'Klara and the Sun' by Kazuo Ishiguro
Another one of our recent Book Group choices, though I forget whose choice it was - possibly Ruth's.
Klara is an ‘AF’ (an Artificial Friend), an artificial humanoid built to be a companion to a child. The story opens with Klara, along with many other AFs, still in the store that sells them. Klara is a B2, one of the third series of AFs. This series of AFs is known to have some solar absorption problems, which has led Klara to see the sun as the source of vital life-giving nourishment.
In due course, Klara is chosen by a teenage girl, Josie, who has unspecified health problems. Klara goes home to live with Josie and her mother, Chrissie. Josie is very ill, but we don’t know what’s wrong with her. Josie had a sister, Sal, who passed away. Klara gets the idea that the Sun’s ‘special nourishment’ will help Josie. She gets the idea that she can meet the Sun at a barn on a neighbouring property – which is the spot where she sees, from Josie’s house, the Sun going down every night.
Some children have been ‘lifted’. We don’t know what this means. They don’t go to school but learn at home from online tutors. Rick, Josie’s best friend and neighbour, has not been lifted. Josie hasn’t been lifted yet, but might be on course to be. Some decision that Chrissie made has made Josie get sick. Her mother felt she couldn’t “deny her the chance”.
Josie’s father, Paul, lost his job and now lives in a ‘community’. What are ‘subsitutions’? We kind of guess that it might mean replacing humans with artificial beings, though it's never stated.
‘Klara and the Sun’ was published in 2021 and is Ishiguro's most recent novel. It was the first Ishiguro I’ve read though I think the rest of Book Group had all read ‘Never Let Me Go’. It was an interesting and intriguing story, though did seem to leave some unanswered questions – the others advised that this seems to be something Ishiguro does. I mean, not that I expect EVERY loose end to be tied up, but there seemed to be some fairly major questions lingering. Will probably read NLMG in due course. No, as always, I don't want to see the film.
'The Growing Season' by Helen Sedgwick
The story opens with one of the audio logs left by an elderly woman living in a lighthouse, somewhere off the coast of Scotland. We learn in due course that her name is Freida. She is waiting for someone – who? We then meet a younger woman, Eva, who – along with her mother before her – has been fighting to preserve natural birth. Eva’s mother is dead now but had devoted her life to monitoring the work of FullLife, the company that makes and markets the baby pouches. We also meet a journalist, Piotr (at one point in a relationship with Eva, though they aren’t any more). And we meet the Bhattacharyya family, in particular Holly, the 76-year-old matriarch, who has the distinction of having been the first woman to have a baby via the pouch, and Holly’s granddaughter Rosie, who is about to ‘have’ a baby via the pouch with her husband Kaz.
Rosie and Kaz’s son is stillborn, which acts as a catalyst for the action of the story. Just before the event, a new FullLife advertising ploy, extolling the virtues of natural birth, had caught Eva’s and Piotr’s attention simultaneously. Is there a problem with the pouches? Eva contacts a scientist, James Quentin, who is director of research at FullLife, and James agrees to meet her and spill some beans about safety concerns around the pouches. (Why is Eva so bloody angry all the time? We don’t get given the potential explanation – that Eva was a ‘care home’ child – until very late in the story, by which time my dislike of her was kind of fixed.)
We learn, in due course, that the older woman Freida was the scientist that invented the baby pouch technology, though she had signed the rights to the pouch over to FullLife. Freida had started to worry about the potential for the pouch being abused, and had tried to get FullLife to slow down their marketing of it, but they had refused. We learn that Freida has a daughter, from whom she is estranged.
I felt sorry for Freida, who seemed to have been a bit unfairly ostracized by her daughter. Being somewhat sentimental, I was cheered that Freida found friends to live with during her last years, and that Eva and Piotr are going to have another go at their relationship. I felt very sorry for James, and couldn’t really understand what he thought he’d been lying about. He has developed a working theory that the stillbirths are affecting the third generation of pouch-born babies, and is worried for his own grandchildren. But still – it’s frustrating that he ignores his wife’s rational appraisal of the situation. The actual baby pouch stillbirth rate, at five babies over three years, doesn’t actually seem dramatic enough to justify the outrage of our main players. Why is everyone so outraged that pouch births carried a tiny amount of risk? Natural birth carries some risk. Did they imagine that science has gone beyond any possible risk? We seem to be being given to understand that FullLife had assured people that the pouch was completely safe. But still. That part is a bit tiresome (as is Eva’s somewhat improbable takeover as director of FullLife in the last chapter). A much more serious social issue is the issue of large numbers of babies – and children – being kept in out of town ‘care homes’. The pouch has led to abortion rates plummeting, because unwanted pregnancies are transferred to pouches – but the downside is that the care homes are stuffed full of children, too many to be found homes for.
‘The Growing Season’ was Helen’s book choice. She was disappointed in it, I think because she had wanted more horror along the lines of the pouches harbouring malevolent alien-like forces, which isn’t the case. I enjoyed it, on the whole – it raises some interesting issues and I liked it as a human interest story.
'The Boy with the Topknot' by Sathnam Sanghera
During the COVID lockdowns, I think both Ruth and I felt we developed more acquaintance with newspaper and magazine columnists than previously, due to there being not much else to do but read the newspapers avidly. (And watch telly, obviously, but I am too sophisticated to while away hours in front of Netflix). Consequently, we were both able to independently recognize Sathnam Sanghera when we were subsequently seated at the table next to him in The Freemasons Arms in Hampstead during my 2021 birthday weekend. He seemed quite animated, and ordered a cocktail instead of pudding.
That’s all slightly irrelevant. This lovely piece he wrote for the Times about spending lockdown with his 20-something nieces put me in mind of reading his family memoir, so I put it on the Book Group list. The title refers to Sanghera’s mother making him wear a topknot, slightly curiously given that evidently both his father and older brother had short hair; he explains it as his mother being seized with increased religious fervour when he was born. The chapter in which, aged fourteen and finding his topknot being the butt of jokes at school, he clandestinely makes himself a barber’s appointment and gets it cut off, is a treat.
The book is anchored by Sanghera’s discovery, in his mid-20s, that both his father and his sister have schizophrenia. Around this, he weaves recollections of his childhood and adolescence in a Punjabi Sikh family in Wolverhampton, coupled with an ongoing thread of angst that he’s living a double life (keeping his life in London, with its dating of white women, separate from his family life in the Midlands) and how he will break it to his mother that he doesn’t (necessarily) want to marry a Sikh woman. The mental illness stuff is very sad, though my sympathy for Sanghera’s father was somewhat tempered by the violence he inflicted on Sanghera’s mother as a young man. One of the saddest passages in the book, for me anyway, was Sanghera’s sister Puli’s written account of the onset of hearing voices, and of being taken to the doctor, while revising for her O-levels, and of subsequently feeling lost to her illness and to the medication she was put on. And the resilience of Sanghera’s mother is amazing, though doubtless she felt she had little other choice: his father did not work and his mother appears to have been the main breadwinner throughout his childhood, working as a seamstress to support the family. Sanghera expresses frustration at several points that his parents have never learned English in spite of their long residence in the UK, feeling that this has restricted and disadvantaged them.
I really enjoyed it – thought it was excellently written and does a stylish job of marrying those comedy moments with those sad moments. It's the sort of book I'd like to keep around to re-read at some point.
'Matilda' by Roald Dahl
I decided to read this before imminently seeing my niece in the musical version, though I’ve no doubt the musical alters the story a bit.
Five-year-old Matilda Wormwood is the somewhat neglected daughter of a used car salesman. She lives with him, her mother and older brother in a house containing no books. The family has a dining table, but doesn’t use it, preferring to eat in front of the TV (despite Matilda’s asking if she can eat her dinner at the table). Mrs Wormwood doesn’t bother to cook an evening meal so the family eats pre-prepared TV dinners – or else she picks up fish and chips on her way back from bingo. All the above was clearly intended by Dahl to show that the Wormwoods are AWFUL people – which indeed they are, though more because of the way they treat their daughter than because they eat dinner in front of the TV.
The majority of the story takes place once Matilda has started at the local primary school. Her class teacher, Miss Honey, discovers on Matilda’s first day that not only has the child read a huge number of both children’s and adult books already, she can also do multiplication at the level of a mathematical genius. Unfortunately, the school is blighted by a horrendous headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, who isn’t remotely interested in Matilda’s genius (and Miss Honey rapidly discovers that Matilda’s parents aren’t either, disapproving of too much education, especially for girls). Miss Trunchbull doesn’t like children and displays her dislike by throwing them around, picking them up by their hair and ears, dangling them upside down, and in one scene, punishing a boy in front of the rest of the school by forcing him to consume an entire chocolate cake – which he calls her bluff by managing to do, to the cheers of his classmates.
I have no idea what I would have thought of ‘Matilda’ if I’d read it as a child. I was never an avid Dahl reader – the only Dahl books I remember reading were 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and its sequel. The fantastical elements just about compensate for the horridness of Matilda’s parents and of Miss Trunchbull. There are a few questionable elements that it’s probably better not to dwell on too deeply, e.g. Miss Honey’s confiding her (sad) history to a five-year-old child – but then Matilda is no ordinary child, she is Superchild, and is able to rebuke Miss Honey for signing away her salary to her evil aunt and also able to advise her that in her current circumstances she’d be better off resigning and drawing unemployment benefit(!). Towards the end of the book Matilda develops telekinetic powers in addition to her genius, which enable her to defeat the Trunchbull and save the day for Miss Honey. I guess it’s agreeable escapism. It’s a weird story though.
‘Matilda’ was first published in 1988 and was one of Dahl’s later novels (he died in 1990).
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