It’s summer 2031 in Los Angeles and Ari goes to a party with her housemate Gloria.
This is Ari’s first party in a long time — she’s just out of prison for hiring a hitman to kill her cousin and business partner. But she’s contrite, a criminal in recovery.
Actually it’s the first party in a long time for all of the guests. The civil wars that have fractured the United States have ended.
Los Angeles is part of the newly formed Republic of California, run like the other republic-states by local militias.
It’s a nice party, the rooms bedecked with flowers by the host, Kareem, and the wine flowing.
But strange things are happening. As a fearful Kareem tells Ari, ‘there’s something wrong with the party’.
There are guests who appear to be replicas of those other versions of themselves chatting at the other end of the room. By night’s end Kareem has disappeared.
Ari moves to the Republic of Ohio where she works for the militia and gives the mystery of Kareem’s disappearance little thought — until she meets Gloria’s lookalike, now Nico, who was also at the party.
The novel functions best as a speculative projection into America’s near future where the terror of immigrants seized on the street by armed agents of the state has become everyone’s terror.
When it takes on the more sci-fi concepts of teleportation and parallel worlds however it devolves into confusion.
Moving between Paris in 2065 — a refuge still recognisably itself — and an America ‘fractured into disarray’ and one ‘closed like a fist’, the characters appear and disappear in different guises and it all starts to feel directionless.
Mandel is a Canadian writer who writes speculative fiction, notably the prescient , published in 2015, about a world-ending pandemic.
Here, her fluent style proves not quite enough to carry the unwieldy and over-extended plot. There are moments when it fits together ingeniously like a jigsaw.
But as it meanders from apparent expedient to expedient, she seems to lose control of it, and with it her readers’ attention.
, has been bought, like before it, for TV. It will transfer happily to the screen if the tortuous plot achieves some clarity. Some task for the scriptwriters.
