Beyond borders
For all the popularity of Henry James’ characterization of the novel as being “a loose baggy monster,” there are also novels that don’t feel the least bit loose or baggy, but are taut and meticulously shaped. “Exit West,” Mohsin Hamid’s fourth novel, is one such book, a short, urgent missive in which each detail gleams with authorial intent.
It begins in an unnamed city riven with sectarian conflict. As their environs turn increasingly violent, two young people, Nadia and Saeed, start talking.
While the government fights rebel militants in the city streets, and despite curfews and mobile-network shutdowns, Saeed and Nadia find ways to date, try hallucinogenic mushrooms and fall in love.
It’s a common enough juxtaposition, of course, private joy thriving in the midst of public crisis; in “Exit West,” though, the contrast is made more stark by the omission of a city name. Locale-specific identifying details are blurred. No political causes are given, no belief systems labeled, as if to imply that Nadia and Saeed could be any of us, and their collapsing city also ours.
Through the first section of “Exit West,” Hamid instead reserves his descriptive powers for the particulars of civic breakdown, the pain and dread of watching one’s milieu give way to chaos. He’s especially adept at evoking how peril can defamiliarize the known world. Windows turn menacing because they can’t stop bullets. Easily shattered, potential shrapnel, windows become “the border through which death [is] possibly most likely to come.”
Saeed’s father walks past a group of young boys playing soccer, and is reminded of his own childhood love of the game. He then sees they’re not boys, but young men, while the ball they’re kicking is a goat’s severed head — no, he realizes, it’s “the head not of a goat but of a human being, with hair and a beard.” Perception lags behind event, the terrifying filtered through minds used to less brutal times. Executed bodies hang from streetlamps like “a form of festive seasonal decoration.”
To an increasing extent, the deaths personally involve Saeed and Nadia: a cousin, a drug dealer, an upstairs neighbor, a parent. Meanwhile, exit visas have become unattainable; trapped as they are, it’s no surprise that Nadia and Saeed begin heeding rumors about “special” doors that can spirit people out of the country.
Left as rumors, magic doors would have served as an elegant metaphor for visas, but these portals also happen to be literal. A paid guide leads Saeed and Nadia to one. They step through, and fall into a public bathroom in Mykonos, Greece, thus starting their lives as refugees. More special doors eventually whisk them further west, from Mykonos to London to Marin County.
It’s a large-scale, ongoing migration, desperate people everywhere finding doors into more privileged countries, which are “building walls and fences and strengthening their borders, but seemingly to unsatisfactory effect.” Note that the destination cities are all named: In “Exit West,” as in the world, rich, safe nations are few, and distinct, and greatly outnumbered by those in need.
The prose in “Exit West” is restrained, its surface calm both belying and heightening the pathos of Saeed and Nadia’s situation. It’s terrible, for instance, when Saeed’s father refuses to go with him through the first door, deciding to stay behind because, he thinks, “with an old man hampering them these two young people were simply less likely to survive.” Hamid barely mentions the son’s guilt and anguish, an elision made all the more moving when the couple pauses at a Mykonos beach to watch the waves, “the water stopping just short of their feet and sinking into the sand, leaving lines in the smoothness like those of expired soap bubbles blown by a parent for a child.”
In London, Nadia and Saeed land in a bedroom so opulent that, at first, they think they’re “in a hotel, of the sort seen in films and thick, glossy magazines, with pale woods and cream rugs and white walls and the gleam of metal here and there.” It’s an unoccupied mansion, the cupboards stocked with food. Hamid notes that 50 migrant squatters end up fitting into the vast, plush house; the gulf between such different kinds of luck is implied.
In Mykonos, London and Marin, the influx of refugees leads to conflicts that, in our post-Brexit, Trump-era present, seem all too credible: nativists advocating for the slaughter of newcomers, riots, attacks. Still, “Exit West” is lit with hope. Hamid has said that “part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures,” and that “fiction can imagine differently.”
“Exit West” does so, and beautifully. May Hamid’s hopes turn out to be as prescient as his concerns already are.
R.O. Kwon’s first novel, “Heroics,” will be published this year. She is a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow.