Mohsin Hamid, 2017
the fiftieth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Katie
This is a Pattern 8 book—it starts off seeming like it’s going to be one kind of story, but then takes a left turn and ends up being a very different kind of story, though there are some cryptic hints early on about what kind of story it will eventually turn into. The blurb I wrote for that pattern back in 2008 makes it sound like these sorts of twists are always a good idea. In this case, maybe not so much!
At first, Exit West seems like it’s going to be the kind of story I really go for: it takes a dramatic historical moment—in this case, the fall of a city in an unspecified Muslim country to militants—and shows how the lives of specific people are shaped by that moment. It is darkly fascinating to watch the protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, try to go about their lives as close to normally as possible, even attempting to begin a courtship, but soon find themselves just trying to survive, as the phone service and power go out, and then trucks full of guys with rocket launchers are driving by trading fire with combat helicopters, and then bands of zealots are bursting into people’s homes and slaughtering anyone with the wrong surname or insufficient facial hair. (Adding to this dark fascination is that we’ve started to see those first few signs of societal breakdown here in the U.S., with the prospect of sliding into undisguised autocracy or even civil war before the decade is out no longer one to be dismissed out of hand.) Eventually Nadia and Saeed find that they really have no choice but to flee the country…
…and here’s the twist, as it turns out that the world has become riddled with wormholes, like the Krakoan gates in the last few years of X‑Men comics, that allow refugees to walk into a closet in a war zone or a storage locker in some impoverished corner of the globe and walk out into a rich enclave: an upscale house in Sydney, a fashionable neighborhood in Tokyo, a gated community in La Jolla. Nadia and Saeed teleport from the hellscape their hometown has become to the Greek island of Mykonos, from there to London, and from there to Marin County. The resulting damage to the novel is not a product of the switch from journalistic realism to fantasy: it’s that the focus of the novel shifts from the specific experience of these two people to what they hear on the news as millions of people all over the Global South take advantage of the wormholes. What happens when suddenly there are more refugees in London than pre-teleportation Londoners? What happens when the hillsides of Marin County, previously kept in something approximating their natural state as a matter of policy, become teeming favelas? Hamid’s answer is that everything turns out just fine, with the rich countries’ armies standing down and everyone agreeing that losing the Muir Woods and Marin County’s other protected areas to hundreds of thousands of tin-roofed shacks is a small price to pay for rich intercultural exchange. Perhaps you agree with Hamid’s priorities and prognostications. Perhaps you don’t. But either way, I think the story loses something when it becomes more about the world than about two people in the world. Yes, Exit West does continue to track Nadia and Saeed as they grow distant and decouple, but in the second half they seem more like case studies than individuals. “Here is what happened to Nadia” and “Here is what happened to Saeed” give way to “Here is what happens to people in situations like this”. Hamid becomes so uninterested in the specificity of their lives that their new partners are just “the preacher’s daughter” and “the cook” rather than people with names. The less said about the interlude with “the elderly man” and “the wrinkled man”, the better. I guess I still recommend the book, but not nearly as enthusiastically as I was expecting to on page 98.
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