Writer Kazuo Ishiguro: 'I grew up with a naive assumption that there was progress all the time'.
Kazuo Ishiguro has written his first novel since winning the Nobel prize, a poignant tale of a solar-powered robot called Klara. But artificial intelligence is a dangerously seductive tool, he warns.
Klara believes in the goodness of the Sun. He warms, heals and is always there for her in a crisis. Without the Sun she becomes listless and grows "weaker and weaker". Sometimes she worries she may have done something to offend the Sun.
Klara is a robot, an AF, Artificial Friend. She is solar-powered — sunlight on her body charges her. "Her world view," Klara's creator says, "is shaped by this idea that the Sun is the source of everything good and nourishing. So it builds into a kind of private religion."
Her creator is Kazuo Ishiguro. Klara and the Sun is his eighth novel, his first since he won the Nobel prize for literature in 2017. His novels, starting with A Pale View of Hills in 1982, were said by the Swedish Academy to have "uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
"Good writing and good reading," he said in his Nobel speech, "will break down barriers. We may even find a new idea, a great humane vision, around which to rally."
Although a robot, Klara is in search of this kind of vision, a way of understanding the minds of her human owners. She is the AF of a teenage girl with a serious illness that, Klara prays, will be cured by the Sun. What is it, she wonders, that makes humans special? Eventually, Klara finds an answer.
The point is Klara learns. Ishiguro has been talking to Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, the world's leading AI company. AI is now less about programming machines to be clever, more about letting the machines teach themselves and rewarding them for doing so. "I immediately thought about being a parent. You know, our parental urges, where we give one kind of goal or some major mission. Then we arrange everything else in our lives to optimise that."
AI is a particular challenge to novelists because it raises the possibility of non-human consciousness. Ian McEwan, who, like Ishiguro was at the University of East Anglia creative writing course in the 1970s, has also written about AI, in his novel Machines Like Me (2019), about a robot in a three-way love match with his two owners.
Klara's reward system is the urge to keep her human friend from loneliness. "That's how she defines it, but I suppose it means just looking after her." This project is given intense poignancy by Klara being the novel's first-person narrator. We think what she thinks and, when there's a processing glitch, see the world become a cubist mash-up.
This being Ishiguro, the novel is a masterpiece of great beauty, meticulous control and, as ever, clear, simple prose. He is not one for fancy effects. He once told me he kept his prose simple to make translation easier. Now he comes up with something more interesting: "The surface of my writing has to be simple, otherwise I become incomprehensible." I find the suggestion of chaos beneath the sweet-natured surface consoling.
His 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was about human clones bred to provide organs for transplant. Like Klara, it was a form of science fiction, a term he, unlike some posh authors, embraces. "The stigma has reversed itself. It's become a kind of a sign of something cutting-edge. We now feel a real need to look at science and technology. We're hungrily looking around for people who give us some insight into it."
Ishiguro still lives with his wife, Lorna, in the house in Golders Green, North London, where I first met him in 1995. Has being a Nobel laureate changed him? There is something called Nobel disease, defined as: "When intelligence fails to protect against irrationality." This is said to afflict scientists in particular, but others also go a little crazy. Not Ishiguro.
"It goes to people's heads and they think they're geniuses. It's particularly noticeable in science, when they come off their area of research and start to assume they can be experts in other areas where they are not qualified."
Ishiguro gets invited to lunches with British winners. "Science Nobel laureates have said to me they envy the fact that I can win a Nobel and not have all these people hating me and disputing the fact that it was given to me, or should have been shared."
There are also what seem to be annual therapy sessions — disguised as lunches — at the Swedish embassy. Among other things, old winners brief the new ones on the pitfalls of the ceremony. "People say watch out for the fact that these kids will come and wake you up very early in the morning to sing carols to you, and if you don't want this you have to tell them not to."
His Nobel lecture was, in part, an autobiography, covering his family's arrival in England from Japan. But it contained an anecdote that anticipates the central theme of Klara. He was talking of the 1934 film The Twentieth Century, and the prodigious performance of John Barrymore. He found himself "uninvolved" and then realised why.
"The reason why so many vivid, undeniably convincing characters in novels, films and plays so often failed to touch me was because these characters didn't connect to any of the other characters. And immediately this next thought came regarding my own work: what if I stopped worrying about my characters and worried instead about my relationships?"
The anxiety at the end of the lecture, the hope for a "great humane vision", is political and scientific. He follows the world-changing technologies of our time — artificial intelligence, gene editing, surveillance systems — closely. They imply fundamental changes to our ideas about humanity and the humane. He worries about the fate of liberal democracy.
"I'd grown up with a naive assumption that there was progress all the time towards some more liberal status quo. Despite stops and starts and arguments, by and large, that had been my experience." But now he believes "there are serious threats to what people like me had taken for granted".
These are the anxieties of an immigrant — even though he was only 5 when he arrived in England — who has always seemed more at home here than any English-born Englishman. He is fully Japanese, but the degree to which he was or was not Japanese muddled critics of his first two novels, both of which had Japanese characters and one of which was set in Japan. But crucially it was an imagined Japan.
"I had to kind of invent my version of Japan. And that just got me into the habit of inventing my own worlds."
Surveillance technology troubles him. It intensifies the threat to our way of life. "The technologies help centralise power. It's easier to run centrally planned economies successfully in the way you couldn't during the Cold War. And maybe this time around a much more centralised authoritarian single-party system could do it much better [than the Soviet Union]."
China, for example. "China is presenting us, the whole world, with something that looks like a frighteningly workable model, an alternative to liberal democracy, that can actually be very successful for people. With the progress in artificial intelligence, as well as surveillance technology, it could present a very tempting alternative model, even for us in the West."
He has always been good at being old. Of the great 1997 album Time Out of Mind, he said Bob Dylan had gone ahead of us all to "romanticise old age". Exactly. Ishiguro once did an analysis of the ages at which writers did their best work. He found they reached their peak at 45. He is now 66. "Well, obviously I'm now doing everything to prove that statement wrong!"
He mentions The Great Beauty, a gorgeous film by Paolo Sorrentino about an old man wandering through Roman society, and Roy Andersson's latest masterpiece, About Endlessness.
"These are works that absolutely come out of a sense that one is towards the end of one's journey. You have to take a different kind of stance, it's not the usual stuff about, 'Oh my knees are creaking and I can't remember where I left my pen and stuff.' And it's not necessarily stuff about people dying around you, although there's an element of that. They are an attempt not to romanticise ageing, perhaps, but certainly to beautify it.
"I think at every point in your life you have to do your best to, you know, represent yourself as you are at that time. And so, in a sense, it's irrelevant to compare the work of a young person with the work of an older person. You're in a different position, you look for different things I think."
He has always seemed to live a life of studied self-containment. The Nobel detonated that somewhat, but so, with every book, do the reviews. How does he feel about them? Authors usually give a swift, glib answer to that question. Not Ishiguro.
"I always grew up with a slight distance even from very favourable reviews. I knew it was something that went on out there in this other parallel world I had to live in as a writer. But I knew that whether they were good reviews or bad reviews, there was a disconnect with what I was trying to do. I always felt I had my own rather private, lonely sense of success and failure. Even now, with all these people giving me gongs and things. I'm really glad to have them, really honoured. But it's something that happens to a parallel person, out there in a parallel world."
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Allen & Unwin NZ, $50) is available in March.
Written by: Brian Appleyard
© The Times of London
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