When Ishiguro accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, he warned of the world that untrammelled advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetics might bring: ‘savage meritocracies that resemble apartheid’ and ‘massive unemployment’; a vast technological entrenchment of economic inequality. ‘Can I, a tired author, from an intellectually tired generation, now find the energy to look at this unfamiliar place?’ he asked. ‘Do I have something left that might help to provide perspective, to bring emotional layers to the arguments, fights and wars that will come as societies struggle to adjust to huge changes?’ Klara and the Sun is his faltering, beautiful answer – the book he was writing when he learned he had won a ticket to Stockholm.

When we first meet Klara – newly unboxed – she knows little of the class-riven world she’s waiting to join. Like all AFs, she is been programmed to be unworldly (beholden, docile); she can help a child with their maths homework, but is flummoxed by a bulldozer. As he has so often done, Ishiguro leads us down into the ethical murk by the light of an earnest heart.

Kazuo Ishiguro (Agence Opale/Alamy Stock Photo)

The AF who shares Klara’s window seat is a giddy optimist. As she dreams of domestic bliss – of a child’s unconditional love – she misses the patterns that hyper-vigilant Klara can’t help but see: the bitter thoughts that pass across the faces of window-shoppers; the AFs who steer their children away from the storefront, fearful of being replaced; and the others forced to trail behind their tiny, indifferent masters in public displays of servitude. ‘I wondered what it might be like,’ Klara explains, ‘to have found a home and yet to know that your child didn’t want you.’ From these miniature street dramas, Klara begins to learn the textures and subtexts of loneliness. (‘Perhaps all humans are lonely,’ she thinks, ‘at least potentially.’) It will prove crucial training for her life beyond the store. For the family that chooses Klara – an ailing daughter (Josie) and her imperious mother (the Mother) – seems to speak ‘in signals’, so much between them is unsaid and unsayable.

Like all élite children her age, Josie is home-schooled by online tutors, and socialised by strict appointment (hyper-supervised ‘interaction meetings’). She’s a ‘lifted’ child: if she survives her nameless illness, a high-status future is certain, the Mother has made sure of it. It takes more than money to ‘lift’ a child, we’re told – it takes courage. What has the Mother done? And why is she adamant that Klara pay such close attention to the way Josie holds herself: her gait, her intonation? As Josie’s health worsens, Klara turns to the Sun for help. ‘Supposing I could do something special to please you,’ she offers him. What might her God demand?

Klara and the Sun was meant to be a picture book for children: the tale of a sickly girl and her doll, watching the sunset together from the hermetic safety of a bedroom, yearning for the outside world. But when Ishiguro’s daughter declared the project far too sad for kids, he turned his doll into a robot girl, and his fairy tale into a novel. Klara and the Sun returns to the same existential territory as Never Let Me Go (2005), Ishiguro’s soul-bruising tale of parentless teenagers grappling with a looming, inescapable duty. Here, too, is a novel of gauzy recollections, fateful obligations, and impossible promises, underpinned by questions about the shape and limits of humanness. Is there such a thing as a self, Klara and the Sun wonders – irreplicable, unknowable, and precious – or is it an antiquated comfort, ‘a kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better’?

When you are tackling an author whose watchword is restraint, it’s far too easy to give away far too much. The grand pleasure of Ishiguro’s novels, with all their watchers watching and manners mannering, is that they reveal themselves as though they are emerging from fog – slow-motion heartbreaks. Sixteen years after Never Let Me Go was published, I still tiptoe around that gorgeous book, wary of ruining it for new readers (buy it immediately, bring tissues). To measure Klara and the Sun against Never Let Me Go’s yardstick feels like a cruel comparison – greedy – for how can we possibly expect that same kind of literary lightning to strike twice? It hasn’t, which, when we’re talking about Ishiguro, is only to say that it’s a layered and thoughtful novel, not a brilliant one.

In Klara and the Sun, the so-very-British author’s lauded reserve feels like a narrative straitjacket. He has imagined a roiling political world in this novel: an upper-middle-class gutted by automated professionals; an ever-widening gap between the lifted and unlifted; and a growing apprehension of AFs that’s hardening into a vicious social hatred. But, confined to Josie’s bedside – a sullen cipher of a girl – Klara isn’t free to explore that world for us. She can only try and make sense of the little she’s seen with her Sun-worshipping droid logic.

And so Klara and the Sun metes out its revelations in ponderous drips, and then in one frenetic, last-act gush: incipient fascism, corporate vandalism, obsequious nepotism, ghoulish technological overreach, and the sky-choking spectre of environmental carnage. It is dissonant pacing from a novel with dissonant ambitions: torn between the grand opera of a political dystopia and the quiet anguish of one robot’s squandered devotion. Never Let Me Go was a dark fait accompli; its battles had already been lost, long ago. The true horror of that novel was its narrator’s acquiescence, her passive wistfulness. But while there’s a lurking menace in Klara and the Sun, there’s also something else lurking here: possibility.

It is easy to wish Ishiguro had made his novel bigger, loosed Klara and her molten God into the world he built. But we have seen versions of this android dream before; this is one of fiction’s long-recurring techno-nightmares. And we live in the era of oracular doom, on and off the page; our bookstore shelves are groaning under the weight of new ruin. As a nuts-and-bolts dystopian, Ishiguro is unremarkable, but there are few authors who can capture our private frailties with such intricacy and humility (in gentle contrast to his contemporaries – Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie – those peacocking egoists). Ishiguro is our poet of ontological doubt, our bard of unbelonging.

There’s a red-hearted jewel of a novel in here, cut away from the snarl of late subplots and elaborate political foments, and Klara and the Sun’s coda is magnificent proof. Ishiguro’s closing scene is a long-shadowed reckoning. Caught in its gloaming, this is the book you’ll remember: hushed, lonesome, and so ordinarily cruel. ‘In the end,’ Ishiguro explained in his Nobel lecture, ‘stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?’ Yes, you’ll say when you read these final, perfect pages: I can. It does.