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I had to double-check that Kazuo Ishiguro had not written an android protagonist before. His characters are emotional blanks who favour the clipped diction of police reports in a safer-than-average constabulary. Scores of pages can pass before the reader discerns an inner strain, at which point the uptight prose makes sublime sense as characterisation. No writer achieves more effect while seeming to do so little.
The solar-powered “artificial friend†in his new book is a kind of career culmination, then. Klara and the Sun depicts the bond between the titular servant and a mysteriously ill girl in a near-future US.
Ishiguro is too cool — too like his own characters — to write an outright dystopia. When Klara runs the biomechanical gauntlet of sitting at a kitchen island, we see that here, even after the Nobel Prize, is an ironist at work. Still, a quick tabulation of the horrors that are foretold in this book include: the obsolescence of most workers, the mistreatment of sentient machines, environmental despoliation, genetic surgery run amok and the corruption of childhood. When Klara sees people engrossed in handheld “oblongsâ€, the book comes distressingly close to asking why we don’t talk to each other any more.
In a young century, attitudes to technology have passed from credulous optimism to scattered misgivings to what is now a grinding bleakness. Only the middle phase was remotely proportionate. Last month, Tobias Ellwood MP described the end of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter as “one of the priorities of our ageâ€. Not the reining-in, mind, but the end. As for Congress, victims of its hapless inquisitions include the current CEOs of Google (“congressman, iPhone is made by a different companyâ€) and Apple. In my own trade, the angst takes the form of half-researched allusions to 19th-century robber barons, as though Standard Oil’s wares were free at the point of use, as though politicians summoned John Pierpont Morgan and not the other way round.
And these are some of the lowest-stakes industries that can fairly be described as “techâ€. Imagine the coming rap for artificial intelligence and gene editing.
I don’t use social media. I equate Netflix with the clammy pathos of stale marriages. The urbanist in me distrusts any industry that calls Palo Alto home. As recently as three years ago, I would have numbered myself among the tech-sceptics. But then the bar for that club seemed to rise from healthy vigilance to a perception of the last three decades of change as a net negative. And of the next few as inherently baleful.
Somehow, the gloom survived 2020. Over the past year, the supply chain for almost every product in existence held up during the worst peacetime conditions in a century. In-person, eyeball-to-eyeball work, the way of things since the dawn of agriculture, went online with a seamlessness that I still cannot quite believe. The life sciences then produced a vaccine for a lethal virus within 12 months of its still-opaque emergence. Even tech’s fripperies — streaming, delivery apps — turned out to be essentials. To exit this pandemic as sour about tech as we were before it would be quite the feat. The species seems willing to give it the old college try.
If not the highest ceiling, Ishiguro has the highest floor in modern letters. None of his work is bad, not even the Mitteleuropean maze of The Unconsoled, the only book I have ever read in order to be able to say that I have read it. Precisely because of his rigour, though, Klara is something of a cultural moment. Techno-pessimism really is all-pervading if it encompasses an artist this subtle.
No doubt, a novelist has to have a jaundiced view of the future. A space-age idyll would be thin on drama. It is just that tomorrow might be grim in an altogether different way. A loss of consumer surplus, if the Ellwoods prevail, is the least of it. Picture the fragmentation of “the†internet into national ones. Or the stunting through moral panic of life-changing bioscience. Even the ordeal of Uber, an unlovely business in lots of ways, portends the gumming-up of a once-frictionless world. In the end, for all her growth, Klara’s “life†is circumscribed. We at least have our choice of dystopias.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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