoles

A much-delayed appraisal of Klara and the Sun and the startling perspectives of Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction. (Contains spoilers!)

I’m sitting at my desk looking at the ornaments and trinkets on the windowsill in front of me. A Russian doll (a bit full of itself), a little figurine of William Shakespeare, a couple of nice beer bottles (including a Lucky Buddha Beer), a cleaned-out jam jar I use for pens, a teacup from Uruguay, and a clock which I bought in a short-lived attempt to stop checking my phone so much (I use my phone as an alarm clock, so the goal was to keep my phone in a different room and use the clock to wake me up; I ended up lying awake in the middle of the night absentmindedly turning the light of the clock on and off – force of habit, I suppose). 

I also have a small wooden object. It’s about the size and shape of a playing card, but it’s slightly thicker. It has the words ‘Old Fire 2006-2016’ engraved into it. It’s a little memento from an album on which I played the guitar. Old Fire is the name of a project my friend John Mark Lapham put together, with various musicians recording their parts remotely. With the first 25 CDs he included this little wooden emblem. So it’s a nice reminder of a good friend and of a rewarding, collaborative project.

My Old Fire emblem

Where am I going with this?

Well, imagine that I wanted to illustrate to you what an average study or office might look like. How would I communicate what a working-from-home environment was like to a complete stranger, or to an alien, or to a robot with artificial intelligence? I might describe the objects on the windowsill to bring my experience to life. Pens for writing. A clock to tell the time. The ornaments might be harder to explain – decorative items that are nice to look at? And what about the Old Fire object? Well, maybe I wouldn’t include that – it’s too difficult to explain. It’s not general enough; it’s too specific to me.

All of this brings me onto the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro’s created worlds are full of these non-general details and are populated by characters who are, more often than not, victims of their own subjectivity. Limited by their worldviews, they mistake the part for the whole. In other words, a character in an Ishiguro novel would mention the Old Fire object and would include it as a detail of their lived experience because – well, because it’s there, and because their awareness about what is and is not ‘general’ is somehow flawed.

When Ishiguro appeared on Adam Buxton’s podcast I thought it was significant that the first thing he said was to do with assumptions. He was talking about how, in the age of Zoom interviews, people just assume that he will have the required software and equipment. He imagines being asked to do an interview which necessitates the use of the delightfully named ‘Platgarden’ software. The characters in Ishiguro’s novels are often led by assumptions because their understanding of the world is somehow restricted. In Never Let Me Go, children, cloned to have their organs harvested, piece together information about their preordained lives from rumours – and from a well-meaning, but soon to be dismissed, guardian. This leads them to make assumptions about what they can do to try and escape their fate (or defer their ‘donations’, to use the creepy euphemism of the novel). In The Buried Giant, Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple in a fantastical post-Arthurian England, are similarly unable to fully understand their world because they cannot retain long-term memories. In The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens also has a reduced outlook, blinkered as he is by duty and by the rigidity of the British class system. In the buildup to the Second World War he is unwaveringly faithful to his employer Lord Darlington, a Nazi sympathiser. From the vantage point of the aftermath of the war, Stevens slowly and painfully reckons with his misplaced loyalty.

The butler didn’t do it… Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in the 1993 film of The Remains of the Day

This restriction of knowledge is taken to an extreme in Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Klara and the Sun. Klara is an AF (Artificial Friend), a solar-powered android who has been assigned to provide company for Josie, a seriously (terminally?) ill teenager. Klara narrates her unquestioningly subjective experience as if it were objective reality. For example, when Klara’s battery levels are low, her vision is severely affected – and this is described solipsistically, as if the world itself has changed, not just her individual perspective:

We were then facing the store, and I could see all the way to the Glass Table at the back, but the space had become partitioned into ten boxes, so that I no longer had a single unified picture of the view before me.

Klara’s solipsism leads to a quasi-religious belief system, complete with its own form of prayer. We all feel that the sun provides nourishment, but the leap that Klara makes is that the ‘Sun’ (capitalised throughout the book) is a conscious entity that nourishes us deliberately and responds to our devotion.

So I gathered my thoughts and began to speak. I didn’t actually say the words out loud, for I knew the Sun had no need of words as such. But I wished to be as clear as possible, so I formed the words, or something close to them, quickly and quietly in my mind.

We don’t find out what drives the plot of Klara and the Sun for 200 pages and so, for the bulk of the novel, the reader is, like Klara, led by assumptions. Restricted by Klara’s narrative perspective, we are unable to distinguish between important and unimportant details. As the guardian Miss Lucy tells the clones in Never Let Me Go: ‘you’ve been told and not told’.

Eventually, we discover that Klara has actually been employed in order to learn Josie’s behaviour. In the event of her death, a new Josie would be created – an exact physical replica housing Klara’s imitation of Josie’s… soul? The novel asks: if this were to happen, if Klara were to become a copy or continuation of Josie, would it matter? In what sense would it still be Josie? What would happen if there was nothing that was completely unique to us and we could be recreated, down to the smallest detail, in a lab?

Science fiction is often rooted in speculative questions like these. The foundation of Never Let Me Go is a similar ‘what if’ scenario: what if humans could be cloned for their organs? Like the best science fiction writers, Ishiguro deals with these questions indirectly (hence the 200 pages of assumption-led misdirection in Klara and the Sun). His characters are at several removes, or perhaps several generations, from the decisions and events that determine their lives. And so each novel is as much to do with the moral implications posed by its ‘what if’ question as it is to do with what the actual nature of experience would be like for these marginalised characters. Like the hero of Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker trying to make sense of the ruins of the world centuries after a nuclear catastrophe, Ishiguro imagines how life would actually feel for his characters as they try to decipher and find meaning in their surroundings.

By decentring his science fiction novels away from their speculative origins, they occupy a strange middle ground between the symbolic and the literal. The experiences of Klara, and of the clones in Never Let Me Go, are full of details that resist interpretation; there is no straightforward dystopian analogy at work. In Never Let Me Go, Tommy, the novel’s savant, comes to believe that the quality of the artwork that the children produced at Hailsham (the mysterious boarding school where the clones were raised) may help to defer their donations. This leads him to compile a bizarre portfolio of intricately designed imaginary animals. What do these drawings mean in the context of the ethical issues raised by the novel? Do they have symbolic value? Or are they, in a sense, side effects; peculiar manifestations of the clones’ compromised perspectives? Is their purpose to contribute to the fabric of the reality of the novel, to more fully gain a sense of the depth of Tommy’s inner life? If this is the case, it is tremendously defamiliarising, because, while the drawings bring Tommy’s experience to life, it is an experience that we don’t recognise. 

Defamiliarisation is a hallmark of Ishiguro’s fiction; as is his use of a curiously affectless narrative voice. Klara and Kathy, the narrator of Never Let Me Go, do not distinguish between the familiar and the unfamiliar because their own lives are not strange to them. Kathy’s experience of growing up as a clone, which is something that the reader cannot relate to, is filtered alongside things that do feel recognisable: the trivial stuff of childhood – crushes, football matches, arguments about pencil cases, all the unremarkable routines of school life. This creates a peculiar flattening effect. Familiar or unfamiliar, the reader must experience Ishiguro’s created worlds exactly as his narrators do.

You’ve been farmed… Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan in the 2010 film of Never Let Me Go

Several times so far I have mentioned a blurring of lines in Ishiguro’s fiction. What is important and unimportant? What is symbolic and literal? What is familiar and unfamiliar? Ishiguro’s novels seem to exist in these in-between zones. Indeed, for a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, we might almost expect a different kind of novel from Klara and the Sun, or from the epic anxiety dream of The Unconsoled – something more sweeping, more quotable, more unambiguously about ‘the human condition’; or, at least, a story with which we can more easily relate or identify. But on a sentence-by-sentence level Ishiguro often seems to resist relatability and quotability because his novels are so full of strange details like Tommy’s drawings; details that are strange because they are so unique to the experience of one person (or clone, or android) – rather like my Old Fire emblem.

But of course Ishiguro’s novels are about the human condition – in many ways they are about a very specific aspect of the human condition: the experience of strangeness itself. It is with those strange details – rich with uncanniness and otherness – that we are given a glimpse into another perspective that is totally unlike our own.

Perspective is key to understanding Ishiguro’s novels. On Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail podcast, he said: ‘I’m always after perspective and so I like to create things that perhaps offer readers a slightly startling perspective on familiar things.’ Startling is the word. It doesn’t seem to get remarked upon often enough, but Ishiguro’s novels are really strange. There are passages in Ishiguro that I have to read over and over again because I almost can’t believe how weird they are. And what makes them weirder is the impassivity with which they are narrated; that curious affectlessness I mentioned earlier. Take this sentence from The Buried Giant, which is so brilliantly lacking in surprise and wonder:

A sound made him turn, and he saw at the other end of the boat, still bathed in orange light, the old woman slumped against the bow with pixies – too many to count – swarming over her. 

Or consider the passage in Klara and the Sun where Klara decides that it is necessary to destroy a piece of roadwork equipment that she has named the Cootings Machine. ‘Cootings’, which is emblazoned across the side of the machine, is presumably the name of its manufacturing company. Rather like the alien in Craig Raine’s poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ who refers to objects as iterations of their original mass-produced forms (books are ‘Caxtons’, a car is a ‘Model T’), Klara names things according to their branding or signage. A burger restaurant with a sign outside that reads ‘We Grind Our Own Beef’ becomes known as the ‘Grind Our Own Beef building’ thereafter. Klara believes that the Cootings Machine is causing pollution which is affecting the Sun’s ability to nourish Josie. With the help of Josie’s father, Klara makes an incision below her ear in order to access her reserves of ‘P-E-G Nine’, a polymer which, as becomes clear, is essential to the inner workings of an AF (and which, it turns out, actually exists). Together, they drain the solution into a bottle and pour it into the Cootings Machine in the hope of destroying it. Shortly afterwards, Klara’s functionality becomes severely impaired. Sitting in a diner with Josie’s friend Rick and his family, she suddenly and involuntarily relives the sensory experience of what she will later call her ‘sacrifice’:

At that moment, I felt once more, fleetingly but vividly, the Father’s hand holding my head at the required angle, and heard the trickling noise as the fluid entered the plastic bottle he was holding up close to my face with his other hand.

Even describing this truly unheimlich scene makes me feel unsettled and disturbed in a way I can’t quite describe. But it is in these vividly realised windows into his characters’ lives that Ishiguro captures something that feels like the true substance of experience. Not an experience that we recognise or can relate to admittedly (I don’t know what it feels like to relive the memory of destroying a roadworks machine with liquid I have extracted from my head), but an experience that feels remarkably tangible because it is so strange. The more shocking and uncanny a scene such as this feels to the reader, the more it solidifies the reality of the novel, and brings the uniqueness of Klara’s perspective to life.

Some of Ishiguro’s more discomforting scenes are so strange and absurd that they veer into black comedy. In Never Let Me Go, the clones, having learnt about their roles as future donors, mime the removal of their organs as part of a bizarre running joke:

The idea was that when the time came, you’d be able just to unzip a bit of yourself, a kidney or something would slide out, and you’d hand it over. It wasn’t something we found so funny in itself; it was more a way of putting each other off our food. You unzipped your liver, say, and dumped it on someone’s plate, that sort of thing.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate just how weird this concept is. Imagine if you told a friend that you were writing a science fiction novel about cloning that contained a scene in which teenage replicants gross each other out by pretending to eviscerate themselves on each others food. I think your friend would find the idea very creepy and might wonder if you were OK. It’s like a sick joke – there’s something so distasteful about it. It’s a scene that makes us want to turn our eyes away, but something about the way in which it is narrated – as if what is happening is totally normal – forces us to look. The children’s awful fate, ordained by an unknowable authority, is narrated with shocking impassivity; their donations are an unremarkable element of their day-to-day lives. There is something of the ‘banality of evil’ about this scene (as there is in the background of much of Ishiguro’s fiction). It is truly grotesque yet strangely plausible. This is, after all, exactly how children would behave – indecorously, not really understanding the seriousness of their situation. As Kathy says, ‘All that business about “unzipping”, that was typical of the way the whole subject impinged on us when we were thirteen.’

All of this is not to say that there aren’t beautiful (and quotable) Nobel-esque moments in Ishiguro’s novels. Klara and the Sun ends with Klara deciding that Mr Capaldi, the scientist responsible for creating the clone of Josie, was mistaken:

There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.

Klara comes to believe that our identities are defined not by who we are, but by how others feel about us. It is not the fact that we love, it is the fact that we are loved; we are defined by reciprocation. If Klara’s words were tweaked slightly they would make a great epigrammatic quotation. You can imagine it being engraved on a memorial somewhere. Maybe it’s not a million miles away from ‘the love you take is equal to the love you make’. But the majority of Klara and the Sun is made up with the weird, granular detail of experience, with sentences like: ‘My concern however wasn’t the passing cars or their unfriendly drivers, but what was going on at that moment inside the Grind Our Own Beef.’ I think I’d prefer to have something like that engraved somewhere. In its own way, it’s just as profound. It represents the vivid, lived-in quality of Ishiguro’s language and the way it clings to an individual perspective – and it demonstrates the capacity that this defamiliarising idiolect has to make us see the world afresh.

Cool AF – Klara and the Sun (2021)

The intricately detailed internal lives of Ishiguro’s characters are often hard to parse on a micro level, but when we view them from a distance things seem to come into focus. After all, we still know what it feels like to try and make sense of our lives like Klara; we still, like the clones in Never Let Me Go, have to face up to our own mortality.

We empathise with Tommy and Klara despite the animal drawings and the Cootings Machine feeling inscrutable and strange. Both characters have been led by assumptions into actions that they believe will help them and help others. They both have a kind of corrupted survival instinct. People, even bound by assumptions, misinformation and compromised perspectives, will still try to reason their way towards survival. Although we cannot literally relate to their experiences, they are motivated by something that we can all understand: hope, ‘one of the things that makes us human’, as Ishiguro said in a recent interview. 

Tommy’s drawings then do have a broader symbolic value. They represent Tommy’s hope for survival. Tommy believes that the drawings will demonstrate the clones’ humanity, their souls. He believes that there is something palpable about the human soul which can be expressed in artistic form. Tommy remembers that, at Hailsham, the head guardian Miss Emily told a fellow student that ‘pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff […] revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul’. This leads Tommy to formulate his theory about how to delay their donations:

Suppose some special arrangement has been made for Hailsham students. Suppose two people say they’re truly in love, and they want extra time to be together. Then you see, Kath, there has to be a way to judge if they’re really telling the truth. That they aren’t just saying they’re in love, just to defer their donations. You see how difficult it could be to decide? Or a couple might really believe they’re in love, but it’s just a sex thing. Or just a crush. You see what I mean, Kath? It’ll be really hard to judge, and it’s probably impossible to get it right every time. But the point is, whoever decides, Madame or whoever it is, they need something to go on. […] Suppose two people come up and say they’re in love. She can find the art they’ve done over years and years. She can see if they go. If they match. Don’t forget, Kath, what she’s got reveals our souls. She could decide for herself what’s a good match and what’s just a stupid crush.

This scene is echoed in The Buried Giant. When Axl and Beatrice overcome their amnesia they are able to recall that their son died many years ago. They meet a boatman who offers to row them to an island where they can be with him forever. However, if the couple wants to remain together on the island they must first pass a test:

Occasionally a couple may be permitted to cross to the island together, but this is rare. It requires an unusually strong bond of love between them. It does sometimes occur, I don’t deny, and that’s why when we find a man and wife, or even unmarried lovers, waiting to be carried over, it’s our duty to question them carefully. For it falls to us to perceive if their bond is strong enough to cross together.

Beatrice asks the boatman about the nature of this questioning. He replies:

If it’s a couple such as you speak of, who claim their bond is so strong, then I must ask them to put their most cherished memories before me. I’ll ask one, then the other to do this. Each must speak separately. In this way the real nature of their bond is soon revealed. […] [W]hen travellers speak of their most cherished memories, it’s impossible for them to disguise the truth. A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more. Abiding love that has endured the years – that we see only rarely. When we do, we’re only too glad to ferry the couple together.

The fallacy in Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant is that a couple’s love for each other is something that can somehow be measured scientifically and proved objectively to exist. Both novels end without consolation. It turns out that Tommy’s theory, tragically, has been founded on a mistaken assumption. We discover that, while Hailsham was an unusually compassionate environment in which the artwork produced by the clones really was used to advocate for their humanity, there was never a system of ‘deferrals’ and the school was eventually closed down. In the penultimate chapter Miss Emily tells Tommy: ‘Your life must now run the course that’s been set for it.’

In the world of The Buried Giant, we never find out if the unreliable boatman (who, it transpires, is also the novel’s unreliable narrator) really can perceive a couple’s love for each other, or if, for that matter, the island really is a magical place where the living can be reunited with the dead. The book’s deeply ambiguous ending sees Axl and Beatrice appear to pass the boatman’s test (which ends up being little more than a formality). Despite this, Beatrice is rowed to the island alone, the boatman claiming that the water is too turbulent to take them both together. Axl, mistrustful, remains on the shore.

In comparison, Klara and the Sun contains a note of uncharacteristic optimism, with Klara’s aforementioned belief that, ‘There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.’ In other words, for Klara, love is something that can be said to exist outside of oneself. It is measurable in the sense that it has an effect on others. 

Ishiguro’s novels have a preoccupation with the ways in which something internal – our souls, our identities, our emotional lives – can be quantified, expressed and perceived externally. The theme surfaces in the ‘bubble game’ that Josie plays with Rick in Klara and the Sun. In this game, Josie draws sketches of people – acquaintances, family members – with empty thought bubbles above their heads. Rick fills the bubbles with text; approximations of what people are really thinking beneath the surface. In this game we see the novel’s irresolvable tension, between external appearances and unknowable internality, played out in miniature. In his review of Klara and the Sun, Alex Preston wrote that the bubble game, along with Tommy’s drawings, are representations of ‘the power of art to express the unsaid’. It is with art that we get closest to expressing our great internality.

Art’s strange power is also key to the dream city of The Unconsoled, where music appears to have a kind of objective and (much-contested) civic value. Ryder, the novel’s narrator, is regarded as a saviour whose upcoming piano recital will somehow rescue the anonymous town from crisis. In one scene, Ryder is asked: ‘is it truly the case that pigmented triads have intrinsic emotional values regardless of context?’ (Note how the musical term ‘augmented’ has been corrupted by the oneiric dialect of the novel.) 

The idea that an abstract art form such as instrumental music has ‘intrinsic emotional values’ is another attractive fallacy. If it were the case, then a musician wishing to communicate a particular emotional state would simply have to use ‘pigmented triads’ and be done with it. In reality, a composer may ‘express the unsaid’ and translate their emotional state into music; this emotional state may then be perceived by a listener. However, it’s an inexact science and, really, we are in the realm of pure subjectivity. Of course, there is a shared language of Western music (minor chords sound sad, for example), but the more you try to analyse the emotional nature of music the more enigmatic it becomes (no one has ever been able to explain exactly why minor chords sound sad). What happens in the beautiful translational journey from composer to listener is a mystery. There is nothing ‘intrinsic’ in music that can communicate objective meanings; it cannot be translated back into the emotional state from which it originated.

Mystery, inexplicability, indefinability, weirdness. Although we have art, music and language itself, there are some questions that have no answers and some things that can never be explained. It is impossible to ever know what another person is really thinking or feeling. All of our expressions of internality are innately imitable. Which brings us back to the central question of Klara and the Sun: does it then matter if those expressions are imitations? Towards the end of the novel Josie’s father asks Klara:

Then let me ask you something else. Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? 

(Note the brilliantly naturalistic quality of this dialogue: ‘Then let me ask you something else. Let me ask you this.’ It is typical of Ishiguro to preface the most meaningful question of the book with such tentative, circumlocutory dialogue.) 

What makes us human and how can it be proved? Is it something that can be expressed in art or music? Is it something to do with the language we use? Something to do with the way we communicate with each other? Is it something that can be reconstructed in a lab, like the replica of Josie? 

Ishiguro’s characters, despite their strange circumstances and unfamiliar perspectives, enact the essential human need to be understood. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Ishiguro said:

There are large, glamorous industries around stories; the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry. But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?

As individuals we are all unconsoled; we are all divided by the unknowability of other minds. What unites us is the need to reach through this cloud of unknowing and ask: Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?