Dark, hopeful look into refugees’ lives
Second novel by Omar El Akkad is of rare boldness and ambition
A boy lies face-down on a beach, having washed ashore along with the bodies of other would-be refugees. The opening pages of “What Strange Paradise” echo one of the indelible images of our times — except that where the real-life Alan Kurdi drowned when his boat capsized on the way from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos, the boy in the book recovers consciousness. Scared by the workers in containment suits who are poking at bodies nearby, he bolts into a nearby forest.
Two books into his career, Omar El Akkad has already proven himself a novelist of rare boldness and ambition. The Egyptian-Canadian writer’s celebrated dystopian debut, “American War” (2017), asks us to imagine the Middle East as a beacon of democracy and the United States wracked by internal strife and devastated by climate change. “What Strange Paradise” also looks to shift readers’ perspectives. Alternating between times, genres and points of view, it delves into the experience of those who pay smugglers and put themselves in grave danger in hopes of finding safety in the West.
El Akkad draws on his time reporting from global flashpoints including the Arab Spring in Egypt, the Afghanistan War, the military trials in Guantanamo Bay, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo. In his sharply etched fiction, mundane details accrete in startling and powerful ways: As the boy, nine-year-old Amir, wakes up, he “doesn’t register the dead, only their belongings: ball caps and cellphones and sticks of lip balm and forged identification cards tucked into the cheapest kind of waterproof container, tied-up party balloons.”
From the opening, the novel splits in two — one timeline reaches back to recount the events leading to the shipwreck, and the other follows Amir’s attempts to avoid being detained by the Greek authorities. The latter is a breathless adventure story that shows us Amir through the eyes of others — a disaffected 15-year-old girl who risks her own freedom to help him, the administrator of the refugee camp Amir seeks to avoid, and the exasperated colonel leading the pursuit. The past-tense narrative, focused through Amir, calls to mind a play; it’s set mainly on his sea voyage, on which tensions rise between the people clustered around him.
The boat passengers’ conceptions of the West are informed by hearsay, relatives, and the media — while the islanders, who are happy to welcome entitled tourists, betray a fundamental lack of curiosity about the refugees appearing on their shores. As a child, Amir is bound up in the intractable conflicts of the adults around him, but he sees the possibility of escape.
Where “American War” is grim in an unrelenting, sometimes overbearing way, the darkness in “What Strange Paradise” is leavened by hope. The dialogue on the boat is shot through with dark humour, and the present-tense section at times feels like a caper.
El Akkad is adept at interweaving literary contrivance with documentarystyle realism — no mean feat — but there are times when the stitches show. Characters have a habit of bursting into stagy, implausibly well-honed monologues during dramatic confrontations, even in the present-tense chapters. And without giving anything away, there’s a twist in the book that, while well set up, feels like an unnecessary wrinkle to add to an already knotty tale.
Nevertheless, “What Strange Paradise” succeeds at what one senses might be El Akkad’s goal — to deepen our engagement with the world around us and with others’ stories.