Exit West: A Review

Exactly two months ago, the Tamil Guardian reported that German authorities had rounded up as many as 100 Tamil asylum-seekers in an attempt to deport the lot to the country which they fled to escape being devoured by a rising tide of ultra-nationalism. As victims of a political culture that licensed racism on the grounds that it is supported by a majority, the asylum-seekers, and their fathers and forefathers, have been discriminated against for the best part of their country’s post-colonial existence. Germany, and much of Europe, has probably become inured to stories of wretched human beings abandoning their war-torn homeland and heading to Europe in search of security and nourishment. The exodus from Syria since 2015 hardened Europe’s stance on immigration. So Germany coldly deported the Tamils to Sri Lanka. 

This is one of a great multitude of human stories that have been spawned by a defining global phenomenon of our age; emigration. Particularly, movement not propelled by a desire for economic advancement, but instead by an urge to protect one’s existence. This is the phenomenon that the gifted author Mohsin Hamid undertakes to explore in his fictional work Exit West. We are introduced to two intriguing characters, Saeed and Nadia, both presumably in their mid to late-twenties in an Eastern city about to be devastated by a sanguinary civil war. Saeed lives with his parents and is a bien pensant everyman with a strong attachment to his native place. Nadia is an independent-minded young woman who has long moved out of her parents’ house and lives on her own. Saeed is certain he is in love with Nadia, but she is less sure, although she believes their relationship has “force”. 

It is in the initial parts of the book that Exit West makes the strongest impact. Hamid limns a deeply realistic portrait of a city at war and the blossoming love between a new couple in its midst. With militants closing in on the heart of their city, normalcy grinds to a halt. Everything that was once taken for granted, now in danger of destruction. Saeed and Nadia both lose their jobs and are confined within four walls. Their routine assignations now involve greater risks, potentially life-threatening. Much worse, Saeed’s mother loses her life instantly as she is struck by a stray bomb. Reading about the war-torn city condemned to seemingly endless rounds of curfew was particularly relevant to the present COVID-19 era. 

Hamid then introduces a gratuitous magical device into the novel that drastically reduces the thrill and absorption that animated the first parts of the book. He invents miraculous doors which take entrants to a different spot on the earth. Hamid has explained this as a metaphor for the celerity of global movement and transportation in today’s world. But they serve to add a bizarrely hallucinatory touch to a novel that until the last few pages felt eminently real, and even personal. The device could have been used calculatedly to inspire a greater impact amongst readers. But the way it comes across in the book, it seems more like an odd incongruity that damages the standard of what could have been a much more powerful novel. 

Saeed and Nadia pass through the door and are instantaneously transported to the Greek island of Mykonos. It is precisely from this point that the quality of the novel starts to deteriorate. What felt like irresistible prose earlier, now comes across more as thick amounts of prolix verbiage. The semi-lovers wander around the island, get swindled, begin to despair, and pass through another door that takes them to London. And Hamid takes several dozen pages to narrate what I said in the last one sentence. You can imagine the tribulation of a reader confident that something interesting will happen but is disappointed at all turns. Hamid’s fetish for the mundane detail sometimes makes one wonder; “so what?” 

The novel is dotted with vignettes of migration tales that have no connection with the main story. Whilst more often than not they frustrate the reader because of their irrelevance to the plot, some of them are rather poignant and arouse our empathy for they strongly portray the plight of refugees and asylum-seekers in the current age. We meet a Tamil family who find themselves in an upscale neighbourhood by the sea in Dubai where they arrive after ingressing a magical door elsewhere. They are singled out by state-of-the-art surveillance technology and authorities take them into custody swiftly but furtively so as not to spoil the experience of international visitors. The fictional Tamil refugees were probably deported too. Hamid also attempts to depict the wave of nativism in Britain in the wake of Brexit, which does feel rather timely. But aside from such episodes which offer much-needed vitality, most of Exit West is stodgy and uninspiring. 

What shocks the mind is that such a jejune fictional patchwork of middling quality is feted as “an instant classic” that defines our age. Is immigration, and the concomitant hostility to “outsiders” in host countries, one of the most pressing global issues in contemporary times? Yes! Is Exit West the most compelling narrative of this phenomenon in the field of fiction? Absolutely not! One believes that contemporary public discourse must exercise a fair degree of temperance before anointing a work as a “classic”. 

To Hamid’s credit, despite disappointing the reader in various fronts, he has managed to evoke a certain sympathy for the predicament of migrants. Besides the wrench of abandoning one’s home and homeland, migrants are perennially exposed to multiple experiences of privation and humiliation. The contumely of the authorities in host countries that house migrants; the feeling of constant foreboding that one’s residence in any place is temporary and subject to the sufferance of the natives and nativists; these ideas are communicated in a literary style unique to Hamid. But one longs for books like The Reluctant Fundamentalist from Hamid, a gripping and deservedly celebrated novel that made him famous.