Reading dystopian fiction in dystopian times may feel slightly masochistic, but Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami’s fifth novel, The Dream Hotel, longlisted this week for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, exerts such a narrative stranglehold on the reader that it is impossible to look away.
Sara is a museum archivist who is on her way home to her husband and children in LA when she is pulled aside at the airport by risk assessment agents. Her “risk score”, a number that is calculated from hundreds of different data metrics, is deemed unacceptably high, and so she will be “retained” in an all-women centre for 21 days, or until her risk score comes down. The reading that has tipped her score over the edge is the one that measures her violent dreams about her husband. (She agreed to those dreams being surveilled when she accepted the terms and conditions of a sleep implant – it’s all in the small print, you see.)
The retainment centre is a Kafkaesque world of unknowable rules; every time Sara gets close to getting her risk score down to acceptable, she is written up for some random infraction. Her hearing dates for release are constantly messed up by glitches in the system, and there are echoes of the brutal regimes of the past in Lalami’s immovable guards who are just following orders. It’s an uncomfortable read, building to a tense climax, even if Lalami’s denouement feels a little hurried after all that build-up.
While the primary story is a cautionary tale of sacrificing our privacy for all the conveniences technology offers, there is also a secondary but equally disturbing narrative about the level of compliance expected from women, whether it be in marriage, motherhood or the working world.
Lalami has already been longlisted for the Booker Prize and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and this book’s timely call to arms about the dark side of data collection will almost certainly earn it a place on many shortlists this year. The Dream Hotel is a captivating imaginative feat, taking our familiar world and carefully nudging it just a few degrees closer to the nightmarishly plausible consequences of constant, inescapable surveillance. It will make you think twice the next time you click “agree to terms and conditions”.
