jade's Reviews > The Test

“have i done this? have i gotten myself here? there’s nothing i can say, no good answer. [...] i don’t know if it was inevitable or if i inched myself into it, one small mistake after the other.”

this novella grabbed me by the collar, shook me up, and then put me down feeling hollow inside.

it’s the sort of speculative writing that reaches into uncomfortable places, and though it does so in slightly predictable ways, it’s very effective at evoking an emotional response. it’s also one of those stories that’s best without knowing too much, so i’ll keep the details to a minimum.

iranian dentist idir jalil is getting ready to take the british citizenship test. twenty-five multiple choice questions need answering, and if he gets them right, his family -- wife tidir, daughter salma, and son ramzi -- will be getting citizenship right alongside him.

as idir goes through the questions on the titular test, we get to know more about him and his family while he steers his thoughts toward finding the correct answers. from watching arsenal games in the pub to halloween celebrations with his kids, we get a feeling for how he’s been experiencing life in britain as an immigrant so far.

and at one point, of course, shit hits the fan.

trivia time: i used to be a citizenship teacher for immigrants. language classes, mostly, as well as everything they could possibly need to pass their exams that would allow them to live here permanently.

it’s harrowing to see what hoops my former students had to jump through. on what ridiculous criteria they failed, what absolutely trivial stuff they had to learn, all while often working 70+ hours a week and dealing with racism on top.

the saddest joke of our department back then was that native dutch folks would never pass the citizenship exams, and i know this is the case in many other countries as well.

reading the test brought back a lot of those memories, with one particular theme at the center of it all: the arbitrary ways in which we assume we can judge people. how we attempt to measure them through impossible standards and outdated thinking, especially from a psychological testing perspective.

neuvel explores those kinds of themes quite a bit for a book with only a hundred pages: gamification and AI, statistics and testing, and how even though numbers don’t lie they don’t always show the full scope of the truth. clever AIs still suffer from the same biases as the world that built them, and how can we ever effect change if we keep falling back on old promises and ideas?

there is this current of arrogance underlying it all, as well.

the way we think we can parse our national identity in a bunch of multiple choice questions that even our most patriotic of native citizens wouldn’t be able to answer. how we elevate certain behaviors as the pinnacle of humanity, yet we don’t practice them ourselves. how othering people is, at times, a very deliberate choice, even if it is originally borne of the unconscious.

and so we can ask ourselves: is it the right choice?

i’ve seen people mention this novella reads like a black mirror episode, and i can see why. i’d say it succeeds less as a highly detailed worldbuilding piece, and more as an unsettling hypothetical -- a what if that hits so close to home it’s easy to imagine a future in which it might become real.

that’s also my main point of critique of it: i felt like neuvel wrote this as food for thought more than he wrote it as a fully realized sci-fi or semi-contemporary speculative fiction piece. at times, that makes it feel a little too sensationalized or on-the-nose, where realistic details are forgone seemingly To Make A Point.

so on the one hand, i greatly appreciate the questions it asks and the discussion it no doubt fosters for its readers. but on the other, i feel like it’s written more for the people who are not the ones ever sitting down to take a citizenship test (and subsequently prove their humanity), and to showcase how judging people by and for arbitrary concepts is not… great.

that said, i still considered this a solid read; pick it up if its themes appeal to you.

✎ 3.5 stars.