By Madeleine Heffernan
FICTION
The Dream Hotel
Laila Lalami
Bloomsbury, $26.69
Prison is a place beyond shame, writes Laila Lalami in her gripping new novel, The Dream Hotel. Lalami’s main character, Sara Hussein, is imprisoned yet has not committed any crime; she is being detained because she dreams of murder. And every murder starts with a fantasy, officials say.
The Dream Hotel is set in a future when people’s thoughts, actions and dreams are monitored, monetised and weaponised by tech companies and authorities in the name of convenience and public safety. Each person has a risk score, based on hundreds of data sources including their family, spending, health, education, criminal history and reputation.
Hussein, an archivist and mother of baby twins, is detained at Los Angeles Airport after flying home from a conference in London. First, she is annoyed by the delay; then she is mystified as there’d been no major change in her life since the last time she’d seen her risk report. “She didn’t lose her job, didn’t get evicted, didn’t default on a loan, didn’t receive public assistance, didn’t owe child support, didn’t abuse drugs, didn’t suffer a mental health crisis, any of which might have ticked up her score,” writes Lalami. “And she didn’t have a criminal record – wasn’t that the biggest factor in calculating the likelihood of a future crime?”
But Hussein had chosen to install an implant in her brain to improve her sleep quality. The product manufacturer had then harvested that data and trained artificial intelligence to look for patterns and make predictions.
Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami.Credit:
The device revealed that Hussein had dreamed of killing her husband, with whom she was juggling the care of young children. “The algorithm knows what you’re thinking of doing, before even you know it,” a warden explains.
Labelled a “questionable person”, Hussein is sent to a women’s “retention” centre for an observation period of 21 days. But three weeks come and go: Hussein can only leave when her risk score falls below the legal limit. Prisoners are told if they are compliant and work hard – doing mind-numbing jobs to boost income for the prison’s sharemarket-listed owner – they will eventually be released. But the prison’s rules are capricious, and Hussein struggles with compliance. Readers are left wondering whether Hussein will ever escape.
The Dream Hotel contemplates the nature of freedom for people who have never lived without internet surveillance, and bear the brunt of its most brutal applications. The novel’s imagined crime-prevention prison program is popular among the broader population.
But how can anyone survive imprisonment when they are judged not by their actions, but by their darkest thoughts and uncontrollable dreams? And when prisoners make money for their jailers, do they stand a fair chance of being released?
Despite its dark notes, the novel deftly celebrates the joys of human relationships, meaningful work and nature. I found myself thinking of The Dream Hotel long after I closed the pages.
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