Exit West by Mohsin HamidIf you know nothing about Exit West before you read it, you’ll have a surprise about what kind of novel it is on page 99 (out of 229 in my edition). You may be pleased or confused by the author’s audacity or you may feel a little cheated. I felt cheated - well, at least that the writer had given up on providing a powerful insight into the experience of the breakdown of civil society in favour of something more fanciful. But after a few pages, I got used to the way the novel was turning out and was back on board, as gripped as I had been before Hamid whisked me off into a different kind of world.
Hamid writes in long but simple sentences, without much dialogue and with a sense of biblical universality which is disorienting when the subject matter is so vividly real. (Does he use an unusually high proportion of single syllable words?) The reader is constantly flipping between consuming the story as reportage and responding to the cadences of allegory or fable.
I saw Hamid talk about the book, saying he thought the author only has to write “half a novel” (or maybe it was “only half-write a novel” – which is better): the other half is provided by the reader. Indeed, while that makes sense for novels generally, it feels especially true of his book. Although he sketches his characters and incidents with precision, he doesn’t colour in all the detail: that’s up to you.
About the lack of dialogue, he said that with movies and television being specialists in dialogue - in seeing events “from the outside” - he prefers his novels to do what only they can do, which is telling a story from the inside of their characters’ minds. He thinks “books should be more bookish”.
There are many contemporary themes: mobile phones, immigrants, relations between generations, the fragility of order in society. But they are set against a timeless backdrop of human relations, prayer and, especially, mortality. In his talk, Hamid said that our shared humanity rests on a shared sadness about inevitable death, and that we are all immigrants, in that we are constantly arriving at new and different stages of our own lives where we find ourselves strangers, even to ourselves. We construct a narrative about ourselves, but it isn’t always plausible (such as when we try to exclude an incident from it by explaining that “I wasn’t myself”).
Only the two main characters have names and the city they come from isn’t named either - although Hamid says he was imagining his home, Lahore. But London and US locations are given names, some quite specific. Palace Gardens Terrace in Notting Hill, for instance, is described, with its cherry trees in blossom; but its big houses are not how their owners would like to see them. Sausalito, near San Francisco is also in a bad way.
In his talk, Hamid referred to the magic of his phone, as a portal to the world, a tool that confuses us about where we are and who we’re with. It blurs allegiances and ideas of belonging - which is why it’s also central to emotions around immigration. “Nativists” is one of his favourite words – meaning both ‘original residents’ and people with a defensive attitude to those outside of their group. The book was written before the vote for Brexit or the election of Trump but might have been inspired by both. Hamid find the same issues in Pakistan, where signs of being loyal to religious groupings are the equivalent of nationalist and racial group identities.
But this isn’t a tract; it’s a gripping story that might make you cry. Hamid revealed (or at least that’s how I saw it) that his novel compresses time, to show us what the Western world will be like in a couple of centuries. Even though it’s only made of paper (if you’re using old-fashioned technology), the book, like the phone, is a portal to a world that you can step into and step out of, a world where your identity is mixed with that of a writer you’ve probably never met. But I imagine he’d say it’s the reader and the writer who provide the magic, not the technology.
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