Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Riverhead, 240 pages, $26 (c2017)

This is not a mystery, but it is one of the best books I’ve read within the last few years.

Mohsin Hamid has created a thoughtful, elegant book whose characters have intricate inner concerns and beliefs. “This is a book about immigration” is misleading and unnecessarily harsh, even though that is what it is at a basic level. It is a book about the challenge of moving into a different culture or creating a different culture, of being popped suddenly out of where you felt you knew how to deal with life, whether that life was fulfilling or not, into an environment where you have to rethink the basics, into an environment where almost no one wants you.

Saeed and Nadia grew up and, as the story begins, live in a city not unlike Lahore, Pakistan, where author Hamid grew up, but the city intentionally remains nameless. Hamid wants his readers to include in their imagining the many places under siege from which people are trying to flee. Militants are warring against the standing government in Saeed and Nadia’s city. The war finally comes close to their neighborhoods. First the power goes, then goods are scarce, then people are disappearing, either leaving or dying, then bombs are exploding much too close for comfort. The next bomb may have their names written on it.

War in Saeed and Nadia’s city revealed itself to be an intimate experience, combatants pressed close together, front lines defined at the level of the street one took to work, the school one’s sister attended, the house of one’s aunt’s best friend, the shop where one bought cigarettes.

This first section of “Exit West” — the political change in the anonymous city and the realization that Nadia and Saeed must leave — was excerpted in The New Yorker. It showcases the power of Hamid’s language in the slowly dawning desperation of his characters.

The rest of the book deals with their re-location to Mykonos, London, and San Francisco. It would be a much longer book if Hamid had to detail how his characters got to these places. Instead, because his focus is on what happens once immigrants arrive in a place that isn’t politically, economically, or charitably ready for them, Hamid uses a device to expedite the process: He has created a door through which people travel, aka wormholes. But this is where everyone reviewing this book must state that “Exit West” is not remotely science-fiction. This device allows Hamid to get to the heart of his story about the waves of migrants fleeing intolerable situations and what the rest of the world should do about them? Is there really a separation between “them” and “us”?

In an interview with The New Yorker, Hamid makes the point that we must look to a future in which climate change, migration waves, animal and plant extinction, and other horrible foreseeable events occur, and think about what we as a world need to do. Right now there is a “failure to imagine plausible desirable futures,” he says. That is what “Exit West” in the end tries to do, present us with a potential plausible desirable future.

But first it will probably begin with this:

Reading the news at that time one was tempted to conclude that the nation was like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some on disintegration, and that this person with multiple personalities was furthermore a person whose skin appeared to be dissolving as they swam in a soup full of other people whose skins were likewise dissolving.