OPEN DOOR PROPHESY

With his new novel, Exit West, Pakistan-born Mohsin Hamid illustrates once again why he is one of the most important voices of our era. Like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, his best-known work, it’s a novel of the zeitgeist. But this is a subtler, and therefore more interesting book.

Its omniscient narrator, the unnamed Islamic country at its centre, and its sometimes technical style—browsing Facebook is described as “exploring the terrain of social media”—combine to give the novel an atmosphere of magic realism. Moreover, the story hinges on the unexplained appearance of portals that allow citizens of poor and war-torn countries to travel instantly to London or San Francisco or the Greek island of Mykonos. While the allusion to globalisation and the ongoing real-world refugee crisis initially seem overly obvious, the strength of Hamid’s characters, his compelling turn of phrase and his keen sense of metaphor keep it from sinking to the level of an episode of Black Mirror.

In the recurring trope of the burqa worn by Nadia, one of the protagonists, for instance, Hamid investigates the identities and masks of conservative Islam and the citizens living under its sway. An atheist, or at least someone who sees no reason to pray, Nadia wears her black robe to discourage unwanted attention from lecherous men, uses a spare one to smuggle her lover, Saeed, into her apartment, and later continues to wear it to send “a signal” about her identity to the nativists of London after the couple join a refugee colony there. Hamid invests Saeed’s devout praying with similar nuance, punning cleverly that he “prayed even more, several times a day, and he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and what would go and could be loved in no other way”.

A meditation on exile and migration and inequality and prejudice—“when we migrate, we murder... those we leave behind”, the author observes—this is a high-wire act of high art. And Hamid never puts a foot wrong.