exit west (mohsin hamid)

It is noted with some amusement that the Obamas' production company has acquired the rights to Exit West. On imdb the putative film project, ‘in development’ is headlined by a pair of British tyros, one of whom is a friend of a friend. The presence of the Obamas is, these days, something of a double edged sword. On the one hand a badge of liberal consciousness in a world where the extremists are on the rise, on the other, a badge of compromise, a validation of a system, (US imperialism, with all that implies), which remains a dangerous and far-from-beneficial influence on the shape the world is and has been taking over the course of the last 50 years, or more.

Why would the Obamas be interested in Exit West? The novel opens in a Middle Eastern town, which might be Aleppo or Mosul, but is in fact a fictional space, where extremists are seizing power. The semiotics smell of Isis, (the ritual executions, the sense of lawlessness under the shroud of religious devotion). Nadia and Saeed find themselves falling in love against the backdrop of this turmoil. They know they have to flee, which they do, escaping through a magic door to arrive on a Greek island. From there they will hop to London and finally California. The complex process of flight and exile is reduced to a literary device, which, whilst convenient on an allegorical  level, might be accused of minimising the realities and risks of these migrations. However, this also reflects the way that the novel transforms from being a meditation on surviving the impact of religious extremism to a more spaced-out, opaque vision of the near-future, redolent of hypothetical dystopias such as the Parable of the Sower.

Clearly there’s a market for this kind of story, which in the end offers a positivist vision of a millennial future where religious fundamentalism, xenophobia and climate change have been overcome, laying the basis for a kinder, simpler civil society. However, this also means that the novel might be deemed open to charges of over-simplifying what are, in essence, seismic and perhaps intractable problems. The knottiness of these problems is skated over. You open a door and arrive on the other side.