At the heart of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun is a singular act of imitation, in which Klara, a synthetic human, is asked to take the place of her owner, the sick child Josie.

This essay addresses this moment, in order to ask how far the novel form is able to perform this kind of ventriloquism, to undertake acts of imitation that might replace or supersede those that they imitate.

In order to respond to this question, the essay suggests, we need to put Klara and the Sun in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, which is itself in conversation with the longer history of the novel form. From Artist of the Floating World to The Unconsoled to Klara, Ishiguro has been concerned with the capacity of art to become the reality it imitates, and particularly with the capacity of the novel voice to pass through the boundary between original and copy. Klara might suggest that contemporary technologies have made this boundary newly porous; but the essay argues that the novel form has always sat at the difficult junction between voice and its replications. When he makes an artificial being speak in the voice of its owner, Ishiguro does not depart from the protocols of narrative voice, but rather gains access to its interior mechanisms, in a way that is illuminating for the critical power of fiction under contemporary biopolitical conditions.

This chapter opens with a detailed definition of the Íslendingasaga, or ‘family saga’: stories about the lives and deeds of people living in Iceland from the Age of Settlement to the early eleventh century. The sagas’ mode of narration is described, with its thick description of the material culture and mental landscape of the saga world and its characters, its topographical specificity and apparently naturalistic depiction of saga society. The link between saga characters and the audience for whom the sagas were originally written is illustrated. An analysis follows of the emergence and development of Íslendingasögur and how they first came to be written down. The sagas are assessed as works of literature, with analysis of narrative voice, structure, themes and methods of characterization. The conclusion draws attention to how distinctive and innovative these sagas are, their appearance of reality disguising a highly selective manner. It is pointed out that although they are now amongst the best-known texts in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, they were not the first to be known outside Iceland, and the recent appreciation of ‘post-classical sagas’ is noted.

Who is telling the story and how are they telling it? The difference between the author and the narrator. Respective advantages and disadvantages of first- and third-person narrative voices. Varieties of first-person narrative. Unreliable narrators. Varieties of third-person narrative. Multiple narrative viewpoints. Direct address to the reader. ‘Other world’ narrative voices.

‘Most stories pivot on the question of which character knows what and – crucially – what your reader knows and when you let them know it. The choice of narrative voice and point of view defines how much the reader can know.’

Character and plot are inextricably intertwined: characters make plot. Methods of introducing character. Investigating the respective usefulness of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’. A well-drawn character accumulates in the reader’s mind rather than springing fully fledged from the first page. How ‘showing’ character aids the creative process. Individualising characters. A character wants something; motive drives action and action drives plot. The relationship between narrative voice and character. The problems of too many characters. Managing minor characters. Believable characters are not always consistent; characters are fluid and flawed. Over-planning characters can be dangerous, limiting their potential and removing their ability to evolve.

‘For our characters to approach the texture of ""real"" people the writer, as well as the reader, needs to be curious about them, and that is impossible if we have removed their capacity to surprise us.’

This chapter focuses on the proliferation of novels in the early decades of the eighteenth century that assumed the form of personal memoirs. Acknowledging arguments that link this new style of writing to demands for greater narrative plausibility, it also considers the popularity of the form in relation to the social upheavals driven by the increasing mobility of people and the flow of money associated with modernity and globalisation. It argues that the first-person form enabled novelists in this period to explore the importance of the novelistic imagination as a tool for adapting to difference and cultural change, foregrounding the use of narrative by those on the move in negotiating personal identity and social relationships. With particular reference to novels by Crébillon, Prévost, Marivaux and Lesage, it examines the different ways in which protagonists struggle to become authors and thereby exercise greater control over their lives, pointing to how the memoir-novel played a formative role in constructing the concept of an autobiographical subject and the contours of modern autobiography.