I don't know how I feel about this. Set in a dystopian Egypt where an authoritarian government has taken power after a failed/violently suppressed uprising of "Disgraceful Events", the central authority known as "The Gate" controls the masses through bureaucracy and (correctly) assumed complacency. In order to do nearly anything in this regime, one must wait in line to get formal approval by the government. The only problem is The Gate never opens - anyone who wants to do anything outside of the Gates direct benefit ends up waiting in line ("The Queue") which continuously grows as no one is ever seen. The complacency of the people abiding by the nonsense bureaucracy - ie refusing life saving surgeries, denying historical events, rejecting obviously valid identification etc - is a huge tenant of the narrative. People in the queue even get mad at protestors because it is disrupting their new norm of waiting in the line every day. Characters become so bogged down by the new societal norms they eventually succumb themselves to agreeing that things are good the way the Gate runs them.

This feels very timely, as I'm sure it did when it was written in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Central to the story is the message that if we become complacent, they've already won.

Some moments were very obviously very inspired by 1984,  which I enjoyed, and the political discourse and setting was brilliant. Unfortunately, the plot felt formulaic and a little dry. I could probably chalk some of that up to it being a translation so some nuance and prose may be lost but even so - overall the actual plot wasn't very engaging.