A Muslim love story set in a Brexit dystopia
EXIT WEST by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99)
IT WAS perhaps only a matter of time before the newly spawned genre of Brexit-lit morphed into the alternative reality of Mohsin Hamid’s new novel. Exit West offers a close-to-the-bone dystopia, though, with all the realism of Islamist terror and alt-Right outrage thrown in among the spookier stuff.
The novel begins familiarly enough: a progressive Muslim girl meets a progressive Muslim boy. They start dating in an unnamed city that becomes so dangerous to live in under Islamic insurgency that they flee, only to face the implacability of a West that is hostile to their immigrant plight. So far so News at Ten. It is only when, almost halfway into the book, Hamid describes how they travel to the West — through a portal or a secret “black door” (the technology is never explained) — that the gears shift and we find ourselves in a Brexit novel with science-fiction bells on.
London, where Saeed and Nadia migrate, is embroiled in a clash of civilisations. Nativists stalk the streets to “reclaim Britain for Britain”, while immigrants arrive through the doors to form their own mini-tribes: “All over London houses and parks and disused lots were being peopled in this way, some said by a million migrants, some said by twice that.” The city resembles a Brexit apocalypse movie: a “dark London” filled with drones and surveillance machinery.
The “doors” are a clever device for imaginatively reflecting on the refugee crisis and what national borders mean in a world that has found a way of bypassing them. They teleport Saeed and Nadia to a London that seethes with discontent but they also have the potential to lead to a utopia where borders cease to matter and people become citizens of the world.
This central metaphor is ingenious but it is also what lets the novel down in the end, becoming a substitute for a fully formed plot. Once the doors are revealed, the story stalls: Saeed and Nadia find a safe house and drift apart. The violence abates, Armageddon is averted and tolerance is resumed in this new world of porous borders. Saeed and Nadia have an amicable breakup. Hamid dwells on the anatomy of their relationship: how romance develops into love and then how it is neutered of its sexual fizz. The immigrant experience warps the love between them, but their relationship is not a powerful enough driver for a satisfying ending on its own.
This leads to a desperate lack of dramatic tension in the second part of the book, which is perplexing in the hands of an author who has proved he can create suspenseful plots and taut, thrillerish denouements, most notably in
The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Exit West is still worth a read for its message, even with the offnotes. Hamid’s writing, once the over-stylised prose is dropped, is crisp and sincere and his dystopia has chilling levels of realism. It might even be a premonition of the News at Ten.