‘I have to be careful to guard against genius syndrome’

As the only living British winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, one would expect Kazuo Ishiguro to have, shall we say, some notions about himself. But no: on our Zoom call, he’s happy to speak longer than many writers, asks his Irish Times colleagues, and doesn’t address as Kazuo – or indeed Sir Kazuo – but informally as than Ish. (It is true that he dresses all in black, but there is no turtleneck to see.)

This unassuming air extends to his location: English interviewers still comment on his life at Golders Green in London as a source of wonder. Why? “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe they expect me to live in Notting Hill.” Was the lockdown difficult? “I’m a little guilty that it hasn’t been bothersome for me personally. In a way, it suited me; it is validated as I normally exist. “

Part of the lockdown he’s spent finishing his new novel, Klara and the Sun, which is a strong addition to a body of work that looks well behaved on the surface, but swells with emotions that threaten to saturate the page. It’s a book that is difficult to talk about without spoiling it: “The suspense in my books,” he says, “depends on whether certain things are not revealed and what he does emotionally to the reader when this. information is finally revealed. “

Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics will bring us incredible and life-saving benefits, but can also create savage meritocracies that resemble apartheid

So like Never Let Me Go, perhaps Ishiguro’s best-known work, is now the “clone novel,” so details of Klara and the Sun will flow. Suffice it to say, it takes place in the future, and narrator Klara is an artificial friend, an AI device sold to provide companionship for children. The story, delivered in a light and open style, touches on artificial intelligence and human potential, but has a pessimistic outlook at its heart, mirroring Ishiguro’s comments at his Nobel Prize lecture in 2017.

“Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics will bring us incredible and life-saving benefits,” he said at the time, “but can also create savage apartheid-like meritocracies and massive unemployment, including for today’s professional elites. ” Be replaced by robots, in other words. (What, even the interviewers? Oh sorry, you said elites.)

“I’m worried about it,” he says now, “because it’s already on us.” Take the Crispr gene-editing technique: “I don’t see how the hell you can control Crispr and confine it only to medicine and healing. So obviously this is going to be used to not only make us more able to resist disease, but it will serve to make us better in other ways, intellectually, whatever.

These threats to society depicted in Klara and the Sun are at odds with Klara’s innocent and cheerful tone. “I wanted it to be kind of a sunnier book, kind of a response to Never Let Me Go.” Even the title has an unusual simplicity. “It’s a very rare case where the title is the one I started with. Usually you end up with a huge list. And you spend every day discovering potential titles, you see a road sign: “Steep Hill Ahead” – “Yeah, what about that?”

He says his latest novel, The Buried Giant, until the last minute was called Black Waterside, after the folk song, which reminds me that Ishiguro is – as he puts it – “some kind of failed musician. “. He speaks enthusiastically about listening to “traditional Irish music” in St James’s Church in Dingle and his admiration for Andy Irvine, Planxty and Paul Brady. “I find this aspect of Irish culture really appealing – the way music is so important in a way that it is not in England.”

He is also an admirer of the Irish playwrights of JM Synge (“one of my great influences – that sense of the grim loneliness of human existence”) and Conor McPherson (“however,” he laughs, “I wish he’d come back to hardcore stuff with alcoholic ghosts ”).

But back to the books: Ishiguro says that the simplicity of the title Klara and the Sun relates to being “influenced by the idea of ​​children’s stories.” I had this atmosphere in my head of a tale for young children with these bright illustrations. I have always been fascinated by the world of these children’s books because they are very moving and they seem to have a special license to circumvent normal rules.

What is normal is always subjective in Ishiguro’s books, which is a function of the fact that he “doesn’t really care about what happened, I am much more interested in what the narrator is thinking. that it happened. This battle that people have with themselves over what they think they’ve done or what they think they are. “

Like all of her novels, Klara reads as so meticulously ordered and crafted; does he plan a lot? “I often don’t know what to do in terms of the plot, but I know where I want to end up emotionally. I have spoken to other writers who say they would be very bored if they knew where it was going to end up. I was on stage with David Mitchell and I was really amazed when he said he never knew the end of his books, and he in turn was absolutely amazed. [that I did]. “

All my life as a writer, people have given me prizes. I’m not saying it’s not a big deal; I feel incredibly lucky and incredibly honored. But it’s like something happening in a parallel universe

So he never, as some authors claim, experienced the characters “take control” of the story? “I think people like to say that maybe more than it’s true,” Ishiguro says. “I’ve often heard writers say, ‘I always wanted Mildred to be a scientist and a chess player, but she wouldn’t let me.’ And I think, come on!

Klara and the Sun is dedicated to the memory of Ishiguro’s mother, who passed away in 2019, aged 92. “The book is much closer to my mother than any other book could have been,” Ishiguro says. “I had more or less finished the book, I was actually sitting at his bedside in the wee hours of the morning, and I was taking notes, ways of doing the last pieces of the book. So I associate it in this sense. But my wife says there may be a lot more of my mother in Klara than I think, because there is a big parenting problem with Klara. She was eventually programmed to take care of a child. So I thought it was a bit obvious.

And the kind, I ask. There has been a lot of debate as to whether The Buried Giant was “really” a fantasy novel; the same goes for Never Let Me Go and science fiction. Does it frustrate him when people wonder if his book fits a particular genre?

“I’d rather people say, ‘this is science fiction’, ‘this is fantasy’, rather than it only applies when and where it is happening. My first two novels were set in Japan and people recommended me because I will give “a glimpse of the Japanese spirit”. With The Remains of the Day, I made a very conscious decision. I thought, I would write the same book that I wrote in Japan. I’m going to put it in England this time, and maybe people will think this applies to them!

“It bothers me a lot less [being categorised as genre] – in fact, if it’s science fiction, I welcome it. His affection for the pitch is mutual, SF novelist Adam Roberts recently tweeted: “I remember being impressed that when Never Let Me Go was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, he went to the ceremony in person and chatted with everyone. , some dressed up as Star Wars stormtroopers.

Speaking of prizes, has the Nobel changed things for him? He can’t be sure, for he was already “deep in Klara and the Sun when the Nobel took place.” The next time I try to start a novel, I might be somewhere else. But I don’t think so. I mean it sounds very arrogant but I’m quite used to winning prizes.

“All my life as a writer, people have given me prizes. I’m not saying it’s not a big deal; I feel incredibly lucky and incredibly honored. But it looks like something happening in a parallel universe. So maybe this Golders Green thing is very important! It is not a place full of writers. I am sitting in my office and it has nothing to do with this world.

“But,” he adds, “there’s what’s called genius syndrome. You win the Nobel Prize and you think you are a genius at everything. What if all of a sudden your career goes haywire. He’s laughing. “So I have to be careful to protect myself against genius syndrome.”

Based on the evidence from our conversation today, he has little to fear.

Klara and the Sun is published by Faber & Faber on March 2. Kazuo Ishiguro appears at ILFDublin on Friday, March 12