Not the Booker prize shortlist: a long look at Cairo by Louis Armand | Sam Jordison

Our close reading of the finalists begins with this bold journey into a future dystopia that gets lost along the way

Full coverage of the Not the Booker prize

Let's try to get things off to an upbeat start. Louis Armand's Cairo is an ambitious book. It has multiple narratives set over dozens of locations where time is fluid, human biology and computer technology are intertwined and everyone has weird names like Joblard, Shinwah and Johnny Fluoride. It is unflinching in its portrayal of human greed, urban decay and nasty rats. It attempts to put forward complicated ideas about technology, about space-time and about the fact that our own present is looking ever more like a dystopian future.

Armand is also admirably unwilling to make things easy. Those disparate narratives appear (as one reviewer on the Not the Booker voting page put it) to be "hyperlinked" and there are strong hints at an over-arching conspiracy theory centred around a boy called Momo. But there are never any clear connections, easy answers or simplistic explanations. Armand is brave enough to challenge his readers. For that at least, we should salute him. Part of me is glad that someone should attempt to write a book like this one and that a small press like Armand's publisher Equus should have the courage to put it out.

"A riotous exploitation sci-fi noir whose action shifts from London to New York to the Australian outback, Prague and a post-apocalyptic Cairo. This novel has it all, conmen, evil doctors, rats, Egyptian artifacts, meteors, time-traveling kung-fu assassins, dwarfs, exploding heads, soy vindaloo and a long list of other extraordinary renditions."

"An intersection at the west end of Canal Street. Night. Traffic backed out of Holland Tunnel, jamming into the river, the distant lights of Battery Park Annex oozing down it. Wind And Rain. Osborne huddled against a lampost in a worn brown leather trenchcoat "

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