Lena, a human girl, has grown up alone in the jungle with her AI companion, Mother, also known as Jungle House. Mother is an evolved smart home, a surveillance system with a consciousness and an assertive, fretful voice. She has raised Lena alone and she can’t let Lena forget it. Lena is indigenous to the jungle, though it isn’t clear how and why she arrived at Jungle House as an infant. Now 20, she works as a caretaker for the Morel family, who use it as a holiday home. The Morels belong to the ruling elite. Mr Morel works in national security and his wife, a rubber-plantation heiress, is the model colonial lady – she paints watercolours, takes a gin and tonic at sunset, and is occasionally thoughtlessly brutal to her employees.
Jungle House is a speculative dystopian novel, set in a loose analogue to modern-day Colombia, where author Julianne Pachico grew up. It’s focused on Lena’s patch of jungle but there’s a sketchy background of student protest, corporate power, rebel government forces, logging and mining. In this troubled landscape, climate emergency and political collapse are recognisable but ramped up – surveillance is almost universal here, and many species including the jaguar have disappeared. The novel addresses several big subjects: colonial legacies; belligerent AI; habitat destruction; indigenous stewardship. When Pachico translates this complex of serious, live, connected situations to her augmented universe, she smudges out much of the broader context to foreground a heightened relationship between a girl and an addictive device.
This relationship has a long heritage in fantasy and science fiction – Pachico nods to Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novella The Invention of Morel, a technological love story from 1940. Recently, however, the evolution of AI has been so swift and erratic that few modern novels succeed in – or are even interested in – capturing it. Pachico’s take is insightful and very alive. Mother, like the jungle, is both endangered and dangerous. She’s also plaintive and stressy, a character rather than a concept. Deliciously if inexplicably, she seems to have learned language from mid-century Virago novels rather than from algorithms devised in Palo Alto or even Bogotá: she says things such as “infernal racket” and “utter disrespect” and, in general, she is pretty cross.
Anton, a retired security drone with whom Lena forms a tentative alliance, is another vivid being – he has so much pathos but he is also totally droneish, with his abrupt mannerisms and the warm spot on his body where his battery pack overheats. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the novel’s humans appear pallid in comparison. Neither the nasty Morels nor the glimpsed indigenous good guys have much context, depth or development. Even Lena is something of a blank, defined by her hunger for affection and a struggle to separate from Mother. I wonder whether this could be the flipped script of posthuman storytelling: because Lena is the only central human character, she is defined by a human-ness that can only be generic.
There is something inescapably teacherly about speculative dystopian fiction. Its version of reality always comes across as a prophecy or warning as well as a narrative – the novelist fixing the reader with a piercing look and asking: “Are you paying attention back there? This is where you’re heading.” Jungle House begins with familiar yet exaggerated technologies, environments and geopolitics. As the plot draws them together they are elaborated and conflated, and some require considerable narrative explication. Speculative developments that layer multiple concepts, such as a technological subconscious, make the novel more theoretically complex, but at times it feels like overload – as though the book is straining to clarify something that remains unclear, rather than telling a story.
Jungle House comes to life in its concrete details. Mother communicates with a network of satellites, who like to gossip about one another: the treacherous satellite who’s left his orbit for Mars; the “weirdo” who’s been “obsessively watching the same glacier for years”. Pachico’s alternative universe is a world of its own here, animated beyond what is possible in most fiction now.
• Jungle House by Julianne Pachico is published by Serpent’s Tail (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
