Mohsin Hamid, the author of this 2017 novel, was born in Lahore in Pakistan, and has spent about half his life there. He studied in the US, at Princeton and Harvard, and has also lived in California and London. He's well qualified, then, to write about mobility. In an interview in 2018, he says his growing familiarity with places that people are desperate to leave is matched only by an equivalent familiarity with places that are desperate for people not to arrive... It's this tension that Exit West is all about. And, as an inveterate migrant (albeit a much more fortunate migrant than the people depicted here), I find it hard not to like a novel about migration.

It had been on my list for a while, this book, but when it came in at No. 75 on the famous New York Times list of best 21st-century books, and when a copy then appeared at Ithaca Books (next door to Indah's new cafe at Think & Tink), it went from list to nightstand in short order. You see how logical my reading is...?


Jessore, Bangladesh, 2014. We had a very positive experience during our stay in Bangladesh, but alive in my memory still is a poignant conversation in which a young man, having heard we were from New Zealand, begged us to give him employment there. Desperation meets helplessness...

Exit West starts in an unnamed city: "A city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war... [one of those] cities teetering at the edge of the abyss..." We meet Saeed (works for an advertising agency, and lives with his parents) and Nadia (works for an insurance agency, lives independently as a single woman -- quite unusual -- and wears a long black robe, "so men don't fuck with me"). They have just met each other. They get on well. They spend time together. They're the only ones whose names we learn.

But their relationship is not blessed with peace. "In times of violence," says the narrator, "there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real." In this case, it's Nadia's cousin, who is blown up in a truck bomb.

Violence encroaches ever further upon the city. Helicopters, a beheading, the relentless rise of religiously conservative militants, government reprisals, curfews... People start to think about getting out, discussing "the relative merits, or rather risks, of the various overland routes". There are outbursts of fighting, making travel between the city's districts impossible; mobile phones are disconnected, likewise the internet. "Nadia and Saeed, and countless others, felt marooned and alone and much more afraid." The city becomes a patchwork quilt of areas held by militants or by government forces.

There are shortages; queues at the bank to withdraw money, under cover of which women are sexually harassed; job losses; drones; bombs; public and private executions; unmarried couples who are "made examples of and punished by death"; boys playing football with a human head; public and private executions; rules on dress, rules on beards, rules on hair; hanged bodies left on the streets. "People vanished in those days..." Music is outlawed by the militants, who can search property at will. A neighbour is killed. A simple window becomes "the border through which death was possibly most likely to come".

All this is relayed searingly simply. Hamid doesn't linger over these circumstances. He presents them; he moves on.



Saeed's mother is killed, and Nadia moves in with him and his father. Saeed, more old-fashioned than Nadia, wants to marry her. She feels, at this, a mixture of tenderness, terror, and resentment.

Meanwhile, we have started to learn about the "doors". We see them in operation first, as people emerge, mysteriously, in different parts of the world. They funnel people out; they also funnel fighters in: "Rumours had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country... A normal door, they said, could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all... It was said in those days that the passage was both like dying and like being born."

Saeed and Nadia approach an agent, who agrees to show them a door. Saeed's father insists on staying. He says goodbye, and says Saeed will come back one day, although they both know this won't happen. There's a heart-rending line here: "When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind."

The couple emerge in Mykonos, Greece. In a camp that is "like a trading post in an old-time gold rush".


Not Mykonos, but Chios, 2019. This island also -- along with Lesvos and Samos -- has hosted thousands of asylum-seekers in the last decade or so

It's an interesting contrivance, this doors thing. I don't normally like magical realism (I've probably said this hundreds of times in this blog). But here this fiction of the doors works, because -- as Hamid says -- it takes all the focus off the perilous journeys migrants make (a valid focus but one that has been repeatedly canvassed), and redirects it to the reasons migrants leave, and their experience once they arrive (and arriving might be something they do repeatedly).

Humans don't necessarily survive this trauma unscathed. Nadia starts to detect a kind of bitterness in Saeed, and "it struck her that a bitter Saeed would not be Saeed at all". Again, it's very lightly sketched, and nothing is laboured over, but we see very clearly the toll such experiences take on the equilibrium of individuals and relationships.

People in the Mykonos camps are desperate and fearful, anxious that they will be trapped there for ever. There are outbursts of local hostility. The couple try for a rumoured door to Germany, but are elbowed aside. A people smuggler says he can get them to Sweden, but disappears with their money.

Eventually, they find a door to London, and emerge in a house that already holds 50 squatters. "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." In some boroughs legal residents are in a minority. Our protagonists' street is attacked by "a nativist mob". They're both injured. Three lives are lost. There's talk of "a coming night of shattered glass".


Surreal London, 2023

The authorities start a kind of war of attrition. They cut off the electricity; they set up barricades and checkpoints. Fighter aircraft appear. And drones: "Frightening, because they suggested an unstoppable efficiency, an inhuman power".

Migrant communities start to segregate, as people flock to what they see as their own kind. Nadia is less suscepible to this trend than Saeed.

Everyone fears "the battle of London". An attack starts. Rumours abound. But it fizzles out. "Decency", it seems, prevails, not to mention bravery, "for courage is demanded not to attack when afraid".

There's an interesting exchange at this point, initiated by Nadia:

"Imagine if you lived here. And millions of people from all over the world suddenly arrived."
"Millions arrived in our country... when there were wars nearby."
"That was different. Our country was poor. We didn't feel we had as much to lose."

"The natives and their forces" step back from the brink this time. But that summer it seems the whole planet is moving. The couple are now in "one of the worker camps". Every month there are more of these, and yet the population of their own is constantly swelling. They hear that Saeed's father has died.

And our couple continue to drift apart. They feel they have to try a new horizon.

Their next door takes them to Marin, where they live in a shanty with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the fog.


Bay Area, 2001

Nadia works in a food cooperative; Saeed is becoming more melancholy, more devout. There's a beautiful passage about prayer here:

"He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way. When he prayed he touched his parents, who could not otherwise be touched, and he touched a feeling that we are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being... and so he prayed as a lament, as a consolation, and as a hope."

That's a fairly precise description of what I feel whenever I hear the call to prayer rise from the minarets here...

Saeed and Nadia are both attracted to other people now. But they part very civilly.

Throughout the novel, we have had little cameos of migrant experience in different parts of the world, both bitter and sweet. Via the woman from Palo Alto comes the idea that "we are all migrants through time". That is, even if you stay rooted to the spot, that spot will change round you. You cannot help but move through time. Unless you die.

And everywhere there is people movement: "All over the world people were slipping away from where they had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields, and slipping away from other people too, people they had in some cases loved, as Nadia was slipping away from Saeed, and Saeed from Nadia."

Yet this is not entirely a bleak picture. "The apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on..." There's a creative flowering. A new jazz age. Nadia and Saeed still meet, though less and less frequently.

And the world doesn't end: Half a century later, Nadia and Saeed return to their native city, which is not a heaven but not a hell either: "They watched the young people of this city pass, young people who had no idea how bad things once were, except what they studied in history, which was perhaps as it should be." When they were dating, Saeed and Nadia used to dream of going to Cuba, or Chile. Now he says he will take her to the deserts of Chile, "and she shut her eyes and said she would like that very much, and they rose and embraced and parted and did not know, then, if that evening would ever come".



***

Viet Thanh Nguyen comments: "This gentle optimism, this refusal to descend into dystopia, is what is most surprising about Hamid’s imaginative, inventive novel. A graceful writer who does not shy away from contentious politics and urgent, worldly matters -- and we need so many more of these writers -- Hamid exploits fiction’s capacity to elicit empathy and identification to imagine a better world. It is also a possible world. Exit West does not lead to utopia, but to a near future and the dim shapes of strangers that we can see through a distant doorway. All we have to do is step through it and meet them."

Hamid himself says he wants to address a general failure of imagination with regard to migration. Things are GOING to change. People will move. They're unstoppable. Yet leaders insist on trying to push us backwards. What we need to do instead is to start imagining this changed future, and make people comfortable with what is inevitable. We need to find beauty, he says, in this need for movement.

I totally agree, and yet I'm not totally sure Exit West hits the right spot between optimism and pessimism. There's a lot of scary stuff before we get to that creative flowering and the new jazz age... And the transition is glossed over a little quickly.

Of course, we can always paint hell more easily than heaven, but Hamid's dystopian vision is disproportionately more convincing than the bland calmness of the close. I think Andrew Motion is right when he says Hamid's "bare-statement style" does not work as powerfully here: "Now it seems a little thin, and therefore conveys a sense of wishful thinking. Perhaps this is always a risk when writers use the same style to dream of utopia after toiling through a dystopia. But it nevertheless means that we exit Exit West admiring its depiction of nightmare more deeply than we feel persuaded by its description of a bright future -- no matter how much we might sympathise with the principles defining that future."



***

Despite that reservation, I found this a very thought-provoking book, and a beautiful read. It's a lean, spare novel, with little extraneous detail. Some don't like that pared-down quality. I think it works. We learn as much as we need to learn in order to empathize with Saeed and Nadia, and to feel anxious -- though not, as we've said, despairing -- about the world that is shaping up in the future.