All along the watchtower

In the Moroccan-American author's stunning new novel, a mother of two on her way home from a work trip to the UK is detained for a dream she had. It doesn’t feel like a dystopian forecast so much as a tiny twist on our present day. Is this the future of crime-prevention and surveillance? It doesn’t have to be, Lalami says. An exclusive interview

- Kanika Sharma

ould your dreams be used against you? In Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami’s new novel, The Dream Hotel, pre-crime surveillance has stretched its tentacles into our sleeping brains.

Her heroine, Sara Hussein, is a researcher with the Getty Museum and a busy mother of toddler twins. She is returning to the US from a work trip to London when she is detained at the airport and told that her dreams have raised her risk score too high. She is then transported to a “retention centre”.

These centres are privately run and have been in the news for holding people for extended periods; to say “without trial” would be a misnomer, since they have been accused of no crime yet. They must simply stay here until their risk level is deemed low enough for them to rejoin the general population.

The novel, with its dark, unsettling look at the future of surveillance and crime-prevention, invokes great works of the past, from Philip K Dick’s Minority Report (1956) to Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Except, this tale unfolds in a world nearly identical to ours.

“I worked on it, on and off, for over 10 years and could not have imagined it would be released in a moment such as the one we are living through today,” says Lalami, 57.

Excerpts from an interview.

The title of The Dream Hotel is determinedly misleading. How did you come up with it?

When I was trying to come up with a title, I wanted to convey the existence of a future in which people are neither free nor imprisoned, but somewhere in-between.