Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
Behind the anonymity of his handle, Alif is a talented, undogmatic computer programmer who will provide his prowess to any group fighting against the censorious State forces of the unnamed emirate in which he resides. Alif helps the communists, anarchists, feminists, and islamists in turn, but has no allegiance himself other than to Intisar, the love of his young life to whom he’s pledged himself by way of a marriage certificate printed off the internet. But when the artistocratic, Arab Intisar comes to tell middle class, mixed-race Alif that she’s betrothed to marry a wealthy man, much more than Alif’s romantic life is suddenly thrown into chaos. First he finds his programs directly under attack by the notorious Hand of the State force. Then, finding himself the recipient of a mysterious and powerful book called the Alf Yeom or Thousand and One Days, he is thrust into a non-stop adventure as he attempts to save himself, his friends, and the people of his City from those who would seize the resources of the many and use them to serve the interests of the few.
While cataloged as an adult novel, Alif the Unseen reads more as Young Adult. It chews over powerful and necessary concepts of love and solidarity, identity and culture, political power and integrity, and faith and spirituality. Written in the gestation of the Arab Spring, Wilson weaves together the pulse of that potent time, which she witnessed from Cairo, with her own positionality as a white US American convert to Islam, her self-proclaimed geek status, and her skill as a comic book writer.
The novel is simultaneously philosophical, thought-provoking, and an almost addictive page-turner. Many of these finer philosophical questions—what does freedom really mean, look like, and consist of? How does the way we perceive reality as individuals, informed by our own experiences, affect reality? What is real? What is true?—resonate long after the book is over. This resonance mingles strangely with some of the book’s more predictable plot points and repeated deus ex machinas, which themselves are inextricably tangled in with characters some of whom are dynamic, others of whom are unfortunately flat. Well-researched cultural details, storylines, and geography from the Islamic and Arab past and present scaffold the break-neck plot, adding a rich and grounding sense of time and place to a novel that digs its heels in to the unknown and the unknowable: the uncertain, burgeoning bud of the Arab Spring, the ever-being-written world of coding, computers, and the internet, and the unseen compass of religion. Alif the Unseen is both fun and serious, a many-layered novel great for teens and adults alike to dig into even while the pages are flying past.
Subjects this book includes which some readers may be sensitive to: imprisonment, sensory-deprivation torture, gendered harassment.