Exit West
Mohsin Hamid
Riverhead Books
Well-known for politically engaged works like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid returns with a frighteningly wise exploration of the global migrant crisis, taking the issue beyond standard reportage and debate to explore its existential dimensions. The novel begins as an ordinary boy-meets-girl tale of two lovers in an unnamed country resembling Syria. The slow descent of their homeland into chaotic militant takeover is told with brilliant realism, with a focus on the ordinary and technological details of life, so that we feel what happens to Nadia and Saeed, who are ‘always in possession of their phones’, could just as easily happen to us.
Rumours begin to circulate about doors which, accessed for a price, could take you far away, and soon the pair are forced to flee on a journey West, through refugee camps in Mykonos, encountering ‘nativist backlash’ in London and the Bay Area. The novel is best described as soft science fiction, verging on the dystopian but ultimately hopeful. It takes cultural patterns of xenophobic nationalism to their extremes, holding them up both for examination and for the opportunity to transcend these. In scattered vignettes, we see that the doors to far away are open to first-world characters too, including a suicidal Englishman. Hamid reminds us that ‘we are all migrants through time’ – the migrant’s journey is experienced universally as the journey of life, and eventually time will alter and make unfamiliar everything any of us have known.
Words – Maryam Madani
