Exit West (2017) By Mohsin Hamid

Published earlier this year, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is one of the most interesting books I’ve read … ever.   The novel is brutally current, and can be categorized as dystopian, though it does hold out hope for individuals, if not the world.  The final chapters call to mind Aldoux Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World in style, though not in subject.

Geography is everything in this book, but importantly the opening city is not revealed -- it could be Kabul, it could be Mosul, or it could be Aleppo.  Exit West starts as the love story of and young man named Saeed, and Nadia, a young woman he meets in university.   She’s clad head to toe in a burka – not because she is religious, but as a defense mechanism to ward of unwanted attention.  She also drives a motorcycle.

Mohsin Hamid

While Saeed and Nadia are the main characters of the novel, they are not the story being told. Hamid uses these characters to bring to their place in history two broader subjects: life in a city/country under siege, and the reality of life as a refuge/migrant. 

Saeed & Nadia live in an unnamed city where religious fundamentalists are slowly, but unmistakably taking control.  Their day to day life is a romance, and a nightmare.  While the political good guys vs. bad guys nature of the situation is acknowledged, in reality it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is that regardless of who is firing the rockets, the people being hurt are civilians trying to live ordinary lives; made difficult to impossible when where you live has become unsafe, you don’t have freedom of movement, and basic utilities such as water, sewage and electricity are sporadic, then non-existent.

Like many, Saeed & Nadia make the difficult decision to leave.  In literature and throughout world history, we’ve read that story before – and Hamid handles it superbly with the metaphoric device of calling such an escape "going through the door” without knowing what’s on the other side.  The only thing people know for sure it that it will be somewhere else.  It is a decision being made today by millions of people, throughout the world. “Choosing” to become a refugee is as dramatic a change as one can make in life, and seldom a choice. At one point the narration explains “it was said in those days that the passage was like dying and like being re-born.”

When Saeed & Nadia arrive on the other side of their first door they are on the beach in Mykonos where tourists pay no more attention to them than they do sand crabs, and authorities round them up and remove them to a refugee camp.  Saeed and Nadia will walk through many doors, through many refugee camps, to destinations where they are seldom met with open arms.  Throughout they will meet other refugees from every corner of the earth, and will hear their stories, people escaping war zones, and others escaping crippling poverty.  Their names, their languages, their places of origin are interchangeable, their stories are the same.

Recommendation:  Strongly.