2084: The End of the World
by boualem sansal
translated by alison anderson
europa editions, 240 pages, $17
Sleep soundly, good people, everything is sheer falsehood, and the rest is under control.” So begins Boualem Sansal’s new novel, 2084. The author, an Algerian secularist, has rewritten George Orwell’s 1984 imagining the oppressive power to be political Islam. The result confirms everything you think you know about religion, politics, and literature—provided you’re a member of the French Academy (which awarded Sansal its Grand Prix) or an average American teenager.
The story is set in the late twenty-first century, in a country called Abistan. This “land of believers” has been founded on the conviction that a God named “Yölah is great,” that a prophet named “Abi is his faithful delegate,” and that submission is the sole disposition and response of every member of the faith. Through a series of convoluted descriptions of this world’s cultural-political features—punctuated by such observations as “true religion can be nothing other than well-regulated sanctimoniousness, set up as a monopoly and maintained by omnipresent terror”—we learn that Abistan cows and controls its people by making them fear God and state. There is no free passage in Abistan. Citizens are only allowed to move about the country on state-directed pilgrimage, to witness the show trials and industrial-scale public executions that take place each day, to fight the vaguely outlined enemy and become glorious martyrs, or to be sent to and from sanatoriums.