Exit West

Exit West is an impressively rendered, sensitive and timely novel. It tackles the issue of the refugee crisis in a way that feels remarkably current. There's a freshness to this story that is often lacking in other stories of this style. Given its subject and the ways it's skillfully depicted, I think this novel has a decent-to-good chance of taking this year's Man Booker Prize. But, in my opinion, it's lacking something, a result of taking a few shortcuts and arriving at its destination posthaste.

Exit West is the shortest of this year's nominees. Unfortunately, I think this is its greatest flaw. While the settings and language are all written in vivid detail, the characters and relationships suffer from the novel's brevity. Despite their strong potential as characters, Saeed and Nadia never seemed fully developed to me. There could've been another fifty pages exploring these characters, a hundred pages developing their stories; instead, their journey is presented in a story that takes only a few hours to read. The further their journey took Saeed and Nadia, the more distant I felt from them.

There's also a bit of disconnect in Hamid's device of using magical doors to journey from one country into another. I see the potential in the story for such a device. I see how it could also free up the author some. I'm not going to argue against the author's choice to use it. Personally, it just added a second level of disconnect. The stakes were not high enough. There was a sense that anytime things were about to get really bad, they could hop on a magical door and journey to some place that was a little better. If only this were true.

In most ways, I think Exit West was a great novel. Unfortunately, where it was lacking was perhaps the most significant: it was light on heart. I was mesmerized by the language, entranced by the scenery, and stimulated by the questions implied, but I never felt much for the characters themselves. And for a story which promises to be a love story, I'm not convinced they felt much for one another.


Man Booker Prize 2017:
Though this will not be my favorite amongst this year's nominees, I see Exit West as a potential winner. Its presentation of the migrant issue tied with its gorgeous prose and fast-moving plot make it a very strong contender. Of the book's I've read so far, this one has, in my opinion, the greatest likelihood of going all the way. I'll be surprised if it doesn't make the shortlist, but I've been surprised before.