Given the accelerating and overlapping crises that currently beset the world – the global ascent of the far right; galloping climate change; wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran that threaten to spiral out of control; the corrosive influence of tech oligarchs and billionaires – it sometimes seems as though dystopia is, if not the only mode available to fiction writers, certainly the most appropriate. In a world that appears ever more to be spinning out of control, with little recourse for affected publics to induce change or better their situations, dystopia – satire’s more cynical cousin – feels closer to kitchen-sink realism than ever before.

This is certainly true of Catherine Leroux’s 2024 novel Peuple de verre, newly translated into English as Republic of Glass by Katia Grubisic. The story focuses on Sidonie, a journalist in a slightly torqued version of Montreal. Rampant income inequality and a consequent housing crisis have forced the poor into tent cities proliferating throughout the metropolis, while the rich live securely in lavish comfort. Sidonie is convinced that the unhoused are being disappeared; to prove her theory, she teams up with a photojournalist named Lucius and pens a story that becomes a huge success, winning her awards and landing her a popular radio show.

All of this is in the narrative past. In the present, Sidonie has discovered that her suspicions were correct. The unhoused are being systematically scooped up and deposited into government-run work camps known by the collective acronym HAPPI – the Housing Assistance Program for Public Improvement. She knows this because, following a series of personal betrayals leading to her ejection from her comfortable apartment, Sidonie has no choice but to retreat to one of the precarious encampments that have cropped up around Montreal. Her time on the streets is brief: she is quickly abducted by government agents and relocated to the Montreal East HAPPI facility. Once there, Sidonie spends her days doing mindless, repetitive tasks – tearing up flimsy pieces of fabric in a communal workroom – and meeting with her social worker, Régine, who insists she keep a notebook detailing her life experiences.

Sidonie’s notebook comprises the novel we are reading. This is a canny tactic on Leroux’s part. A journalist by trade, Sidonie is an accomplished writer capable of transforming mundane reality into narrative. She is also, we come to learn, a serial liar. This, as much as anything, accounts for how she ended up in the Montreal East HAPPI facility, though like most things in the novel, the truth is not nearly so simple. In Republic of Glass, truth is a constantly moving target.

This is clearly part of Leroux’s intent. A notoriously unreliable narrator, Sidonie is highly attuned to the power of words to deceive. “Words skim the surface of what’s real without being able to touch it,” Sidonie observes early in the novel, while later musing on the nature of dishonesty and prevarication: “That’s how lies work: countering a falsehood does not restore the truth simply by removing the alteration. Even after the lie has been revealed, reality remains deformed forever.”

It’s not just Sidonie’s own first-person deformation of the truth that alters reality in the novel; it is also the pervasive bureaucratic language deployed by the officials in charge of HAPPI. The indigent are not homeless, nor even unhoused: they are undomiciled. The facility holding Sidonie and her fellow captives is not a work camp or prison; it merely represents controlled dwelling parameters. Even the name HAPPI is redolent of official doublespeak: “Is the acronym meant to be ironic, hypocritical, utopian? Is it an insult, or another order we’re being given?” The answer, at various points in the novel, is all of the above.

Leroux extends this to the inmates’ situation. On paper, they are not prisoners and can apply for release at any time. The catch is that before being let go, they must repay the expenses incurred for the state to house them, a daily figure that far exceeds the subsistence wages they are paid for their menial work. Here again Leroux underscores the way state power obscures reality: freedom is available for anyone able to pay for it. “It’s funny how freedom never looks like we expect it to,” Sidonie says at one point.

The slipperiness of Leroux’s narrative makes it occasionally difficult to find one’s footing and much will depend on how a reader responds to the character of Sidonie. Is she a victim of state oppression or the author of her own situation? More or less sympathetic readers will be able to find sufficient evidence to support either position. What does come clear is Leroux’s unsparing critique of a stratified society that rewards the well-off while literally disappearing the poor and supposed undesirables, including children, trans people, and those suffering mental illness. The novel’s dystopic vision would seem absurd until one realizes the society Leroux has imagined is not that far removed from the one we are actually living in.

If there were any question about this, Leroux provides a section of nonfictional notes at the end of her novel, offering a sketch of her own experience bouncing from place to place in the wake of a failed relationship. Though how much of this should be taken at face value is questionable: “Even this chapter is half fabrication,” she informs us. “The world itself is increasingly a lie,” Leroux writes. “What we require now of novelists is the opposite; we ask them for reality.” The blazing irony is that in refusing to provide us with transparent reality, Leroux’s novel gets closer to the truth of how we live today than any litany of facts ever could.