Mohsin Hamid‘s debut novel, Exit West (2017) is a most rare creature: a gentle dystopian work.
Exit West begins in an unnamed city in the Middle East (the geography can easily be inferred, but nothing terribly specific is confirmed), and traces a budding love affair between two youth, caught in the early days of a terribly violent revolutionary conflict. The conflict increases in its danger, and widens in its impact until the basic routines of life–work, the finding of food, the predictability of shelter–are totally disrupted.
Here enters the fantastical element upon which Exit West turns: doors have begun to appear in the world. Jet black, and seemingly random in their appearance, these doors allow a free and unfettered global movement, and while initially they are overwhelmed with the movements of refugees, they also eventually are adapted as a mode of more general travel.
The protagonists move from a refugee camp in Mykonos to one in London, where the threat of radical violence in raction to the migrants’ arrival is navigated. They end up outside of San Francisco, in Marin, and there come to terms with the changes wrought in themselves and their relationship by the exit from their homeland and their subsequent struggles to find a permanent home.
The book is compelling and, as mentioned, gentle, providing a rich description of the protagonists’ concerns and desires, and despite its somewhat grand scope, is far more a novel of characters than of plot: it is a story of people, and of how their longing for home, whether as a place of origin or a place of refuge. It reads easily, and if you are drawn in by the first few dozen pages, it is likely you will find yourself satisfied throughout, and finished more quickly than you anticipated.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Hamid ignores the standard injunction of show, don’t tell throughout, directly describing thoughts and motivations, and only afterwards describing the actions they manifest.