Alif the Unseen Review

Salon.com

I expected more from this book.  Maybe that was its downfall.  Written by G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen treads a fine line between magical realism, and the fantasy genre.  It's the story of Alif, a hacker tag for a young man living in an unnamed city somewhere on the Arabian peninsula.  He provides data security against aggressive State security; born out of the Arab Spring, this is a trenchant subject, and despite helping to protect agitators and revolutionaries, Alif is strictly a gun-for-hire.  Or, perhaps he's something else.  Instead of actually fighting the battles of his peers, he simply provides them anonymity.

Anonymity is a resounding theme throughout the novel.  People are rarely referred to by their names--Alif, as I've already stated, is not his real name, and though we're offered hints about his true identity, he remains essentially nameless.  Characters throughout the book are disguised by their aliases, as an erstwhile Saudi prince is referred to as often as not by his own hacker tag.  A young American woman studying in the city is known only as "the convert," and the slew of magical beings (including one pretty nifty jinni) are compromised by the fact that few people even believe in their existence.  A young woman in a niqab exists only as glimpses of skin and kohl-lined eyes.

With this pervasive theme resounding through the book, I expected a subtle reflection on state security, the need for privacy in a democracy, and indeed, the book touches on each.  Clearly, a book about a hacker who provides secrecy-services is going to involve those layers of secrecy undone, and Wilson obliges.  When Alif comes into possession of a book reputed to have been written by jinn, he is suddenly the object of the man in charge of hunting down all those people Alif has been hired to protect.  With the very real threat of the State looming behind the hunt, Alif knows that to be captured is to risk torture and death.  Yet the book seems to indeed possess a kind of magic.  Not magic in the fantasy sense, but magic in the coding sense, since it offers insights into building the most powerful computers on the planet.

Wilson's technical naivety shines through here.  Though she manages to get some of the technobabble correct, it lacks of the feel of a truly knowledgeable writer--something that Neal Stephenson and William Gibson have been perfecting over the last two decades.  But I forgave her the shallowness of her technical prowess--this is, after all, a fantasy (or very nearly).  With the hint of jinni in the wings, and set in Arabia, it seems far too easy to populate this world with a sideways world of jinn, effrit and other magical creatures out of The Arabian Nights.  This might have been handled poorly, but by acknowledging her sources, Wilson allows the reader to maintain the sense of disbelief necessary to plod through the abusively ponderous second act into the third.

Which is about where the story falls apart.  What began as something subtle and nuanced becomes a diatribe about modern belief--about the lack of belief inherent in modern society.  Constantly preaching, Wilson's aforementioned "convert" seems to be a poorly veiled (sorry about the pun) version of herself, experiencing the inconsistencies of all modern religions, and the necessary faith one requires to follow them.  This feels both sudden and inconsistent with the tone and pacing of the book prior, and hardly matches the themes she so carefully crafted at the outset.  Indeed, one is forced to wonder if she experienced a crisis of faith while writing this books, as I experienced while reading it.

Real life rarely intrudes, or at least informs, books.  Certainly, the events of the real world might alter the way in which I perceive a particular book, but as I was reading Alif, extremists in Libya set fire to the American embassy in Benghazi and killed the American ambassador.  Meanwhile, protests had been sparked in Egypt over a controversial film depicting Mohammed as a philanderer and a pedophile.  Subsequent protests have since been staged throughout the world, including Australia.

The anger I felt at the death of our ambassador no doubt colored my perception of this book.  And I can't help read into it the way in which the Arab Spring has metamorphosed into a wild grasping for power, as all revolutions must eventually go.  I doubt my sense of disappointment with the novel would have been alleviated if the assassination has not occurred, yet I can't help wonder if some of my own residual anger tempered this review.  I like to think that I am more impartial than that, but I have to admit that it may have.  So, take this with a bit of salt; overall, I thought the book was flawed, with great potential that Wilson was unable to exploit.

I would not recommend this book to a friend.