Murder she imagined: The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami reviewed
‘In dreams begins responsibility,’ wrote W.B. Yeats. In the near-future America imagined by Laila Lalami, culpability starts there, too. Charged with the prevention of potential crimes, the Risk Assessment Administration monitors not just every aspect of citizens’ behaviour but, via tiny ‘neuroprosthetics’, the hidden drives revealed in sleep. As an RAA agent insists: ‘Every murder starts with a fantasy.’ If those nocturnal fantasies grow too ‘troublesome’, and your personal ‘risk score’ edges above the key threshold of 500, prepare for at least 21 days of ‘forensic observation’ as an inmate of a ‘retention’ centre. Not quite prison, ‘it’s not not a prison’ either: instead, a ‘kind of a grey area’.
