Engrossing, frightening, and believable.
Feature image credit: Bloomsbury
Sara Hussein is a successful archivist, happily married, with twin babies. One day on returning to the US from a conference in London, she is detained at the airport by agents from the Risk Assessment Administration. The DreamSaver chip she and thousands of others have had implanted in their brains has made huge improvements to their sleep quality. But it has also allowed the RAA to use data analytics on their dreams to predict if they are planning to commit a crime. The system has flagged Sara as planning to hurt her husband Elias, and as a result she ends up in a retention centre.
Constantly reassured that they are not in jail, the women in the centre are given privileges if they work, and can have their initial 21 day assessment time extended if they break any rules: rules which seem to keep changing. Sara tries to keep her head down, stay out of trouble, and bide her time so she can get back to her husband, and more importantly, her babies. One day a new resident arrives, who miraculously fits right in, does her 21 days, and is immediately released. This strange occurrence sets off a chain of thinking in Sara which leads her to question whether compliance is the answer, and to seek to reclaim her personhood.
In The Dream Hotel, award-winning author Laila Lalami has crafted a tight, exciting, and logical work of speculative, dystopian, fiction. Her extrapolations from current data analytics practices are highly believable, and she sensibly doesn’t dwell on the more difficult science of how dreams can be read and downloaded. She expects us to suspend disbelief here and we happily comply in order to delve into the more important issues of data, privacy, and the carceral state.
Lalami draws a detailed picture of life in detention, whether that be an actual jail, immigration centre, or any other institution designed to deny basic freedoms. Her portrayal of the daily small humiliations, the interactions between detainees, and between detainees and officers, and especially the excruciating boredom, is so good one assumes she plunged into some solid research before putting pen to paper. She also gives an important place in the story to extraneous issues which could likely be occurring in the near future, such as an increase in climate-based disasters like wildfires.
Written mostly in standard third-person prose, there are elements of the epistolary in sections of emails, staff-meeting minutes, and transcripts of PA announcements from the mysterious Chief Retention Officer. This structure keeps the pace lively and adds an extra layer of interest.
The Dream Hotel is tight, engrossing, and very readable. It falls down a little in narrative structure. There seems to be an arc moving towards something, which never quite eventuates, instead just fizzing out. It almost reads as though the work was finished off in a hurry. There is also the occasional, jarring use of cliched phrases. However, neither of these issues are enough to detract from the satisfying enjoyment of this work.
As a warning about data analytics, an interrogation of family dynamics, and an excoriation of the carceral state, The Dream Hotel succeeds. And most importantly, it does its job as a great read. No wonder it was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year.
Reviewed by Tracey Korsten
The views expressed in this review belong to the author and not Glam Adelaide, its affiliates, or employees.
Distributed by: Bloomsbury
Released: March 2025
RRP: $32.99
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