Mohsin Hamid, _Exit West_

COINCIDENTALLY, THIS NOVEL has something in common with Anna Burns's Milkman, which  I just wrote about--both are set in cities where there is increasingly violent conflict, but neither names the city nor identifies a date.  Burns's novel seems fairly clearly to be set in Belfast in the late 1970s, but Hamid's is harder to pin down--Damascus, Aleppo, Homs? Beirut? The year: probably a quite recent one.

Nadia and Saeed meet in the increasingly dangerous city, fall in love, and start living together with Saeed's religious-but-not-that-strict parents (Nadia is estranged from her much stricter family--she wears traditional Muslim female clothes but also rides a motorbike). They decide they must leave the city. And here things get a little fantastical.

The world of the novel is full of "black doors" through which one can step instantaneously from one place to a very distant and very different place. The black doors are portkeys, we might say; moving up the literary ladder, they are like the wormholes in Richard Powers's Plowing the Dark; drawing on Hamid's earlier fiction, they are like the hypothetical technology of the hypothetical company Changez evaluates for his job interview in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Or they are just shorthand for airports--nearly identical the world over, yet each located in its own very particular and unique city.

Exit West is about migration. By means of the black doors, Nadia and Saeed get to Mykonos, then London, then Marin County, experiencing responses that range from hostility to indifference to acceptance to love. Their relationship changes; they change as individuals. They both convince, and their story does not go precisely where one might be expecting it to go.

Nestled among the episodes of their story are vignettes of other characters (to switch it up, these characters are unnamed, but their cities are identified), all tending to show what a powerful turn on the handle of chance migration is--no one, migrant or native, knows how the elements will recombine, and no one is going to be unchanged.

A bit like Colson Whitehead in The Underground Railroad, Hamid sprinkles quite a handful of fantasy into a topic that seems to call for the soberest, most straightfaced sort of naturalism, and not only gets away with it, but actually gives the narrative a different sort of moral power.