ONE WAY OUT
An immigration tale with a mystical twist follows a young migrant couple from country to country to new lives
In the news again are stories about migrants, hundreds of them, being smuggled out of their homelands and seeking refuge in Europe.
One article reported that the bodies of 16 people, including five children, from unknown countries, were recovered in the Aegean Sea. The same story said there was a riot in a migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Migration is the dominant theme of Mohsin Hamid’s 2017 book “Exit West.” It’s an elegant, absorbing novel that has touches of magic and treats migrants with respect.
The focus is on the young couple Saeed and Nadia, the only named characters in the novel. In the first half, they deal with a worsening civil war in their unidentified country that threatens their safety.
Saeed and Nadia initially meet in a night class on corporate identity and product branding. They begin to date while they try to survive in secret as newly minted lovers, a cultural taboo of this presumed Muslim nation.
Another cultural challenge is that Nadia, more independent than Saeed, lives alone; Saeed resides with his parents. When his mother is killed and the fighting closes in on them, they decide to flee. They want Saeed’s father to come, but he insists on staying behind to be close to his wife’s grave.
The second half of the book tracks Saeed and Nadia’s struggles and uncertainties as migrants. Enter a magical element. The couple pay an agent for safe passage, though it won’t be by sea, land or air. They magically slip through a doorway that once had been a supply cabinet in a dentist’s office; Nadia goes before the reluctant Saeed.
They end up in a tiled bathroom near a beach club on the Greek island of Mykonos. They walk toward “what looks like a refugee camp with hundreds of tents and lean-tos and people of many colors and hues … but mostly falling within a band of brown that ranged from dark chocolate to milky tea.”
The next magical door they pass through takes them to London, where they are deposited in a room that seems like a palace. After many months, they decide to leave and are transported through a door to their final stop, “the new city of Marin,” near San Francisco, where they bivouac in a shanty.
Embedded in the novel is a kind of love story. Saeed and Nadia begin their relationship through romance. That wanes. They try to rekindle their lost love.
The author said he’s been a migrant, too, though not forced to migrate because of a natural catastrophe or political upheaval.
He grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, and has lived in the United States and in London. “Moving has been part of my life from the beginning, really,” he said in a phone interview from Lahore.
“Maybe in a couple of hundred years migrants will be widely accepted to live anywhere on planet Earth they want. Now there’s fear of movement … though we all move from places to somewhere else.”
What Hamid finds encouraging is how much more openminded young people are than older people, and “young people are more comfortable living alongside people not like them.”
The New York Times Book Review, Time and People named “Exit West” a Top Ten Book of 2017. “Exit West” and Hamid’s 2008 novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” were also finalists for the Man Booker Prize.