Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

It's rare that you find a book that you want to call enchanting, and probably much rarer that you'd want to apply that term to a book that is, in very real and difficult ways, about refugees and the feeling of crisis that has been developing around them. Yet, Mohsin Hamid has done that, written something that feels like a parable or myth for the modern day, with a sense of detachment that is nonetheless warm and kind. I really enjoyed Exit West, from beginning to end.

From what I remember from a few of the reviews, some people stubbed their toes on the one element of the book that is not strict realism, but since I'm a genre reader at heart, I didn't have a problem with it at all. More than that, I think it's necessary to show some aspects of this experience that Hamid would have had trouble accessing otherwise. I'll talk more about that in a minute, but I really do think that it is integral, not tacked-on or superfluous.

We start in an unnamed city, probably in the Middle East, given what we know of names and customs. Saeed and Nadia meet before the situation in their city gets too bad, at a computer class. Nadia always wears a full robe covering her, although she rides a motorcycle and is noticeably less religious than Saeed - she wears it because she lives by herself and feels it offers her protection as she travels the city. They fall for each other almost immediately.

Then the city starts to become more unsafe - militants take over parts of it, behaviour becomes more strictly policed, cell phones start not working. Without them, Saeed and Nadia have several nervewracking days when they don't know how to find each other. Bombs fall. They reunite, and Nadia ends up living with Saeed's family for a while.

Then enters the strangeness. There start to be rumours of doors that open to other places on the planet. Once they are discovered, they appear to be fixed. There is no particular rhyme or reason to where they appear, just that when you pass (with difficulty) through a door, you come out somewhere else. Because they are fixed, these can become ports of entry to other countries. In Saeed and Nadia's case, this holds the potential to take them away from the war that has taken their city. But because they are fixed, other countries can discover them too, and if you aren't one of the lucky few to get through before they are discovered, they will not necessarily lead you to an entirely new life.

In fact, when Saeed and Nadia make their way through one to their first port of call, they find themselves in a refugee camp, kept to one part of the island, the way back to their origins left open by a government who really wishes they would disappear. From there, they make two more jumps, discovering nativism and potential violence in England, and a ramshackle community being built in California, which is neither hostile nor particularly welcoming.

This all unfolds more or less gently, with Saeed and Nadia's relationship developing through it all. They are not married, the only ties those of love and the country they left behind. Saeed's father, before they left him, asked her only to help his son get to safety, not to stay with him forever. As they move through new experience after new experience, Nadia, still in her voluminous robes, paradoxically finds it easier to find herself a place in each new country, while Saeed turns more and more strongly to things that remind him of home.

This is all told sparely, but with a warm detachment rather than a cold clinicalness. Because it is all sketched so lightly and so distantly, it takes on the feel of a myth, of a legend, of a parable about our world, about where home is, what being a refugee means, how we close borders, and what might happen if we opened them.