Alif, the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

Every once in a while you read a book that impresses you a great deal upon reading but which leaves you a little underwhelmed in retrospect. Such was G. Willow Wilson's promising and often enchanting Alif the Unseen, a love story mixed up with a good guys/bad guys adventure chase story. Both unfolding in marvelous, unreal places, the online world and the Empty Quarter, a mythic no-man's land  home to the Djinn, mysterious, mercurial spirits mentioned in the Koran as a third creation between the angels and man.

Alif, the main character is, a very real, mixed-blood (Indian and Arab) twenty-something living in frustration with his mother in a backward, unnamed Persian Gulf emirate. He passes his days online and, not of pure Arab bloodscratches out an income of sorts by providing firewalls and encryption to various digital discontents intent on keeping hidden from their State's security apparatus.

In his free-time, he strikes up a romance with a wealthy, upper-class young woman, Intistar he meets in a dissident chat room. Love blooms till her parents insist on her marrying a suitor who comes seeking her hand, a man high-up in the emirate's digital security system, whom the Emirate's hacker community has tagged with the comic-worthy monicker, "the Hand." While she's content to face the reality of her parent's demands, Alif has a tantrum and creates a program to shield himself from Intistar online. Intistar manages to contact him one last time via Alif's neighbor, Dina, a serious young muslim girl from Egypt who holds a candle for the unwitting Alif.

Intistar contacts him to deliver a book, The Alf Yeom, to Alif. It is a mysterious collection of stories, like the One Hundred and One Nights. Alif quickly learns it is an ancient, powerful and much wanted book. In particular, Intistar's husband to be covet's the book and immediately puts the Emirate's security service to work to locate Alif and the book. And, although he's primarily interested in Intistar because of the book, he nevertheless is jealous of Alif and looks to stick him in a prison and starve him to death.

Alif is forced to go on the lam with Dinah who gets swept up into his predicament by accident. Their escape takes them on a wild journey across a variety of digital and spiritual realms, from back-alleys in the Old Quarter of the city where they meet the sinister, mercurial and supernaturally powerful Vikram the Vampire, to immaterial planes where the Djinn make their home, to a mosque in the heart of the city where they encounter Imam Bilal, the voice of a wise Islam. All prove no match for The Hand, and Alif finds himself locked away like the Count of Monte Cristo, starving in the dark without hope, till.....

The mysteriously peers from her author photo bedecked in a veil and the veil is a central preoccupation of the book. Wilson attempts to reconstruct it's meaning by presenting the veil as an instrument of power, a piece of clothing that affords woman a species of privacy and anonymity, the power to observe without being observed. The veil confers a power and pleasure on a par with that conferred by the anonymity of the web. Poor and foreign, Dinah picks up her veil as a class statement, defying her parent's hopes that she will eventually be able to go into high-priced servitude with a wealthy sheikh's family. Not for her.

Although Alif is the central character of the book and the action is instigated by him, Dinah is the book's soul. She is a religious person, but capable of surprises, of tremendous strength and daring. The ostensibly more modern Alif is indeed the drearier, more predictable character. Indeed, as Wilson is at pains to point out, we are all "programmed" by our culture and it is up to us to inject code from elsewhere, to write into that programming some fuzzy logic if we wish to grow and be more. Dinah is there to teach this to Alif. Yet, I'm not sure that Wilson manages to fully pull this off. This is meant to be the education of the digital, non-spiritual Alif by the girl-wonder Dinah and the Imam Bilal.While Alif grows, the nature of that growth is murky: he comes to realize that surfaces are just that, that much lies beyond and behind what is visible to the eye, that one can never pay enough attention, that ritual and routine are necessary to our happiness? I guess. And, he comes to some of this but I'm not clear as to how that reflects Dinah or her brand of Islam.

Still, there's plenty here to keep one's attention and I loved the blending of old and new. It seems important to have modern, imaginative forward thinking voices who maintain a healthy respect for traditions. Wilson seems at pains to keep all of this together, most likely to the displeasure of many, and it seems chary to criticize.