A vision of the future in Hamid's Exit West

One of the cool things about Mohsin Hamid's novel Exit West is how he plays with the time frame, a real sleight of hand: in the first section, in which the young couple, Nadia and Saheed, meet and become a couple and try to survive in a predominantly Muslim city torn by civil war, sees contemporary, as if it could take be taking place today in any # of cities in Syria or elsewhere in the Arab world. Similarly, when N and S escape and settle temporarily in a vast refugee community in Mykonos, we feel that this is a contemporary story. But when the move on and settle in London, we seem to be somewhere in the near future - a dystopian future that Hamid depicts with frightening acuity, in which thousands of immigrants and refugees seize property in a few London neighborhoods and live as squatters in micro-communities largely based on country of origin. This movement attracts a tremendous and violent response by both the British government and by a nativist activist group. The tense situation gets resolved through a massive building plan in which the government drafts the refugees to build vast migrant settlements in a green space surrounding London - in return for their labor on this massive project they get housing and some form of aid and services. This all seems reasonable on the surface - but also like a ticking time bomb, as the community will inevitably grow and the settlers will inevitably revolt against their isolation and impoverishment. You could picture this maybe 20 years from today or less. Then, N and S make another journey, to Marin County, Cal., and we're even farther into the future, in a vast refugee settlement with an informal governance of its own and an entire self-sufficient, tho minimal, economy. We seem now to be a century into the future, with the entire landscape and culture of northern California completely altered (the land housing the thousands of refugees is today either tightly preserved parkland or valued beyond measure). Hamid brings us subtly to this point - and, unlike must predictive or dystopian novels, there seems to be little or no technology advances, this is not even close to science fiction, it's strictly a socio-political re-imagined society in the future, pressured to heretofor unthinkable extremes by global migration. My only quibble with this novel is Hamid's unwillingness to bring the lives of his central characters to any conclusion; perhaps it's more lifelike and realistic than most novels, but the end - spoiler here - in which N & S whom we've followed through so much just drift apart (and have a brief meeting some 50 years later to reminisce) makes the novel feel incomplete, as if their relationship was a way to look a larger issues rather than of interest, to the author, in and of itself.

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