I liked this novel for exactly the same reasons others have disliked it. I prefer imaginative treatment of ‘difficultWe are all migrants through time.
I liked this novel for exactly the same reasons others have disliked it. I prefer imaginative treatment of ‘difficult’ topics than a necessarily realist one, since the realist novel by its very nature can only tell one story, whereas an allegory can tell many stories rolled into one. Here, the author does not get bogged down with the excruciating realism the nature of the theme requires, but employs a slight touch of magic and a narrative voice that pulls us along willy-nilly into the heart of the matter.
The characters of Nadia and Saeed are likewise drawn more as symbols or types and less as properly fleshed-out characters, to advance the narrative arc and the ideas the author wants to convey. This is an acknowledgement of the intent of the author and a caution that a realist reading might not be so accurate in this case. Yet it is worth noting that both characters break the stereotypes of a Muslim boy and a Muslim girl with their unique and complex approaches to faith, culture, identity and a sense of belonging to their places of birth and upbringing.
Like his other books, this is also short but conceptually vast; and stylistically, although it’s characteristically Hamid, the urgency and speed of the narrative voice reflects the many momentous changes taking place simultaneously in the lives of the characters and in the world at large. The terse, clipped, commaed, repetitive, wide-angled, and dialogue-deprived narration seemed to me to imitate the style of magical tales of A Thousand Nights, or more precisely that of dastangos of yore (the oral storytellers) who used to draw huge crowds in town squares and narrate tales and epics for a living, the art which is now dead. In the same vein the author employs elements of fantasy to advance the story, which is another not uncommon feature of the old dastansgo storytellers.
The choice of the fantastical device of black doors which transport people also works as a symbol of the impossibility of putting up barriers to migration in the globalised world. The doors have made the national borders ineffective and countries can no longer stem the flow of people. It is futile to try to ban mass movement in our technologically advanced, interdependent, and interconnected world. More and more people travel and migrate to more and more far off places than humans have ever done before, and this trend is here to stay. The episode of the native London mobs facilitated by state authorities shows the immediate reaction of host countries to the changes taking place, but at the end of the day all parties had to find ways to make peace with the new reality, even if the old school liberalism and the ideals of equality, integration, and unity in diversity were found to be no longer tenable. As we move forward into the future we also get closer to the past.
Just as in his previous novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid lends anonymity to the city and the country from where his principle characters come. Nor he names the neighbourhoods or the monuments that might help to identity the city wherein the story begins. I heard him speak at Lahore Literary Festival when his previous novel had just come out, someone asked him why he didn’t name the cities where his story was set. He said he did not want to tie it down to one specific city or country, that the story could have taken place anywhere in the “Rising Asia” and that people from any place could identity with the story of a meteoric rise of the protagonist by following the similarity of conditions and events that exist in all those places. He does the same in Exit West and lends a sameness to the events taking place in the developing world, from Sudan all the way to Myanmar and farther afield. Whereas locations in the West are solidly identified, perhaps because without doing that the story would lose its hinges.
The strength of the novel is in the way it makes you question accepted notions of nationality, identity, belonging, and develops an idea of an alternative world that is always in a state of flux, where no one is native or an alien but individuals that adapt to and transform a place and sometimes see it being transformed before their eyes. There’s a little sub-story of an old granny who lived on a hill in Palo Alto and spent her entire life in the same house, yet she can no longer identity her neighbourhood and its streets, much less the entire town, because the intervening decades have changed and obliterated the town in which she was born. And thus she also becomes a ‘migrant’ through time in spite of living in the same place her enter life.
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