Early in Mohsin Hamid’s remarkable novel Exit West, a young couple fall in love in an unnamed city where—as we learn in the opening sentences—war is about to break out. The streets and parks are crowded with stunned and dying refugees, but so far the local unrest has been limited to “some shootings and the odd car bombing, felt in one’s chest cavity as a subsonic vibration like those emitted by large loudspeakers at music concerts.” Despite the distant crackling of automatic gunfire and the unnerving indications that the life they know is soon to end, Saeed and Nadia, who meet in an evening class on corporate branding and product identity, do what humans so often—and so instinctively—do in similar circumstances: they act as if they have all the time in the world. “That is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.”
Employed by a firm that sells outdoor advertising, Saeed has been trying to design a billboard campaign for a soap company. Having liberated herself, at great cost, from her traditional family, Nadia lives alone in a rented apartment, works for an insurance company, drives a motorbike, and wears a full-length black robe—not as a sign of religious devotion but for protection, as a way of dealing with “aggressive men and with the police, and with aggressive men who were the police.” The couple’s first after-class conversation touches on the subject of prayer (Saeed prays, Nadia doesn’t, a difference between them that will grow more divisive as the novel progresses).
Saeed and Nadia flirt, have dinner, smoke weed, take psychedelic mushrooms. Saeed suggests they abstain from sex until they are married. Nadia is intrigued by her attractive classmate but determined to preserve her hard-won independence. The tentative advances and inevitable stalls of their courtship might seem more familiar and less urgent if we weren’t so regularly reminded of how fragile and doomed their world is.
Reading this part of the novel feels a bit like looking at before-and-after photos of a bombed-out city. Hamid gives us a sort of binocular vision of the apartment where Saeed lives with his mother, a retired teacher, and his father, a semi-retired university professor; it’s at once a pleasant family home—and the ruin it will soon become. The view from their windows “might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.”
Unsurprisingly, the historians prove to be more prescient than the realtors. As the worsening conflict between the government and the fundamentalist rebels—and a strictly enforced new curfew—makes it increasingly dangerous to meet, Saeed invites Nadia to move in (and live chastely) with him and his parents. Nadia hesitates, until history decides for her; the risks she faces living alone have become too great, and she worries about Saeed traveling back and forth to see her.
No matter how often Hamid has warned us about what is about to occur, it still comes as a shock to the reader—as it does to Saeed and Nadia—when the city in which they have been so happy turns into a war zone. Or perhaps what’s startling is how quickly and dramatically a modern society can be dismantled and reduced to rubble and chaos.
Firefights erupt in disputed neighborhoods. Nadia’s cousin is blown “literally to bits” by a truck bomb. The ponytailed entrepreneur who sold Nadia the hallucinogenic mushrooms is beheaded, “with a serrated knife to enhance discomfort.” The militants occupy strategic territory; people vanish, leaving their loved ones with no idea if they are alive or dead; drones and helicopters hover overhead; Saeed’s father sees some boys playing soccer with a human head; an upstairs neighbor is killed at home by militants hunting down a particular sect, and his blood seeps through the ceiling. One by one, the ordinary comforts and conveniences—cell phone signals, plumbing, running water—disappear. There are nonstop public and private executions, bodies hang “from streetlamps and billboards like a form of festive seasonal decoration. The executions moved in waves, and once a neighborhood had been purged it could then expect a measure of respite, until someone committed an infraction of some kind, because infractions, although often alleged with a degree of randomness, were inevitably punished without mercy.”
Windows become borders “through which death [is] possibly most likely to come,” and doors take on an entirely new meaning: “Rumors had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country. Some people claimed to know people who knew people who had been through such doors. A normal door, they said, could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all.” When Saeed and Nadia realize that they can’t survive much longer in their embattled homeland and decide to leave, we learn that these mysterious doors are portals through which refugees can pass—and find themselves somewhere else.
The existence of these magical doors is a clever literary device that allows Hamid to skip over linking passages and bypass strict chronology, thus sparing the writer and his reader from having to follow, in detail, the hardships of embarkation and disembarkation, perilous sea voyages and heroic rescues, horrors that we may feel we already know quite a bit about from reading the news. Oddly, or not so oddly, these transitional sections turn out to be unnecessary in advancing the plot. After all, fiction, unlike life, can skip around in time and compress a long and difficult journey into the space of a chapter break.
After the couple pay an agent to guide them through one such door, they wind up on the Greek island of Mykonos, living at the edges of vast camps crowded with people like themselves. Exiting through yet another door, they reach London, where households of squatters occupy palatial homes left vacant by wealthy absentee owners. Meanwhile, the refugee crisis has destabilized society and set off yet more violence—riots and attacks sparked by nativist rage at the city’s swelling migrant population, conflicts that remind Nadia of the brutality she thought she’d left behind.
“The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.”
Gracefully, almost without our noticing, the novel’s setting has fast-forwarded into the near future, a time in which the tide of refugees has grown larger, stronger, impossible to stem or control—and, consequently, necessary to reckon with. The assaults on migrants—now restricted to workers’ camps, fenced off from the larger society and given strict rules about what they must do in order to begin the process of assimilation—taper off, and an uneasy accord is reached.
The influx of the desperate and homeless transforms whole areas—for example, Marin County, California—from bucolic exurbs into sprawls of squatters’ shacks that cover hillsides and are flimsy enough to tumble down ravines. Amid the international community of migrants in London, and again in the relative safety of California, Nadia and Saeed’s love is tested to—and ultimately pushed past—the breaking point by the cumulative stress and weight of everything they’ve endured together, and by the divergent ways in which they have come to understand and define their separate religious, cultural, and sexual identities.
By now it should be clear that Hamid, who was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and has lived in London, New York, and California, has done something astonishing. He has written a novel, a real novel, about the daunting subject of the global refugee crisis—a novel with a nervy original structure, with complex, plausible characters, a fast-moving plot, and, perhaps most important, beautiful sentences. The depth of characterization and the force of the language have a lot to do with the fact that we never feel we are being educated or lectured to about a real event, an “important” sociopolitical phenomenon. Nothing here resembles those novels (and films) that are little more than dramatized newspaper articles or fictionalized journalism, as if all one had to do was give a character a name, a smattering of background, and a few lines of dialogue in order to turn a story “ripped from the headlines” into literature.
What’s striking is how rapidly Hamid makes us care about his characters; not only do we sympathize with these people, but we come to feel attached to them, so that we find their losses and dislocations wrenching. When Saeed’s mother is killed by a stray bullet, her death seems almost unendurable, and it’s startling to realize that her murder has taken place within a few succinct phrases, in the midst of a complex sentence, at the end of a chapter, only seventy pages into the novel. A horrifying scene in which Nadia is groped—assaulted, really—by a stranger while waiting in a panicked mob of people trying to withdraw money from a bank should put to rest forever the question of whether a male author is capable of writing convincingly from a female character’s point of view.
The novel moves deftly back and forth between the particular and the general, between concrete detail and abstract generalizations about history and human nature. Even as Hamid describes a series of worsening crises, he never lets us forget that we are reading a love story, and that these events are happening to individuals we have come to know, and whose fates move us deeply. As Saeed and Nadia enjoy a brief moment of respite—the “battle of London” has briefly abated, and they are watching rain fall on their balcony—we are reminded of their profound feelings for each other:
Nadia watched Saeed and not for the first time wondered if she had led him astray. She thought maybe he had in the end been wavering about leaving their city, and she thought maybe she could have tipped him either way, and she thought he was basically a good and decent man, and she was filled with compassion for him in that instant, as she observed his face with its gaze upon the rain, and she realized she had not in her life felt so strongly for anyone in the world as she had for Saeed in the moments of those first months when she had felt most strongly for him.
Saeed for his part wished he could do something for Nadia, could protect her from what would come, even if he understood, at some level, that to love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you. He thought she deserved better than this, but he could see no way out, for they had decided not to run, not to play roulette with yet another departure. To flee forever is beyond the capacity of most: at some point even a hunted animal will stop, exhausted, and await its fate, if only for a while.
Hamid’s language is surer and more eloquent than in any of his previous novels: Moth Smoke, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the book for which he is perhaps best known here. Throughout Exit West there are long (in some cases, extremely long) sentences that never feel excessive or muddled, overwritten or strained, and that make us realize how much depth and information can be packed into the space between the capital letter that begins a sentence and the period that concludes it. Phrase follows phrase with perfect clarity and creates a breathless urgency and an incantatory rhythm that would have been diminished if these passages had been broken up into smaller units. The assault that Nadia endures in the “unruly crowd” at the bank occurs within the confines of a sentence that covers more than a page, describing the growing terror and sense of helplessness that necessity compels her to suppress until she gets her money from the teller and finds a money changer and a jeweler to convert her cash into viable currencies, and into gold.
Here, to take just one example, is a single sentence in which Saeed, Nadia, and Saeed’s father attempt to navigate their way around the apartment that Saeed’s mother’s death has transformed into a minefield in which her survivors can, at any moment, be wounded by a memory or a souvenir:
Saeed’s father encountered each day objects that had belonged to his wife and so would sweep his consciousness out of the current others referred to as the present, a photograph or an earring or a particular shawl worn on a particular occasion, and Nadia encountered each day objects that took her into Saeed’s past, a book or a music collection or a sticker on the inside of a drawer, and evoked emotions from her own childhood, and jagged musings on the fate of her parents and her sister, and Saeed, for his part, was inhabiting a chamber that had been his only briefly, years ago, when relatives from afar or abroad used to come to visit, and being billeted here again conjured up for him echoes of a better era, and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time.
One of the longest and most complex sentences in the book is a self-contained set piece, a story within a story, set in Vienna. Interpolated throughout the narrative are brief, unrelated narratives so cinematic that they seem almost like treatments for short noir films. All of them work to increase the steadily building intimations of menace—and, more tellingly, to ramp up our awareness that the growing threat is not local but global.
In the first of these, which takes place in Sydney, Australia, a woman is asleep at home; her husband is away, her house alarm deactivated, her window slightly ajar. A stranger enters the bedroom, looks around, thinks about how little it takes to kill someone, then slips through the window, “dropping silkily to the street below.” In the next of these sections, set in Tokyo, a sinister man who speaks Tagalog, dislikes Filipinos, and has a gun in his pocket follows two Filipina girls leaving a bar. In yet another, an old man in San Diego finds his house surrounded by men in uniform. “The old man asked the officer whether it was Mexicans that had been coming through, or was it Muslims, because he couldn’t be sure, and the officer said he couldn’t answer, sir.”
The most sustained and dazzling of these apparent digressions from Saeed and Nadia’s story begins when militants from Saeed and Nadia’s country, hoping perhaps “to provoke a reaction against migrants from their own part of the world,” stage a series of bloody attacks, massacring innocent Viennese in the street. The next week, a young woman who works in an art gallery hears that her countrymen are planning to attack an encampment of immigrants located near the zoo. Heading across town, wearing a peace badge, a rainbow pride badge, and a migrant compassion badge, she is terrified to find herself in the midst of a bloodthirsty, vengeful mob of men “who looked like her brother and her cousins and her father and her uncles, except that they were angry, they were furious, and they were staring at her and at her badges with undisguised hostility, and the rancor of perceived betrayal, and they started to shout at her, and push her.” Escaping unharmed, the young woman continues on toward the zoo, to join “the human cordon to separate the two sides . . . and all this happened as the sun dipped lower in the sky, as it was doing above Mykonos as well, which though south and east of Vienna, was after all in planetary terms not far away, and there in Mykonos Saeed and Nadia were reading about the riot, which was starting in Vienna, and which panicked people originally from their country were discussing online how best to endure or flee.”
As we read Exit West, it’s difficult not to imagine that any of us—attending our evening classes, enjoying our street drugs and our quotidian domesticity, meeting and falling in love—might be standing on the brink of an abyss much like the one that threatens to swallow Saeed and Nadia. If there’s any consolation at all to be had for the reminder that some humans seem to enjoy killing and mistreating other humans, perhaps it can be found in the fact that a writer like Mohsin Hamid has the compassion, the talent, and the skill to describe both individual and “planetary” experience—to take our indifference and panic, the failure of our humanity and our collective historical nightmare, and to alchemize the raw material of catastrophe into art.