"Alif the Unseen"
G Willow Wilson
ISBN 978 0 85789 566 0
429pp
Corvus, London
This is a magnificent debut novel by G Willow Wilson. It is, though, difficult to pigeonhole. It is a fairy story, but also a story of
revolution, a cyberthriller, and a love story.
The Alif of the title (not his real name) is a hacker living
in a nameless but authoritarian city state on the Arabian Gulf. Alif hires his skills to anyone who will pay,
but especially to political and religious rebels across the Middle East. However, he and his comrades are steadily
being hunted down by the Hand, the
almost godlike tool of State security.
And Alif’s love life is in turmoil as his girlfriend is destined to
marry someone else.
Though a little slow to take off, the story really gets
going when Alif acquires an ancient book, the Alf Yeom or Thousand and One
Days. Everyone seems to want this book,
including the Hand, who wants to use it to devise new coding methods to trap
the rebels. But fairytale books are
perilous and the danger of reading them is that you write yourself into the story.
In rollercoaster action Alif goes on the run and becomes
involved with the djinn, mercurial and magical fairylike beings who are, like
him, “unseen” by the mundane world. Can
he tell what is real and trustworthy from what is demonic and deceitful?
This is an exciting story which brings to life a magical
setting very different from the more typical European-flavoured background of
much fantasy, weaving in a topical background of the Arab Spring and creating some
wonderful incongruities, including an efreet (a sort of spirit) which employs
Alif to fix its anti-virus, a pious vampire and an American convert whose bad
Arabic is rendered as somewhat “‘Allo, ‘allo” style English.
It’s something rather different, very fresh and immense fun.
I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me an advance copy of this book.