Exit West by Mohsin Hamid review – magic and violence in migrants’ tale The Guardian

A couple flee their war-torn city for Europe in a parable of love, displacement and the search for belonging
Andrew Motion
Thu 2 Mar 2017

Saeed and Nadia meet at an evening class in an unnamed, presumably Middle Eastern city “swollen by
refugees” but not yet “openly at war”. Saeed is “an independent-minded, grown man, unmarried, with a
decent post and a good education”. Nadia is less straightforward-seeming: she doesn’t pray but wears a
“conservative and virtually all-concealing black robe”, works in an insurance company but rides a “scuffed-
up hundred-ish cc trail bike”, has veered off from her parents and lives alone. Saeed quickly falls in love
with her. Nadia, to begin with at least, is “not certain exactly what she was feeling, but was certain it had
force”.

In previous novels, Hamid has used a heavily inflected narrative voice to filter everything through a
personality that is not his own, but which he nevertheless owns as the author. In The Reluctant
Fundamentalist we eavesdrop on a marvellously well-sustained dramatic monologue that reveals a great deal
about its speaker, while also concealing precisely what he intends to do to his listener. In How to Get Filthy
Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid ingeniously adapts the form of a self-help book to create a tale-telling “you”
who becomes intimately realised while remaining a nameless everyman. Exit West confidently adopts yet
another kind of voice – a tone of radical simplicity that in the opening 50-odd pages borders on brutality,
and makes every conversation, every detail, every scene feel at once vital and under threat.

Predictably enough, this is most obvious in scenes of outright violence as militants close in on their city
prey. Nadia’s doctor cousin is “blown to bits, literally to bits, the largest of which … were a head and two-
thirds of an arm”. The man who sells Nadia and Saeed magic mushrooms is beheaded, then “strung up by
one ankle from an electricity pylon where [his body] swayed legs akimbo until the shoelaces his
executioners used instead of rope rotted and gave way”. Saeed’s own mother dies while looking in her car
for a lost earring, “a stray heavy-calibre round passing through the windscreen … and taking with it a
quarter of her head”.

A major part of Hamid's achievement is to show how profoundly social damage injures private lives

The mixture of clarity and restraint in such passages is very impressive, and confirms Hamid’s reputation as
a brilliant ventriloquist who is deeply engaged with the most pressing issues of our time. It is also
interestingly at odds with the device he then uses to connect his story with its remaining sections. Faced with
imminent catastrophe, Saeed and Nadia escape from their city through a “black door” – one of several that
briefly opens among the accumulating ruins. Although we have already been alerted to the existence of these
doors – by rumours that our hero and heroine overhear, and also by passages that Hamid interpolates into his
text, in which figures suddenly emerge from nowhere in places ranging from Australia to Marrakesh – they
still seem remarkable. They maintain an element of magical strangeness opposed to the plainness of the
prose in which they are presented, and lead us to think of the novel as a form of parable.

And so it is – a parable of hideous contemporary familiarity and strangeness. Once Saeed and Nadia have
passed through their door, they find themselves in a refugee camp on the Greek island of Mykonos, where in
the process of feeling variously relieved, frightened, outraged and threatened, they plunge more and more
deeply into the questions of identity and nationhood that dominate the remainder of the book. “In this group
[on the island],” Hamid says, “everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was” – preparing us for an
ideal of integration that his characters find variously attractive and difficult to achieve. When they leave the
island by passing through another door to Germany, and then another that leads them to London, they enter a
city that is rapidly “filling up with [the] tents and rough shelters” of other refugees, where every form of
homogeneity is perceived to be under threat.

Hamid describes these threats in terms that deliberately echo some of the intolerant voices raised by
Brexiters: there is a “reclaim Britain for Britain” movement of “nativists”, for instance, which soon forces a
political crisis. And not only political. A major part of Hamid’s achievement in Exit West is to show how
profoundly social damage will injure private lives – not only in obvious ways (physical injury,
homelessness), but by hampering the ability to construct any sort of life outside their sphere of influence. As
Saeed and Nadia try to develop their own true selves, external pressures accentuate their different attitudes
to sex, to worship, to how they view their homeland. At the same time, rootlessness causes the most
widespread possible lack of integration, by provoking refugees from similar backgrounds to identify and
shelter with others like themselves, rather than continue to live in a melting pot.

Saeed and Nadia fear that they are about to be engulfed in a second wave of carnage, and the ferocity of the
opening scenes in Exit West will make every reader share their anxiety. But by this stage in the novel Hamid
has in fact changed tack somewhat. He is now less interested in showing violence than in describing a
solution to the problems it embodies. The military backs down. “Decency on this occasion [wins] out,” he
tells us, “and bravery, for courage is demanded not to attack when afraid.”

As Saeed and Nadia develop their own selves, external pressures accentuate their different attitudes to
sex, to worship

While this saves Saeed and Nadia from battle harm, it cannot undo the hurt already inflicted. As they begin
working with other displaced people in a vast series of camps on the outskirts of London known as the
“London Halo”, the distance that has opened between them only increases. In the process, Hamid’s simple
style acquires an almost fairytale quality, as he continues to explore the extent to which personal lives are
subordinate to political circumstances: “Every time a couple moves,” he says, “they begin … to see each
other differently, for personalities are not a single immutable colour … So it was with Saeed and Nadia, who
found themselves changed in each other’s eyes in this new place.”

The narrative depends on clear storytelling so much for its effect, and Hamid makes this clarity a means of
generating suspense. So suffice it to say that while Saeed and Nadia continue to try to prove their
individuality in ways that are not entirely dictated by war and its consequences, they also continue to
function as a means for Hamid to think about questions of national identity and social cohesion. This makes
for a comparatively quiet conclusion to a book that began with fire and blood.

When he approaches his conclusion by asserting that “We are all migrants through time”, and when he
shows Saeed feeling that “it might be possible, in the face of death, to believe in humanity’s potential for
building a better world”, his bare-statement style works against him. Initially it compelled us to sup full of
horrors. Now it seems a little thin, and therefore conveys a sense of wishful thinking. Perhaps this is always
a risk when writers use the same style to dream of utopia after toiling through a dystopia. But it nevertheless
means that we exit Exit West admiring its depiction of nightmare more deeply than we feel persuaded by its
description of a bright future – no matter how much we might sympathise with the principles defining that
future.

Andrew Motion’s latest collection is Peace Talks (Faber). Exit West is published by Hamish Hamilton. To
order a copy for £9.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p
over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid – magical vision of the refugee crisis

Exit West, a novel about migration and mutation, full of wormholes and rips in reality, begins as it mostly
doesn’t go on. A man and a woman meet at an evening class on corporate identity and product branding.
Saeed is down-to-earth, the son of a university professor, and works at an ad agency. Nadia, who wears a
full black robe and is employed by an insurance company, lives alone, rides a motorbike, enjoys vinyl and
psychedelic mushrooms. She doesn’t pray. We think we know what will happen next: a boy-girl love story,
opposites attracting, secular individuals struggling with the shackles of a theological state.

Now, though, this unnamed city is filling with refugees. Militants are creating unrest. The old world was
neither paradise nor hell – one of its parks tolerates “early morning junkies and gay lovers who had departed
their houses with more time than they needed for the errands they had said they were heading out to
accomplish” – but its terrors are driving out those with ambition and connections. Saeed and Nadia embark
on a journey that, like the dream logic of a medieval odyssey, takes them to Mykonos, London, San
Francisco.

Hamid, intentionally for the most part, doesn’t exert as tight a narrative grip as he did in previous novels
such as The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Exit West shifts between
forms, wriggles free of the straitjackets of social realism and eyewitness reportage, and evokes
contemporary refugeedom as a narrative hybrid: at once a fable about deterritorialisation, a newsreel about
civil society that echoes two films – Kevin Brownlow’s It Happened Here and Peter Watkins’s The War
Game – and a speculative fiction that fashions new maps of hell.

All the same, the novel is often strongest in its documentation of life during wartime, as Hamid catalogues
the casual devastation of a truck bomb, the sexual molestation that takes place as hundreds of city dwellers
throng to take their life savings from a bank, and the supernatural elation of taking a warm shower after
weeks on the road. This is annexed to elements of magical realism and even The Lion, the Witch and the
Wardrobe-style children’s storytelling. A normal door, Saeed and Nadia’s colleagues start to discuss, “could
become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all”.

Characters move through time and space like abrupt jump-cuts or skipping compact discs. There are no
descriptions of life-or-death journeys in the backs of lorries or on flimsy dinghies. No middle passages. Just
the cognitive shock of having been freshly transplanted to tough new terrains. Hamid is deft at evoking the
almost contradictory nature of Nadia and Saeed’s digital life (their phones are “antennas that sniffed out an
invisible world” and transported them “to places distant and near”), whose broadband freedoms contrast
with the roadblocks, barbed wire and camps they face in what passes for reality.

Exit West is animated – confused, some may think – by this constant motion between genre, between
psychological and political space, and between a recent past, an intensified present and a near future. It’s a
motion that mirrors that of a planet where millions are trying to slip away “from once fertile plains cracking
with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous
battlefields”.

The skies in Hamid’s novel are as likely to be populated by helicopters, drones and bombs as they are by
dreams and twinkling stars. Yet his vision is ultimately more hopeful than not. In one of the book’s parallel
but alternative universes a suicidal man chooses life. In another, two old men – one Dutch, one Brazilian –
exchange a kiss. Most of all there is prayer – prayer for the loss that “unites humanity, unites every human
being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry”.

Discussion Questions for ‘Exit West’ The New York Times

March 7, 2018

Mohsin Hamid’s novel “Exit West,” which follows two lovers on the move from a country on the brink of
civil war, is our March pick for the new PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”
Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter.
Learn more about the book club here.
Below are questions to help guide discussions as you read the book throughout the month. The questions are
broken down by week, or divided into four parts to match your reading speed. (Spoiler alert on the questions
that are further down if you read ahead!)

Week One

1. “Exit West” begins with two people meeting in a city “swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at
least not yet openly at war” — setting the scene for what’s to come. Throughout the book, as the city
descends into war, Hamid never mentions the place’s name. Why?

2. As the book follows its two main characters, Nadia and Saeed, readers also meet a thief in Australia, a
suited man targeting women in Tokyo and an old man whose house is being surrounded by military men in
San Diego, among others. We never meet these characters again. What do you think is the purpose of these
interludes?

3. We learn early on that Nadia wears flowing black robes but is not religious. She says she does it so that
men won’t disturb her. When she goes to withdraw money from a bank, she is groped in a crowd with
“incredible force.” What are we supposed to take away from the scenes about the ways women have to
survive in a period of instability?

4. Even as the city descends into war, and events become increasingly scary, Hamid rarely tells us that the
characters feel fear. Instead, the reader is left to decipher how the people in the book must be feeling. Why
do you think that is?

Week Two

5. Hamid describes windows in people’s houses as a “border through which death was possibly most likely
to come,” and the many ways a house has to be rearranged during war to ensure it’s safe. How is the feeling
of home as a secure place challenged in this book?

6. After discussing the windows, Hamid introduces the rumors about doors “that could take you elsewhere.”
What do we learn about the dangers and promises of these passageways?

7. The militants who take over the city do not allow music, do no not approve of unmarried lovers like Nadia
and Saeed, and come looking to kill people of a particular sect. Does this book feel representative of the
unrest of our present time, of our past, or both?

8. When Nadia and Saeed learn that the magical doors do exist, and can in fact take them away from the
violence of their city, they are excited and immediately pursue an agent to help them leave. Saeed’s father,
on the other hand, only says of the doors: “Let us see.” Does this feel resonant to you of the experience of
different generations of migrants?

Week Three

9. Chapter Five ends with Nadia making Saeed’s father a promise to take care of his son, and the line: “That
is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.” Is Hamid
referring to Saeed’s father and the people we leave behind, or something more?

10. As migrants move through the magical doors to other places, trying to escape war and chaos, the passage
they take is described as: “both like dying and like being born.” Does this description feel representative of
the experience of people who migrate today?

11. We never hear, though, about what actually happens as people migrate through these doors. Why do you
think the migration itself is absent from the narrative?
12. As Nadia and Saeed escape through the doors, we learn that not just their city, but much of the wider
world, is in turmoil. Refugees are on the move to Mykonos in Greece and Marin County, near San
Francisco. Riots are starting over migrants in Vienna and in London. What do you think Hamid wants us to
understand about this global instability?

13. As these cities become more unstable, they also come under greater surveillance, at the hands of unseen
authorities. These authorities also control the electricity network and internet connectivity. How do these
changes impact the people in the book? How does it feel relevant to today’s world?

Week Four

14. In the cities to which migrants flee, Hamid writes that people began to reassemble with others of their
own kind, “like superficially with like.” At one point, even Saeed wants him and Nadia to relocate to live
with others like them, though Nadia resists. What do you think is behind this human impulse?

15. As Nadia and Saeed continue to move locations, their relationship becomes increasingly unstable, and
the way they speak to each other not as kind. By the end of the book, Hamid writes that they begin “slipping
away” from each other, as people all over the world are “slipping away from where they had been.” What
does Hamid want us to learn here?

16. And yet at the same time in Amsterdam, two older men fall in love. What do you take away from his
interlude?

17. The book ends in the city of Nadia and Saeed’s birth, which Hamid writes seems to them both familiar
and unfamiliar. How did you feel about this book’s ending?

March’s Book Club Pick: ‘Exit West,’ by Mohsin

March 10, 2017

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

(This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017. For the rest of
the list, click here.)

EXIT WEST
By Mohsin Hamid
231 pp. Riverhead Books. $26.

You own a house or rent an apartment. You live with your family or by yourself. You wake in the morning
and drink your coffee or tea. You drive a car or a motorbike, or perhaps you take the bus. You go to work
and turn on your computer. You go out at night and flirt and date. You live in a small town or big city,
although maybe you are in the countryside. You have hopes, dreams and expectations. You take your
humanity for granted. You keep believing you are human even when the catastrophe arrives and renders you
homeless. Your town or city or countryside is in ruins. You try to make it to the border. Only then, hoping to
leave, or making it across the border, do you understand that those who live on the other side do not see you
as human at all.

This is the dread experience of becoming a refugee, of joining the 65 million unwanted and stateless people
in the world today. It is also the experience that Mohsin Hamid elicits quietly and affectingly in his new
novel, “Exit West,” which begins “in a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet
openly at war.” The city and the country are unnamed, unlike the two characters at the story’s center: Saeed
and Nadia, a young man and woman whose courtship begins in this moment of impending crisis. They are
cosmopolitan city dwellers who meet in “an evening class on corporate identity and product branding,” and
whose first date is at a Chinese restaurant.

Hamid’s enticing strategy is to foreground the humanity of these young people, whose urbanity, romantic
inclinations, upwardly mobile aspirations and connectedness through social media and smartphones mark
them as “normal” relative to the novel’s likely readers. At the same time, he insists on their “difference”
from readers who may be Western. Their city is besieged by militants who commit terrible atrocities,
evoking scenes from Mosul or Aleppo. As for Nadia, she was “always clad from the tips of her toes to the
bottom of her jugular notch in a flowing black robe.” But while this robe seems to be a form of conservative
Islamic dress, one of the starkest signs of difference between Nadia and non-Islamic readers, she is more
daring than Saeed. She is the one who offers him marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms, and she is the one
who initiates sex. The robe, it turns out, is camouflage to allow Nadia to be an independent woman.

The backdrop for “Exit West” is both the plight of refugees from places like Syria and the specter of Islamic
fundamentalism and terrorism. Hamid takes full advantage of our familiarity with these scenes to turn “Exit
West” into an urgent account of war, love and refugees. Politics also matters as it does in his other novels,
which likewise dealt with pressing issues: the troubles of contemporary Pakistan (“Moth Smoke”); 9/11 and
the tensions between being Pakistani and American (“The Reluctant Fundamentalist”); and naked capitalism
and ambition in an unnamed country (“How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia”). Throughout his oeuvre,
Hamid envisions an interconnected world in which East and West inevitably meet as a consequence of
complicated histories of colonization and globalization. The dramas and love stories of individuals like
Saeed and Nadia cannot be separated from these histories, even if, in their own lives, those histories are not
necessarily preoccupations. Until, that is, those histories erupt.

When they do, people die. They do so often, unexpectedly and in violent circumstances. Hamid offers a few
incidents like this, and in their spare detail they are enough, as when Nadia’s cousin is “blown by a truck
bomb to bits, literally to bits, the largest of which, in Nadia’s cousin’s case, were a head and two-thirds of an
arm.” Refusing to dwell on the morbidity of such a scene, Hamid declines to turn the destruction of the city
and its people into a spectacle, the way they would normally be visible to those outside the country,
watching its doom from a digital distance. Examining the destruction at a slight remove, Hamid discourages
readers from pitying the city’s residents. Instead, focusing on Saeed and Nadia, and removing the
particularities of the city, the country and its customs, Hamid aims to increase the depth of a reader’s
empathy for characters who can be, or should be, just like the reader. The reader, of course, must think about
what would happen if her own normal life was suddenly, unexpectedly upended by war.

Most likely, the reader, like Saeed and Nadia, would flee. They do so through the sudden, unexplained doors
that appear throughout the city and that are portals to other places. While the city is unnamed, these sites of
refuge are named — Greece, London, the United States. In their concreteness, versus the deliberate
vagueness of Saeed and Nadia’s city, they call for identification from readers of the novel who live in these
kinds of desirable places that the refugees want to go. The novel implicitly asks these readers why doors
should be closed to refugees, when those readers might become refugees one day? How these doors work is
not Hamid’s concern. The doors can be manifestations of magic realism, fantasy or science fiction, or all
three, but they simply stand in for the reality that refugees will try every door they can to get out.

What happens once Saeed and Nadia arrive at these promised lands makes up the second half of the novel,
in which it seems that “the whole planet was on the move, much of the global South headed to the global
North, but also Southerners moving to other Southern places and Northerners moving to other Northern
places.” Here Hamid’s novel reveals itself to be a story not only of the present but of the future, where
migration will be the norm. Depending on one’s point of view, this is either terrifying or hopeful. When
everyone is moving, then mobility becomes normal rather than disturbing. While these movements cause
unrest on the part of the “natives” — what Hamid, in a postcolonial reverse, calls the inhabitants of the host
countries — the vision that he ultimately offers is peaceful. After the natives get over their initial fear of
strangers, both the natives and the strangers discover they are just as likely to get along as not. From this
measured, cautious recognition of a mutual humanity, the natives and strangers attempt to forge a new
society.

This gentle optimism, this refusal to descend into dystopia, is what is most surprising about Hamid’s
imaginative, inventive novel. A graceful writer who does not shy away from contentious politics and urgent,
worldly matters — and we need so many more of these writers — Hamid exploits fiction’s capacity to elicit
empathy and identification to imagine a better world. It is also a possible world. “Exit West” does not lead
to utopia, but to a near future and the dim shapes of strangers that we can see through a distant doorway. All
we have to do is step through it and meet them.