This is by Mohsin Hamid. It came out in 2007 (and was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize). Exit West, which I read last August, appeared a full 10 years later.

Our protagonist is Changez. A hugely successful young Pakistani guy from Lahore. Bright. Studies at Princeton, does well there, and is savvy enough to land a great job with Underwood Samson, an esteemed "valuation firm" (his role there sounds a bit like that of the George Clooney character in Up in the Air).

The mode of narration is curious. The only voice we hear is that of Changez, who recounts the story of his life, in a formal, meticulously correct English, to a man he assumes is an American. We are aware of this interlocutor -- encountered on the streets of Lahore (whether randomly or not we end up not being sure) -- only through the way Changez responds to him. As John Mullan notes, "It is a technique that dramatises antagonism as well as intimacy, and Changez readily detects resistance in his listener." Because the conversation is one-sided, Mullan continues, the reader becomes increasingly uncertain as to the interlocutor's identity, and Changez's repeated reassurances start to feel unsettling. Gabrielle Bellot also points out that this device smartly demonstrates what it feels like to be part of a one-sided narrative.

There is a tense, thriller-like quality to this book, by the way, so read on only if you're prepared for spoilers.



Our narrator's family lives comfortably enough in Pakistan, but its members find themselves in increasingly straitened circumstances. Inflation, the decline in the value of the rupee, subdivided estates: It all means that Changez needs a scholarship to contemplate studying at Princeton, and once there, works three jobs to support himself in the style he wants to present to the outside world.

He's happy with his success. With his New York job, he feels he is entering the social class that his family was slowly exiting in Lahore. And though he says he never felt like an American, he DID feel like a New Yorker. Immediately.

Underwood Samson (the initials are US, which is never pointed out, but we come to feel is significant) has a guiding principle: "Focus on the fundamentals." This involves paying attention, single-mindedly, to financial detail.

Changez also gets to know the beautiful Erica (a name that sounds ever so slightly like America...). She's mesmerizing. But she's somehow unreachable. Her boyfriend, Chris, died the previous year, and she cannot forget him.

There's always an undercurrent of unease about Changez. He is never wholly comfortable in his environment. On holiday in Greece, for example, with Erica and other American friends, he ponders their assumed superiority: "I... found myself wondering by what quirk of human history my companions -- many of whom I would have regarded as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement were they -- were in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class." Savouring the view from the Underwood Samson lobby, he recalls that he's in touch with "the most technologically advanced civilization our species had ever known. Often, during my stay in your country, such comparisons troubled me. In fact, they did more than trouble me: they made me resentful." And when Erica's father expresses his (rather dismissive) opinion about Pakistan, our narrator explains: "There was nothing overtly objectionable in what he had said... But his tone -- with, if you will forgive me, its typically AMERICAN undercurrent of condescension -- struck a negative chord with me."

So the seeds of disaffection are there. But it's 9/11 that turns them into resolutely growing plants. He admits to his apparently horrified interlocutor that he smiled as he watched the twin towers collapse: "Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased... I was caught up in the SYMBOLISM of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees."

He keeps these views to himself, of course, but he finds, in any case, that he is now by definition under suspicion, both from border guards and from people on the street. He encounters prejudice and verbal assault; and he's pretty sure that it's only his intimidating physique that prevents physical assault. (Shades of Christopher Kitteridge here.)


Death Valley, April 2004. The difference between pre- and post-9/11 America was obvious even to us

By now, the US is pummelling Afghanistan. Changez prefers not to watch "the partisan and sports-event-like coverage given to the mismatch between the American bombers with their twenty-first-century weaponry and the ill-equipped and ill-fed Afghan tribesmen below... I was reminded of the film Terminator, but with the roles reversed so that the machines were cast as heroes." And he resents the way the US is egging on India: "It will perhaps," he tells his interlocutor, "be odd for you -- coming, as you do, from a country that has not fought a war on its own soil in living memory, the rare sneak attack or terrorist outrage excepted -- to imagine residing within commuting distance of a million or so hostile troops who could, at any moment, attempt a full-scale invasion."

Returning from Pakistan after a brief visit, he notices how those who are leaving are its best and brightest: "I was filled with contempt for myself..." Leaving this war-worried environment, he notes the contrast with the US. And he now draws even more attention -- because he has kept his beard: "It was, perhaps, a form of protest on my part, a symbol of my identity, or perhaps I sought to remind myself of the reality I had just left behind... I did not wish to blend in with the army of clean-shaven youngsters who were my coworkers, and that inside me, for multiple reasons, I was deeply angry. It is remarkable... the impact a beard worn by a man of my complexion has on your fellow country-men."

Two aspects of his life seem to symbolically underline why he is reconsidering his position.

One is his relationship with Erica. If you read her character as a place-holder for America, a lot of layers seem to peel away. Erica's problem is her inability to move on from her previous relationship with the late Chris. There's something "broken" about her. She has a strong body, but it belongs to someone "wounded". She is often distant, spaced out, "struggling against a current that pulled her within herself". She's fascinated by Changez's Pakistani-ness: "You give off this strong sense of home... You miss home... I love it when you talk about where you came from... You become so ALIVE..." According to her mother, she has said that Changez has "eyelashes like a Maybelline ad". But she cannot draw close to him.

Always mentally on the edge, she ends up in a clinic. What triggers her ultimate decline? Witnessing the attack on her city? Finishing her book, and trying to find a publisher? Realizing Changez can never really replace Chris? The reader is left to decide.

At this point, Changez specifically sets up the parallel between Erica and America. Both seem hell-bent on looking back, not forward, absorbed by memories of a life that is no longer available to them. The clinic becomes symbolic, too: "Erica felt better in a place like this, separated from the rest of us, where people could live in their minds without feeling bad about it." At the moment, Changez is the hardest person for her to see, says the nurse: He's the most real, the one who most makes her lose her balance.

Eventually, Erica disappears. No-one finds any remains, or a note; she is just no longer there.

You wonder, 18 years after this novel first appeared, whether America's disappearance is now complete, whether anything we might once have recognized as America has moved from living increasingly in a world of its own to just, well, vanishing -- so that only the outward shell is left, while all the rest is memories.



Then there's the symbolism we can associate with "US" (Underwood Samson). Changez starts to question the validity of his role: "I too had previously derived comfort from my firm's exhortations to focus intensely on work, but now I saw that in this constant striving to realize a financial future, no thought was given to the critical personal and political issues that affect one's emotional present."

During a work trip to Chile, he meets Juan-Baptista, who also challenges the ethics of what he is doing ("does it trouble you... to make your living by disrupting the lives of others?"), and introduces him to the role of the janissaries. These were young Christian boys, who were captured by the Ottomans, and trained for service in the Sultan's army. "They were ferocious and utterly loyal: they had fought to erase their own civilizations, so they had nothing else to turn to." Changez is then convinced that he has indeed become a modern-day janissary... "I had thrown in my lot with the men of Underwood Samson, with the officers of the empire, when all along I was predisposed to feel compassion for those, like Juan-Bautista, whose lives the empire thought nothing of overturning for its own gain." He resigns: "My days of focusing on fundamentals were done."

Flying back from Santiago, he reflects on his growing resentment of the way America behaves in the world; he is happy to no longer be "facilitating this project of domination". The kind of America that had come into being has to be stopped, he argues: "I resolved to do so, as best I could."

So Changez gets a job back in Pakistan, teaching at a university. He helps instigate anti-American protests, and regularly meets and advises politically minded young people.

One of his students, he learns "with consternation", has been arrested for planning to assassinate a development worker. He says he has no knowledge of this initiative, and thinks it's all a mistake. But the suspect has disappeared, "whisked away to a secret detention facility, no doubt, in some lawless limbo between your country and mine". Changez gives an interview in which his hostility to America is evident; it gains traction. He is warned he might encounter an American emissary planning to intimidate him, or worse. "Since then, I have felt rather like a Kurtz waiting for his Marlowe... I have been plagued by paranoia, by an intermittent sense that that I am being observed."



So now we need to think a little more about the interlocutor. All the way through, he has seemed jumpy and on edge. He obviously knows something about Changez, and does not seem unduly surprised by what he is relating. Changez says at one point: "Tonight, as I think we both understand, is a night of some IMPORTANCE..." The interlocutor also has an "unusual telephone", through which he is regularly in contact with someone. It also seems very probable he is carrying a gun.

When Changez reaches the end of his story, his interlocutor takes on "a decidedly unfriendly and accusatory tone". But our narrator replies that he believes in non-violence, and is not an "ally of killers".

By now his interlocutor is frankly nervous, looking over his shoulder at the men who follow them from the restaurant where they had dinner: "You should not imagine," Changez reassures him, "that we Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as we should not imagine that you Americans are all undercover assassins."

Ahhh, clever. Because it paves the way for a wide open ending.

Almost everything about this book is ambiguous, starting from the title. I guess we've been trained to assume that it refers to religious fundamentalism. But Changez mentions nothing about religion in his long monologue. His concerns are with geopolitics and global justice. When he does refer to fundamentals, they're American-inspired financial fundamentals, the ones Changez became reluctant to practise.

And as far as the ending is concerned, we are presented with the ultimate in ambiguity. We leave the scene with the waiter from the restaurant rapidly closing in on Changez and his interlocutor. And it ends like this: "Yes, he is waving at me to detain you. I know you have found some of my views offensive; I hope you will not resist my attempt to shake you by the hand. But why are you reaching into your jacket, sir? I detect a glint of metal. Given that you and I are now bound by a certain shared intimacy, I trust it is from the holder of your business cards."

What happens? Is Changez taken out by a hit man? Is the mysterious interlocutor killed or otherwise deactivated by the guys from the restaurant? Is the whole scenario of encounter and (apparent) pursuit purely coincidental, with no sinister motives on either side? Or do both of them end up dead, in a kind of modern-day, no-holds-barred duel? We don't know...

What we do know, though, because Changez has already told us, is that one scenario is no more unlikely than any other. (Indeed, in 2011, an incident took place in Lahore that sounds uncannily like the first version.)

For Bellot, "[it] is a novel that resists a single, moralistic interpretation; instead, how one reads the ending largely depends on what one assumes about Pakistan and America. We can shape events, and, perhaps more importantly, events can reshape us, can recreate us, like impulsive gods, in their own image."



***

What, at heart, is the villainous force in this novel? For me, it has to be the corroding power of nostalgia.

Changez, watching his family fortunes slowly ebb away, grew up with "a poor boy's sense of longing... for what we had had and lost". For some of his relatives, "nostalgia was their crack cocaine".

Jim, Changez's boss, is fascinated by his hungry young recruit, because he sees his earlier self in him. It's Jim who preaches the futility of resisting change: "Power," he proclaims, "comes from BECOMING change." And yet America as a whole simply can't adjust to the new world it's living in. This is symbolized by Erica. Long before she disappears, Changez remarks: "I think I knew even then that she was disappearing into a powerful NOSTALGIA, one from which only she could choose whether or not to return."

He adds, quite unambiguously: "It seemed to me that America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at that time... I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look BACK... What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me -- a time of unquestioned dominance? of safety? of moral certainty? I did not know -- but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent. I felt treacherous for wondering whether that era was fictitious, and whether -- if it could indeed be animated -- it contained a part written for someone like me."

Nostalgia seems written all over the MAGA programme that's riling the world at the moment. Nostalgia for what exactly? Well, vaguely everything, it seems. It's no clearer than it was to Changez. For the oh-so-brief unipolar moment? For victory over the Axis? For an era when sovereignty was a less binding constraint, and powers didn't hesitate to carve out spheres of influence by annexing land they took a fancy to? For some mythical era when women slaved happily in the kitchen, and homosexuality didn't exist, and the disadvantaged were happy to be subjected to the whims of anyone with more power? Well, we don't know. But nostalgia has never felt more dangerous.

A point well illustrated by this book from nearly two decades ago.