Review: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Who are you once you’ve left behind everything you ever knew?
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid’s fourth novel, follows young lovers Nadia and Saeed from their late adolescence in a city that’s descending into war. As life grows increasingly untenable, the couple join hundreds of others who are fleeing the city, only to find themselves in new, unfamiliar, and frequently unsafe places.
All across the world that Hamid describes, migrants are travelling – not by boat or hidden under grubby lorry tarpaulins, but through black doorways that appear in place of, say, an airing cupboard or at the end of a hotel corridor. It sounds fantastical, and if I’m honest I was sceptical at first, but while the passage via the doors is described as arduous, the shifting of focus away from the migrant’s journey and on instead to the jarring dislocation of place really worked for me. The reader is encouraged to consider the trauma of leaving a homeland behind, and finding themselves somewhere that they never planned, expected, or wanted to be.
You feel the gut wrench as Hamid describes the dissolution of what we know as civilised society – from the first distant rumours of unrest; the gradual establishment of spot-checks and then checkpoints; the imposition of a curfew, to the sudden and total loss of mobile phone service across the city. You begin to imagine in your own city the rapid chaos that would ensue when people are abandoned to misinformation and isolation. Then soon come the hours of queues at the bank to withdraw cash… it all feels frighteningly plausible and not so outlandish as maybe it would have done a few short years ago. And when in just a few more weeks, the truck bombs kill and people stop receiving their salary payments, the last vestiges of normality disappears. Saeed and Nadia start looking for a way out, and meet the agent who facilitates their exit via a door in a dentist’s office.
The pair make their way – unsurprisingly – west, first to Mykonos, then to London and onwards. Ending up in a luxurious, empty townhouse, Nadia and Saeed are followed by many others who find themselves emerging into similar Knightsbridge properties. The unconscionable waste of such enormous properties lying empty as investments while countless thousands of people around the world have nowhere to lay their heads is perhaps laid on a little thick, but the fact remains.
“Location, location, location, the estate agents say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians”
Throughout the book small vignettes play out; short unrelated tales of people leaving, arriving, adjusting, loving, suffering and grieving. Not everyone is a refugee from place – some from their own lives. The older man on his balcony in Amsterdam is a melodious note - but the reader is constantly unsettled and unmoored, forced to consider themselves in the position of outsider. However, Hamid also dips into the mind of the ‘insider’, pointedly noting that “the people … who claimed the rights of nativeness most forcefully, tended to be drawn from the ranks of those with light skin”
“Our country was poor. We didn’t feel we had as much to lose”
I loved Nadia. She is pragmatic, determined, and understands the vagaries of how humans treat one another. She wears a covering (niqab or abaya or similar, we’re not told which) “so men don’t f*£k with me”. I think most women will sympathise with the sentiment, if not the solution.
“We are all migrants through time”
The development of Nadia and Saeed’s relationship is beautifully told, and as they travel further west the denouement satisfies without sugaring. Their story could be your story. Mine. Our children’s. The very fact that the home city they must abandon is deliberately never named only increased my sense of unease and bleak possibility. It’s probably Damascus, it might be Aleppo. It could be Glasgow. But the counterpoint of reinvention and adaptability is the joy of this book. The eternal possibility that peoples’ lives can be unspeakably awful – but that every day we get up and try again. Because in the end, what else is there to do?
Why Should You Read Exit West?
What home means, why we live where we do, eerie possibility, dystopian realism, strong women, love, people and place, ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstance