The Unconsoled

Nobel Prize winner Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels have been noted for their versatilility.

‘His novels have covered an incredible range of territory’

‘None of his books is like any of its predecessors.’

Most authors have a consistent voice and range and that is why we won’t see Pavarotti singing soprano, yet Ishiguro defies these limits and I think I know why this is the case.

I think he is an engineer, not a writer.

Consider his book, The Unconsoled, a Kafkaesque journey through the mind of a mental patient who is trapped in a world of his own invention.

The Unconsoled was described as a “sprawling, almost indecipherable 500-page work”[1] that “left readers and reviewers baffled”.[2] It received strong negative reviews with a few positive ones. Literary critic James Wood said that the novel had “invented its own category of badness”. However, a 2006 poll of various literary critics voted the novel as the third “best British, Irish, or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005”,[3] tied with Anthony Burgess‘s Earthly Powers, Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight’s Children, Ian McEwan‘s Atonement, and Penelope Fitzgerald‘s The Blue Flower. John Carey, book critic for the Sunday Times, also placed the novel on his list of the 20th century’s 50 most enjoyable books, later published as Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the Twentieth Century’s Most Enjoyable Books. It has come to be generally regarded as one of Ishiguro’s best works.

Why can’t they make up their minds? Maybe some of the readers are in on the joke and some are not. I think the joke is about engineered writing.

There have been experiments with engineered writing for decades, but only recently has the technology escaped into the public domain, even being used by romance novelists.

What I’m working up to is a concise analysis of Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel and how it is an example of modern engineered writing. In a previous post, I really dug in to the details, but in this post, I will zoom out to take a look at how I would make a case that the form of copying he used was not okay.

In this new novel, Klara and the Sun, we see a portrait of a modern slave expressed in 17 points that are each individually expressed by 5 plot elements that are the same in my book, My Adorable Apotheosis. Of these sets of 5 plot elements, half occur on roughly the same page in both books.

1. The protagonist is a young slave who knows very little about the world, but she is very curious and perceptive. The story is told from her perspective.
2. In this technological future world, non-tech outsiders are at a disadvantage.
3. The outsider – insider dynamic is explored during some awkward social events.
4. We learn about the protagonist’s relationship with her broken family.
5. Her sense of independent curiosity pulls her towards dark places and away from connectivity.
6. The young man and woman are separated by status and cultural differences/goals.
7. They are separated by their connection to new and old technology. One is new tech and one is old tech.
8. The protagonist bravely ventures into an unknown place in order to save her soul from certain death in an unlivable situation.
9. Two pages later, she hallucinates an old friend from before she came to this new place.
10. She bravely visits a scary, sacred, church-like space again.
11. In this sacred space, she meets another version of herself and uses the space to seek access to the power to solve her fundamental problem – (the human soul that is dying of loneliness)
12. She comes up with stupid solutions to her fundamental problem.
13. She tries to re-connect to her home and identity again.
14. Because of the AI’s belief that destroying the machine that tortured the protagonist when she was young will solve her fundamental problem, a machine is destroyed.
15. Two political/social groups meet each other. The destruction of the machine is revealed to have been pointless.
16. The real causes of the protagonist’s fundamental problem are identified.
17. The story has a happy ending in which the fundamental problem is solved on some level.

This recipe or sequence of ideas is surely not copyrightable because it is rather vague and not very long. That is why people always say, ‘there are no new stories’, but when one sees that each element in the sequence is expressed by the same set of five unique plot events that usually occur in the same order in both books, I think we enter the grey area of copyright, especially when those plot events occur on roughly the same page in both books most of the time.

Unless copying occurred, there would be no good reason for two authors to choose the same five plot elements to express each idea in the 17 point sequence. As such, the recipe or coarse template of such a book might not be copyrightable, but the expression of that recipe is and that expression is determined by the sets and sequences of plot events used to convey the ideas in the book.

It is important to look at such cases with the proper focal length. If you zoom in too far, you see noise and no similarity. It is just letters on a page. But if you don’t zoom in far enough, you get the impression that ‘there are no new stories’ and that the similarity is skin deep.

Suppose that my novel was my expression of a moment of madness or healing. Why should a Nobel Prize winner get to profit from my expression while I am unconsoled? Such injustice could drive a person mad!

Thankfully, I’m hard as nails and don’t crack so easily.

(A Quora reader suggested a biography of Helen Keller as a control variable. I can imagine her biography might be made to fit the 17 point sequence with some substitutions for tech-blindness and literal blindness. I doubt, however, that each of the five point subsequences will match with Ishiguro’s book. That would blow my mind.)