Reviews: Books

The Correspondent Book Review: Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliantly clear and simple prose brings to life artificial humanoid Klara in a futuristic world of genetically enhanced children

 Apr 26, 2025

Book Review: Klara And The Sun.

Some of the reviews of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun speak of love and of the meaning of love when the story is more a testament to human selfishness and the opposite of love. Yes, love with the two teenagers Rick and Josie who Klara connects with but as an artificial humanoid she is treated like any piece of household equipment and can be discarded when not needed. However, Klara recognises love and friendship in the humans she serves or observes during her life in the showroom and later as Josie’s Artificial Friend or AF. Written in the first person by Klara the story is set in a future where children are routinely genetically enhanced or ‘lifted’, so as to increase their intelligence and better prospects of gaining a college place and a good career. Some like Josie have health problems as a result and that’s where the AFs come in as a means of support as a friend and general helper. Klara like all AFs is programmed to fulfil this role but unlike the more superior AF B3s she develops a greater sense of empathy and understanding of human emotions making her special.

Like some of the protagonists in Kazuo Ishiguro’s other novels Klara is in some ways an unreliable narrator as she tells her story from only her point of view. She is programmed to serve and as such is compliant to her controllers – the store’s manager and later Josie and her mother – but develops her own opinions of the various characters and her near religious believe in the healing power of the sun. This is in part due to her reliance on solar power to keep her active but also in her misunderstanding of how the universe works which the humans fail to explain to her.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliantly clear and simple prose brings to life artificial humanoid Klara in a futuristic world of genetically enhanced children although apart from these innovations the people and their surroundings sound the same as ever – selfish and materialist. Apart from The Father who seemed to think violence and civil war was likely the ordinary day to day lives of the shoppers, the farmers and the road workers with their Cootings Machine and the office staff in the RPO Building seem no different from today.

Although a very straightforward and easy to read novel there is a continual doubt as to where the story is going as we discover Josie’s family has a tragic past. Would Klara intervene in the lives of Josie, the Mother, Rick and Rick’s mother more or would the eccentric Mr Capaldi and his sculpture of Josie somehow become a threat. And then there was Mother’s ex-boyfriend the very unhelpful Mr Vance and his bitterness at their breakup and the interfering and argumentative Josie’s dad. The concerns they all had and their bickering and arguments about what was best for Rick and Josie contrasted with the two teenagers who seemed the only mature and balanced characters.

As the novel reaches its final chapters the debates about Josie’s future and that of Rick become increasingly intense and Klara observes these often-heated discussions which as an AF brings a certain calmness in her observations. She is not entirely neutral – only wanting the best for Josie but is only sometimes brought into the conversations – and is frequently left standing by the refrigerator. How would it all end? The setting sun in Mr Bain’s barn, the importance of the Cootings Machine or Josie’s illness finally getting the better of her? Or even the horrifying prospect of cloning Rosie?

Fortunately, the down to earth Melania Housekeeper and her concerns of the teenagers engaging in ‘hanky-panky’ and their witty and funny conversations keep the situations grounded in the everyday. Their love for each other is a central theme – in all its awkward teenage mood swings – but a love recognised by Klara as important and often missed by the grown-ups. Rick’s mother’s character Miss Helen is superbly drawn in the hilarious scene in the Sushi Restaurant when she’s rebuffed by Mr Vance to Rick’s embarrassment. And Melania Housekeeper’s warning to Klara to keep an eye on Josie at Mr Capaldi’s studio or she’d dump her in the trash can bring more humour to Klara’s dead-pan narration.

It’s not really a dystopian novel in the sense the world has been plunged into a dark and dangerous future but more of a warning of how AFs could intervene in our world and the downside of genetically interfering with children and how the wealthy would use these changes to their advantage – or disadvantage. The technology behind all of this is not explained as it is Klara who interprets society through the limits of her programmed brain. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun is a page turner, an easy to read, compulsive novel – containing many unexplained events and characters due to Klara’s lack of knowledge of people – and those mysteries slowly unravel even when Klara gets things wrong. And happily, gets them right – including her devotion to the unlikely powers of the sun.

Harry Mottram

Notes

This novel was chosen as the latest book for The Axbridge Four Seasons Book Club founded in 1998. If you are interested in joining email harryfmottram@gmail or message me via social media. The Club has its own FaceBook site.

It’s the second novel of Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro that we have read – and most of his novels are about memories and looking back at the past as in Remains of the Day while I thought there were parallels with his novel Never Let Me Go. As a club we met the novelist in Bath when he gave a talk – although Japanese by birth he has lived in England since the age of two and doesn’t speak Japanese.

Klara and the Sun was published on 2 March 2021 by Faber and Faber – my copy came from Cheddar Library – a £1.50 fee – but it is widely available from all good book shops.

A movie version of the novel is in production with Jenna Ortega cast as Klara – the main image is from a promo for the film; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNgdXFupbjI

Currently on BBC i-player there is a profile of Kazuo Ishiguro at https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000tqn0/imagine-2021-kazuo-ishiguro-remembering-and-forgetting

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The Correspondent Book Review: David Sedaris’s idiosyncratic world of thoughtless fathers, rude friends of friends and people who don’t pack until the removal men arrive

Book Review: Me Talk Pretty One Day. David Sedaris

A friend of a friend should be beaten to death for her rudeness, collecting boxes of LPs should be illegal, the concept of Easter, and accounts of unspeakably dull childhoods fill David Sedaris’ collection of short idiosyncratic stories in Me Talk Pretty One Day. The title is the translation from French of his tentative attempts to improve speaking the language. There’s, his memories of his unthinking parents, his sister who constantly changes her personality and his change of career to become a removal man leading to a rich vein of humour.

If you’ve moved house yourself recently, you’d sympathise with David Sedaris on his thoughts as a furniture remover in New York. The heavier the boxes are with items that haven’t been looked at or used in decades the more he becomes more disgruntled – losing patience with people who fill boxes with unread books preferring moving stuffed animals which are bulky but light. He rants: “Boxes of records made me think that LPs should be outlawed or at least limited to five per person…”

The humourist describes friends, colleagues and members of his family with a surgical precision that reveals the comedy in people you might want to push over a cliff as they are so irritating. His friend Alisha occasionally visited him where she was so easy going it was a pleasure to have here around – until she brought with her friend from work called Bonnie who had, “… landed at Kennedy who convinced that given half a chance the people of New York would steal the fillings right out of her mouth…” And who continued to accuse taxi drivers, metro ticket sellers, waitresses and anyone in a shop of ripping her off. Exasperated with her rudeness Sedaris writes: “We should have beaten her to death. It was clearly the best solution…”

A master storyteller, a convivial and likeable radio voice his stories may exaggerate but are always honest and in their own way truthful. Born in 1956, New Yorker David Sedaris born rose to fame when Santaland Diaries the first of his short semi-biographical stories was read broadcast on National Public Radio in 1922. His hilarious account as working over Christmas as an Elf in a department store led to regular slots on the radio and a long list of books in which are largely semi-fictional accounts of aspects of his life.

Harry Mottram

Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris is available in paperback. Published in 2000.

The BBC ran his stories in Meet David Sedaris on Radio 4 at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000twhp

He has a website with details of his work at https://www.davidsedarisbooks.com/

Book review: last night I dreamt I went to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca again – and tried not to get it mixed up with the movie version

Book review: Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

Last night I dreamt I went to Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca again. I called out in my dream to Mrs Manvers who I found lighting a fire in my bed in the East Wing of Manderley. And Max was firing his revolver again and again into Rebecca’s sailing boat before he turned and with an expression that was part anger and part sorrow asked if I would like to take tea in the library.

When I awoke, I couldn’t remember what part was the novel and what part was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 movie with Joan Fontaine as the narrator and the second Mrs de Winter and Laurence Olivier as Maxim. Did Mrs Manvers really set fire to Manderley or did she simply spend hours and hours folding and refolding Rebecca’s negligee as she mourned the loss of her secret (or not so secret) love? Such is the mistake of reading a novel and watching the film of the book at the same time.

A second reading of the novel 20 years apart convinced me Rebecca is one of the best novels I have ever read. A thrilling psychological mystery with layers of guilt, of manipulation, of gothic detail and of the inner thoughts that give the narrator’s convincing coming of age story such depth. The second Mrs de Winter, the unnamed narrator begins the story reflecting from her Mediterranean exile on all things English countryside. We then flashback to the ghastly Mrs Van Hopper in the south of France – her pompous and obnoxious employer who unwittingly introduces her to Maxim to whom she absconds with and the story begins.

The narrator begins as a young and naïve woman fresh out of school with a sense of right and wrong but ends the story protecting a murderer by failing to give evidence in a legal case concerning the death of Rebecca. Her love for the moody and short-tempered Maxim is all consuming, putting up with his guilty grumps and the psychological damage that his relationship with the first Mrs de Winter had done to him. Dismissed as nothing more than a romantic novel on publication in 1938 it was an immediate best seller and has never been out of print since. But for me it’s the way the narrator describes each character and her reactions to them which transcend this novel from the everyday to a modern classic.

It’s the narrator’s thought process which so grips in all its candid nature and her obsession with the ghostly presence of the ‘remarkable Rebecca’ whose glamour and personality so dominates all at Manderley. Eventually of course she exorcises the Rebecca’s phantom only to see her stately home above the Cornish cove destroyed, sending her into exile and back to the famous opening line in Chapter one.

Harry Mottram

The novel was remade as a 2020 movie directed by Ben Wheatley from a screenplay by Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel, and Anna Waterhouse.

For more features, reviews, news and views on a variety of subjects visit www.harrymottram.co.uk

Follow Harry on Facebook, Twitter as @harrythespiv, Instagram, Blogspot, YouTube and LinkedIn as well as Harry Speed and Harry Mottram Creative Services on Facebook.

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Book Review The Lamplighters, by Emma Stonex: a word of warning – don’t apply for a job on a lighthouse as you could disappear – the question is where did you go when you vanished?

Three lighthouse keepers disappear from the isolated rock off Land’s End. What happened to them? Murder? Suicide? Or an accident? Emma Stonex’s mystery about the trio of lamplighters from the isolated Maiden Rock and their respective domestic lives promises much but only delivers the reasons why nobody should apply to be a lighthouse keeper. Not that you can anymore.

Since the implementation by the UK’s Coast Guard of the Lighthouse Automation and Modernization Program all lighthouse keepers have been replaced by automatic lighting systems so nobody should feel the isolation and loneliness of life on in one or the irritation with sharing the tower with two other people. Set in 1972 the story is a warning about sharing a space not much larger than a prison with the windows closed and cigarette smoke and sea salt damp pervading all within.

The story was inspired by the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers from the lannan Isles Lighthouse, off the coast of the Outer Hebrides in 1900. It is the general opinion that all three were swept to their deaths in a storm as each tried to save each other after one of them fell or was blown into the churning seas.

Emma Lomax cloaks the slow burn story that jumps back and forth in time with a supernatural element as she layers on the background to each of the doomed trio’s lives. The strange Silver Man and a ghost like appearance of a gent walking across the road from the 1930s. And there’s some strange sounds in the lighthouse that can’t be explained, but for me the supernatural overtones took away the prosaic nature of the day to day lives of all those involved and all those 1970s references which lit up the narrative like toasting slices of white Mother’s Pride bread, Neil Young on the Sony and tinned Heinz ravioli. The conversations between the men with their clipped sentences and barely concealed irritation with each other along with the joshing and joking and good deal of swearing brought home the claustrophobia of life on the grimy tower and life back home.

There’s Helen married to Arthur, Jenny’s domestic life with Bill and Michelle who is Vince’s partner – and then there’s the writer Dan Sharp trying to dig up the true story 20 years later. Hints are dropped here and there, an anniversary of the disappearance described and the hostility of the women to the media left to wonder what really happened.

Harry Mottram

Member of the Axbridge Four Seasons Book Club

For more visit www.harrymottram.co.uk

Follow Harry on Twitter and Facebook for more stories and features

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Book Review: Delia Owens’ whodunit, coming of age and environmental romance, Where The Crawdads Sing,l ticks all the boxes as a novel of our times – as mystery marsh girl Kya’s life spins out or control as a suspected murderer

We are familiar with Tarzan and Mowgli, Romulus and Remus and even Dicky and Emmeline Lestrange in The Blue Lagoon, but Delia Owen’ gives us a new feral child in Kya.

Where the Crawdad Sings is a mixture of a novel. Part romance, part environmental plea for understanding and protection of the threatened marshlands of North Carolina and part murder mystery – solved like all good whodunnits at the very end. At its core is the story of protagonist Kya the marsh girl as the villagers call her, who initially lives with her drunken abusive father after her mother and siblings abandon. Left alone with only a diet of fish and grits (a sort of porridge) for nourishment she eventually attracts the attention of the local boys. Firstly in her kindred spirit, educator and mentor Tate and later with ‘the sneaky fucker’ Chase.

Is Kya too good to be true? What about those practicalities like dental health and childhood bugs? Can she really have only attended school once and so left reading and writing to her teenage years with Tate, before writing two books on the wildlife of the marshes? Perhaps. It certainly stretches the realms of the possible in 1950s and 1960s America. Since she is so well drawn as a character by Owens and the story so compelling we suspend our disbelief and go along with this engaging and evocative read – and learn a great deal about the wildlife of the marshes – and even what crawdads are.

The murder and subsequent trial which sweeps up Kya into a neo-Kafka-esque nightmare after the slow burn of the investigation into Chase’s death adds an extra layer which many a crime novelist would be proud of. And since this is Owens’ first novel you have to admit it’s a pretty successful debut.

Harry Mottram

Member of the Axbridge Four Seasons Book Club

For more visit www.harrymottram.co.uk

One part romance, one part comedy and two parts a send up of the upper classes by one of their own – but no happy endings in this pursuit of love

Ever heard someone say, ‘love the book but hated the film?’ The main reasons being major changes to the plot and the actors more no relationship to how the reader had imagined them. It’s a reoccurring sentiment with few people feeling that almost any film or TV adaption fails to live up to the original. And so it seems to be with Nancy Mitford’s parallel novels of Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love set in the 1930s and 1940s. Published in the 1940s after the war the books have been adapted for the screen several times.

Directed by Donald McWhinnie, Thames Television’s 1980 production featured the two novels in an eight part series. It starred Lucy Gutteridge as Linda and Rosalyn Landor as Fanny and the novel’s narrator while in 2001 The BBC featured Rosamund Pike as Fanny and Elisabeth Dermot Walsh as Linda in their TV series directed by Tom Hooper of both novels. Last year the BBC again screened an updated adaptation of The Pursuit of Love with Lily James as Linda and Emily Beecham as Fanny Logan – directed with considerably more joie de vivre by Emily Mortimer with a mash up of the original novel with witty graphics, still photos and music by T-Rex, Joan Armatrading and The Who. There’s a huge contrast in the way the 1980 version was filmed to the one in 2021 – which reflects the changing filming techniques and technical advances and the way directors and screenwriters take a more liberated view of the original novel.

One critic suggested the latest TV series was one that would either be hated or loved as Mitford devotees would only want to see a faithful representation of the books. But if you take the spirit of The Pursuit of Love and update it and take the liberties made by writer and director Emily Mortimer (who also played The Bolter – Fanny’s runaway mum) then like me you’ll love it.

The main theme of The Pursuit of Love is perhaps not so much love but the elusive nature of love with the main protagonist Linda Radlett desperate to fall in love – sadly with the wrong man Tony Kroesig who she leaves for Christian Talbot who prefers Lavender Davies before she is discovered by the doomed love of life Fabrice de Sauveterre before dying in childbirth back in England thus leaving a fruitless pursuit of love.

Despite the lack of a happy ending it’s funny, witty and has some wonderful lines in it. “It’s not as though she could be in love. She’s Forty.” And “He was the great love of her life you know.’ ‘Oh, dulling,’ said my mother, sadly, ‘One always thinks that. Every, every time.”

Harry Mottram

For details for the work of the journalist Harry Mottram visit www.harrymottram.co.uk

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