Alif The Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

From The Week of October 30, 2012 No matter what faith we follow, no matter if we have any faith at all, belief shapes our selves and our world. For it sustains our hopes and dreams even while motivating us to attempt the improbable, to never surrender in the face of daunting odds. It is with us in our lowest moments, when the darkness of despair seems to drain even the sun of its brilliance. It is the stuff of life, the shaper of purpose, the teeth in our determination. But for all of its strengths, belief has two faces. One is open-minded, the face most of us put to the world, the face that allows in the light of many ideas and gives them all equal consideration. But the other is closed off, a fist of iron-hearted ideology that nourishes the hardest of hearts and discourages any sort of deviation from the proscribed path. Wisdom and mercilessness, generosity and cruelty... These are the skeins of belief and Ms. Wilson does a wonderful job demonstrating them both in this eminently readable genre mashup.

In an unnamed, Middle-Eastern state, controlled by an authoritarian monarchy zealous in the preservation of its power, the people are growing increasingly restless. The dawn of the 21st century has placed into the hands of its eager citizens smartphones and laptops, satellite dishes and websites, communication technologies the country's old guard is no more suited to comprehend than it is prepared to fend off. Consequently, the state's control over its message, its agenda, is slipping, losing ground to a host of young revolutionaries who have learned more about the distribution of information and the exploration of truth than the authorities have learned in a lifetime of political repression and state-sponsored propaganda.

Swimming through this new Arab reality is Alif, a 23-year-old hacker who is forever standing between two different worlds. Half Indian and half Arab, he is a gray hat, a hacker who rejects both the black hat's destructive grandstanding and the white hat's noble self-sacrifice. He is an information distributer, an enabler of dissident speech, a conduit for both radical Islamists and socialist revolutionaries to speak free of government censorship. And so he is the perfect pawn for a broader war, a piece on the chessboard of the gods, light against dark, freedom against tyranny, that threatens to consume his country. The key lies in a book that has come into Alif's possession, a book that promises its possessor mystical and technological powers beyond their imaginings, but what will be the cost of using it? Will it consume the world he knows? And is Alif willing to pay that price?

Drawing upon Islamic mythology, information theory, and the upheavals of the recent Arab Spring, Alif The Unseen is a glorious intersection of fantasy and science fiction, that has a little for everyone. For this is a work as much about faith as it is about botnets, a tale about self-belief as much as it is about tyranny, qualities and polarizations that appear pervasive in the Middle-eastern world's tumultuous present. An American convert to Islam, Ms. Wilson, who now lives in the Middle East, has clearly incorporated her own experiences of immersing herself into an environment foreign to her upbringing, suffusing her well-drawn protagonists with a kind of multi-faceted twilight, neither moral or immoral, neither socialist nor conservative, neither democratic nor authoritarian. They are, instead, oft-frightened pragmatists who find themselves plunged into events larger than themselves, in a world that only half-accepts them, and not having the faintest idea of how to deal with any of it.

While the novel occasionally stoops to cliches and tropes typical of popular fiction, these are exceedingly forgivable sins in light of the deftness with which Ms. Wilson has juggled issues of religion and society in a book any interested fifteen-year-old could read. There is no vehemence here. There isn't even any judgement. Ms. Wilson adopts the practical view that nothing is inherently wrong. It is just a way of being that is promoted or discouraged based on our reactions to it. This open-mindedness allows her to make some observations about belief and commitment to the cause that are as engaging as they are refreshingly free of bias. This is a wonderful piece of post-Arab-Spring fiction that goes a long way to demonstrating the gray realities of revolution and technology to those who do not immerse themselves in the news.

As entertaining as it is engrossing. One of the better reads this year... (4/5 Stars)