SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz: https://t.co/JJSDgAfLkl
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) November 16, 2021
Short Review: 8.5 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): In a dystopian satire by an Egyptian Journalist, a country after a failed arab spring revolution finds its gov't requiring its people to wait on a queue outside a Gate that never opens, which makes increasingly absurd and sinister pronouncements
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) November 16, 2021
2/3
The Queue is a short novel by Egyptian journalist Basma Abdel Aziz, originally written in 2013, not long after the aftermath of the Arab Spring. It's a dystopian satire that will remind western readers of the likes of 1984, but taking place in an unnamed Middle Eastern state after such an arab-spring like uprising. The book showcases a cast of characters who find themselves waiting in the eponymous Queue waiting for bureaucracy known as The Gate (literally) to open...when it never does, and seeing how they are all affected by the Gate's constant proclamations about reality, no matter how ridiculous those proclamations are.
As you might imagine, it's a story about the horror a police state with absolute control over media and whatnot can inflict, both through sheer terror and intimidation and through physical force, and how only small resistances, incredibly tough as they are, are the most that can be made.
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Years prior, a popular rebellion known as the First Storm almost change the country....but its leaders turned on themselves before the old ruler could be deposed for good. Not long after that, The Gate appeared, taking control of the country behind its implacable barrier. Those who wished things from the State, or needed to get a permit for some activity, or just to get forgiveness for some past crime, had to get it from The Gate and those who ley beyond it. But since the Disgraceful Events occurred against the strict order imposed by The Gate, the Gate has remained closed, resulting in a queue forming in front of it of people desperate to have their pleas heard the next time the Gate opens - whether those pleas are for leniency, for an award, for necessary medical treatment, or well...anything. And soon the queue is kilometers and kilometers long.
Yehya took a bullet during the Disgraceful Events, which remains inside his body causing pain. The doctor he saw at first, Tarek, said he needed surgery but before he could operate - The Gate issued a ruling that all operations to remove bullets needed approval from The Gate. And so Yehya, after a brief stop at a chilling state-run hospital, heads to the Queue along with his two friends who are desperate to help his case. But as The Gate goes days without opening, the people in the Queue start to fret and fear as the Gate's fatwas and proclamation become stranger and stranger...and force them to change....or else.
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The Queue is centered around its main three plus characters: First there's Yehya, a man essentially dying slowly from a bullet still inside his body which is the proof that the Gate's lies about the "Disgraceful Events" - that the government agents shot him, that there was no shooting whatsoever, that there was no revolt and if there was it was by foreign agents etc. Yehya is the driving force of much of the plot, as he does whatever it takes to try and get the bullet out legally, a proactiveness that makes him a danger to the regime. Then there's Nagy, Yehya's best friend - an unemployed philosophical man who wants to help Yehya anyway he can, and then there's Amani, the woman who kind of loves him (although there's no romance in this book) and who believes that her clear record as a good working and blameless woman will let her get the information Yehya needs to save himself. The trio works desperately to try to save Yehya by various means, and are helped at times by a few others, such as a journalist Ehab who's still trying to prove the truth despite no one being willing to print it and Tarek, the doctor who was intimidated into not helping and hiding the x-ray proving the bullet, who in the framing device for the story is horrified by what his cowardice has wrought.
But The Queue deals with a lot more than that, as it keeps coming back to the people in the queue, who are all there for various reasons, and find their mindsets and identities overturned and shaken constantly by the Fatwas and events happening in line. So there's the woman who lost her older daughter to lack of affordable treatment in desperate line for permission to get her younger daughter treatment, and who makes a business in line; there's the teacher who made a comment perceived as disloyal who now needs permission from the Gate to keep on, who finds herself horrified by reveals that the regime is recording her every "rebellious" outburst and finds herself forcing herself to believe in every word from a conservative preacher who is on the pay from those in charge; there's the young woman trying to maintain a boycott against the state aided telecom company that is clearly recording citizens' calls, and then there's the man trying to obtain official recognition of his friend, a former soldier (who was not in any way actually heroic) who finds his mentality shattered by the various reimaginations of history that change his beliefs about what his friend actually did before he was killed.
The result is a story that really powerfully shows the terror of an autocratic regime that absurdly will never actually serve its people....and yet its people still line up in hope and bend their ways to its every ridiculous notion and idea, even as a few try to resist or are shattered by the result. The most terrifying part comes 3/4 of the way through, when one of the main group finds themselves shattered by an emotional torture of a kind that was beyond their conception, but even aside from that, the stories of the various characters, like the progressive teacher who molds herself and marries herself to satisfy the regime, are just powerfully scary for how believable they are even amongst the absurd.
This novel is very short - probably could've been considered a novella, but it's published as "A Novel" - but it lacks not in power and is well worth reading to see how terror and dystopia can feel from another part of the world, which is living it in some ways every day (there's no coincidence this novel came from Egypt).
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