Unfiltered mayhem as Ali Jones returns in a satire with real bite
FICTION Unfiltered
Sophie White Hachette €13.99
Ali Jones is back. Filter This, Sophie White’s first novel, followed Ali’s story from lowly production assistant on a TV soap opera to the dizzy heights of Instagrammer extraordinaire, with oodles of sponcons (sponsored content, to the uninitiated) and goody bags and a much higher income than the day job had ever provided.
But when Ali faked a pregnancy to gain more followers, her world imploded. Fast. (She didn’t exactly fake it, but didn’t deny it either). And now Ali is more or less stuck.
She’s still reeling from the fake pregnancy fallout, the trolls are out in their throngs, the hate mail she receives is horrendous and her beloved father Miles has just died from Alzheimer’s.
On the day of his funeral, Ali is being chased by Prime Time, who are doing a piece on public shaming and would like to interview her about her very public fall from grace. Since all of this occurs within the first two pages, the reader knows immediately they’re in for rollicking ride. How do you go about mending your reputation when you’re the subject of a YouTube video gone viral entitled ‘Why the Internet Hates Ali Jones (The Full Story with Receipts!!!)’?
Ali’s mother, a bit of an odd fish, is distracted by funeral arrangements.
“Her mum, Mini, had entered a strange phase of grief that involved becoming bizarrely fixated on tiny details like the socks Miles was to be cremated in and ignoring massively important decisions such as where to even have the funeral. Mini had hired and fired several priests (Ali hadn’t even known you could do that).”
To top it all, Ali is now pregnant for real. And Tinder Sam, her love interest who ditched her when he discovered her fake pregnancy, is the father. Mocking’s catching, as they say, and Ali has no idea how she’s going to support herself, never mind a baby.
Her Insta rival Shelly is back, too. The Instamum with the most followers is having a few crises of her own. Her perfect beige life in her perfect beige home is at risk as her husband moves out to a Shomera in the back yard, disgusted with how she has peddled her life and her child — and him too — on Instagram. Shelly is pregnant too and, like Ali, is having doubts. Things are not helped by a stalker who seems to know Shelly’s every move off camera.
The guards have no leads, even when the stalking and the nasty DMs to Shelly’s account are upped significantly. A clever and calculating social media manager is hired to save both Ali’s train wreck and Shelly’s growing sense of impending doom. And by the third chapter we are in full social-media saturation mode, with some real howls of laughter along the way. But it’s not all fun and online games.
Compulsive Instagrammers and in particular Instagram Mummies are an obvious easy target for derision, and though there’s plenty of comedy here, there’s also a serious underside, as there was in White’s first novel.
Both Ali’s and Shelly’s followers include individuals who are far from innocuous. Whole armies of keyboard warriors with multiple fake accounts are permanently waiting in the long grass, if not directly responsible for ‘takedowns’ themselves, then certainly revelling in the ‘takedown’ if and when it occurs. And some of the nasty DMs in this novel are every bit as vile as they are in real life.
While you may squirm at their awfulness, you have to ask yourself: who among us has not snuck a surreptitious peek — or many — at a public figure who suddenly finds themselves in the brown stuff ?
While this phenomenon may be exaggerated on social media (and what isn’t?), we’re very quick to take the high moral ground when it suits us, since long before even the invention of newspapers. There’s nothing like a good scandal, is there?
In this sense, although White has her finger firmly on the social media pulse, she depicts how little human nature ever really changes, with or without the presence of the internet. As an amusing satire it holds its own, and those who loved Filter This will not be disappointed.