Book Review: Exit West

“All their doors remained simple doors, on/off switches in the flow between two adjacent places, binarily either open or closed, but each of their doors, regarded thus with a twinge of irrational possibility, became partially animate as well, an object with a subtle power to mock, to mock the desires of those who desired to go far away, whispering silently from its door frame that such dreams were the dreams of fools.”

This has flummoxed me. I am trying to be positive, and not be such a harsh critic of writing (as someone beginning to write herself) but I had such high hopes, and they were completely crushed. Mohsin Hamid is not yet in the ranks of a prolific writer, he has four novels to his name (googling this led to the completely unrelated fact that he once took a class with Toni Morrison!). I've only read his debut, Moth Smoke, and watched a bit of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Trying to pinpoint what didn't work is a little tricky, as I felt that personally there were so few redeeming features.

First: the long sentences. The repetition of these long run-on lines, and passages turned very quickly to monotony and as a stylish feature just didn't cut it for me. It spoilt the usually clear and sharp prose of Moth Smoke which I really enjoyed.

Then, characterisation. It wasn't that I couldn't care for the protagonists, Nadia and Saeed. By the end Hamid had begun to salvage the tale with some beautiful passages. Despite this, the emotion I tried to summon to care about their eventual fate dissipated fairly quickly when it was revealed and it was just - disappointing. No build up, just a sudden and largely predictable wrapping up of storyline.
What about the magic realism, did it work? I get that Hamid was revealing the absurdity of migration and border permission through those surreal doors. And geek that I am, I looked up an explanation of magic realism in David Lodge's The Art of Fiction: "MAGIC REALISM - when marvellous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative - is an effect especially associated with contemporary Latin-American fiction...but also encountered in novels from other continents, such as those of Gunter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. All these writers have lived through great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism."

I don't believe you can classify Exit West within this category, the magic realism is more of a stylistic choice than a necessity that binds the fiction. Instead, the doors function as an element of fantasy. Yet fantasy, as fantasy genre readers know is firmly rooted in the imaginary but envisioned world of the writer. Exit West has none of this, there is no place. (I mean, there are named cities later, but they are altered and unrecognisable). And I'm sure that the function of losing the war-torn Syria was to create a more relatable novel (for some). But I don't require large brushstrokes of generalisation to help me to relate to a book. I am happy in many places and eras, and happy for a writer to take me there.

Structurally, I felt it such a brief and broad-strokes sort of book that I'm surprised it made the Booker Shortlist.

Hamid revealed in an interview, "I wrote the book I needed. The same impulse has guided me in these twenty odd years of writing; the audience has always been secondary."

Yes, that's true. He did. But sadly, it wasn't the book I needed.

3/5 stars.