Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

The agent shrugged as though it was of no consequence to him, and Nadia, who had not considered the order of their departure until that moment, and realized there was no good option for either of them, that there were risks to each, to going first and going second, did not argue, but approached the door, and drawing close she was struck by its darkness, its opacity, the way that it did not reveal what was on the other side, and also did not reflect what was on this side, and so felt equally like a beginning and an end, and she turned to Saeed and found him staring at her, and his face was full of worry, and sorrow, and she took his hands in hers and held them tight, and then, releasing them, and without a word, she stepped through.

Saeed--quiet, pious, thoughtful--meets Nadia--brash, rebellious, adventurous--in an unnamed city where a violent crisis is unfolding.  Hamid pointedly keeps the city and the country unnamed, even in a novel where other geographical markers are quite explicit, to turn Saeed and Nadia into Middle Eastern everymen, but rightly or wrongly, I read them as Syrians.  Their budding relationship is slow and uncertain, but slowness and uncertainty are luxuries that war zones cannot afford, and soon Nadia has moved into Saeed's house with his father, filling the space left by his mother, who has died in the violence.  Saeed and Nadia love their familiar city, but it is changing, disappearing, and soon they find themselves with no other choice than to do what thousands of others have already done: make use of the mysterious black doors opening up all around the city that lead to other places in the world.

The doors inject a bit of magical realism into the story of the refugee.  The pair finds themselves transported immediately to Mykonos, where they struggle in a refugee camp, then through another door to London, and finally to San Francisco.  It's tempting to say, the conceit of the doors is actually sort of useless: it brings the refugees to their next stop instantly, but it doesn't actually change the progression of their travel or the alienation they feel when they get there.  (This is at least in part the way I felt about the literal train in Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad.)  But I appreciated the interstitial passages where Hamid breaks away from Saeed and Nadia's story to give vignettes about how other people have used the doors.  A suicidal man escapes the drudgery of his life; two elderly men from different sides of the world fall in love.  (I found these stories honestly more interesting than the couple, who bear too much of a burden to be an avatar for all refugees.)  The doors are not just a symbol for refugeeism, but for all the ways the world is shrinking in the 21st century.  Hamid imagines a world where refugees and migrants make up even larger percentages of cities like London than they do now, and provoke greater backlash and unrest, but it seems likely that this vision is less a fantasy or an exaggeration than an image of a near future.

It was interesting to read Exit West alongside Event Factory, which use very different strategies, neither very realistic, to capture something about the alienation of moving from place to place.  Both are good reminders that it is the alien who is truly alienated, and that the nativist fear of a changing home is never comparable to the migrant's sense of loss.  "We are all refugees in time," Hamid says, encouraging us to accept the changing demographics of the places in which we live and he is, of course, right.

Billy said he thinks that Hamid's writing is beautiful and deliberate, and I think deliberate is just the right word: Hamid spins out long but careful sentences, like the one I quoted above, that are tiny marvels in that you never get lost in them.  Combined with the deliberate vagueness around Saeed and Nadia's particular cultural position, and the bird's eye view perspective that avoids immediate action and dialogue in favor of descriptions of longer periods of time, I felt like the writing became aloof, and turned the story into something of a fable.  I found myself skating across the surface of it, wanting to get inside and not quite being able to.  But I did think Exit West was both imaginative and vital to the present moment in a way that few books are able to accomplish.