The second book in my Man Booker shortlist challenge (two down and four to go, and only 2 weeks before the winner is announced!), Exit West has been on my list of books to read for some time. It is the story of Saeed and Nadia, two young people enduring the horror of civil war in their home city as Islamic extremists take hold of the reins of power. The city is not named – it is not a ‘Raqqa’ or a ‘Mosul’, just two of the cities which have been torn apart by religious fundamentalists and opposing forces seeking to eject them – nor is it clear when in time the novel is set. These are left deliberately vague because this is a novel that wants to focus on the issue of migration rather than historical facts; the movement of people from parts of the world so riven by violence that many able-bodied citizens find they have little choice but to flee. And it is about the impact of this mass movement on those parts of the world mostly unwilling to receive them.
At first, the novel seems quite rooted in a real time and place, as we get to know the two central characters, Saeed and Nadia, learn the details of their lives, their families, how they were brought up and what motivates them. Though they are quite different personalities they fall in love, and when tragedy strikes Saeed’s family, they make the decision to leave their homeland for what they expect to be a safer and more peaceful life in the West. They escape the city through the first of the novel’s doors (inside a dentist’s surgery) and they emerge in Mykonos. At this point I saw the door as a narrative device enabling the author to focus on their experience of leaving and of arriving, rather than the journey (one can only imagine the horrors of that, see my review of The Optician of Lampedusa). It gradually becomes clear, however, that the door is more of a metaphor for transition from one place, one state, to another. Saeed and Nadia will go through many more doors in this novel.
In Mykonos they feel a mixture of hope (they have escaped and they are beginning a new life together) and fear, as we see the first hints that the receiving population may be less than welcoming to the escapees. There is also the contrast between the tourists, choosing to visit the Greek island on their holidays, and the refugees seeking a new home. Mykonos is where Saeed and Nadia also begin to learn that the way you look, the way you dress and your skin colour can have a dramatic impact on your fortunes in the West.
From Mykonos, the couple move on again to London, where they stay in a disused apartment in an area that gradually becomes a ghetto of the dispossessed. From here the novel becomes gradually darker; darker even than the terror that Saeed and Nadia escaped in their home country. I also began to feel here that the novel was less about the experience of escape and more about envisioning some future scenario where simmering tensions, brought about by the failure adequately to address mass migration, explode onto the surface. Hamid foretells the possible reactions of the indigenous population and the domestic authorities; this was not comfortable reading.
This novel deals with one of the greatest challenges of our age and is bleak reading in parts. But the author also attempts to root it very firmly at the human level by telling the story through this young couple, who could be anyone. The issues and difficulties that they encounter in their relationship as a result of their migration experience provide a moving and accessible dimension to the book. The doors are not only metaphors for the physical movement from one location to another, but they also signify changes in the nature of Saeed and Nadia’s relationship.
This is a tough read at times, but also an important one. Recommended.
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Eleanor communicates poorly with others, being rather too literal and pedantic for most people to tolerate and is therefore unable to form effective relationships. At first, she is not an easy character to love, except that we as readers know a couple of things about her that her workmates do not, and which make us more sympathetic to her. Firstly, we know she drinks herself into oblivion at the weekends: as a reader we are bound to ask what she is trying to escape from. Second, there is Eleanor’s mother, with whom she speaks every Wednesday evening; “Mummy” is controlling, manipulative, cruel, nasty. Eleanor is an adult and yet there is something disturbing about the way she always refers to her parent as a child would (never ‘Mum’ or ‘my mother’). The fact that Eleanor also receives regular monitoring visits from social workers tells us that there is something dark in Eleanor’s past that has contributed to her present quirkiness, but we are not told what.
This is Gail Honeyman’s first novel and it is a stunning achievement. A thoroughly enjoyable read. In an era where poor mental health, social isolation and dysfunctional relationships seem to have reached epidemic proportions, this novel is both an examination of one person’s particular circumstances and an antidote. Highly recommended.
The novel begins more or less where The Glorious Heresies left off with the central character, Ryan Cusack, embroiled ever more deeply in the Cork city underworld of drugs, money laundering and violence. McInerney has managed to keep Ryan’s character consistent – he has evolved in an entirely credible way – although, unlike in the first novel, there now seems almost no hope of the more refined, gentler side of his personality prevailing to choose a different lifestyle. He is more embedded in the criminal fraternity than ever but remains an engaging and attractive central character. If anything, his charisma grows as he matures; true, he does some pretty unpleasant things, and not always at the behest of his criminal masters, but you can see that McInerney, if this turns out to be part of a series of novels, is building him up to be the tormented gangster.
However, The Power is a prize-winner and seems to have been universally lauded, most notably by Margaret Atwood (Alderman’s literary mentor) whose ground-breaking novel The Handmaid’s Tale has just enjoyed a very successful television adaptation. The premise of The Power is a subversion of current social norms where men dominate, to one where women discover that they have a physical superiority, an ability to electrocute and disable, even kill, men. The novel begins (presumably in the current time) when women begin to discover they have this power and start to use it in ways that enable them to dominate. The story is told through the experiences of a number of women and a male. First there is Roxy, the young daughter of a London gangster who, once she discovers her power, undertakes a purge of all her male foes, her father’s enemies, and her half-brothers who threaten her, to become the top gangster in her field. Then there is Margot a small-time US politician who discovers she has the power and uses it, over a period of years to eliminate her political enemies and rise to great things. Initially, Margot has to hide her power; society is initially hostile to it, and therefore those who have it, seeing at as a threat which could upset order and stability (yes, much of the novel has to be read as a deep irony). Margot, as a politician is also connected with a number of corporations who would no longer support her if they knew she was a carrier of the power. Third, there is Allie, a teenager adopted into a right-wing southern American Christian family (more irony). She is abused by her adoptive father and in one of his assaults she electrocutes and kills him. She then escapes to a convent from where she morphs into Mother Eve, the head of the cult which spreads the power worldwide. One of the followers of the cult is Tatiana Moskolev, the estranged wife of the President of Moldova, who sets up her own republic in the north of the country and establishes a brutal regime where men are mere playthings, sexually abused and murdered at will. Finally, there is Tunde, a young Nigerian, who when we first meet him is trying to seduce a young woman, unsuccessfully as it turns out, because she gives him a small but still very humiliating electric shock when he makes his move on her. It is clear the power dynamic has shifted! Tunde senses that change is about to come to the world and so he sets about travelling the globe, posting his obervations on the internet and thereby becomes an international journalistic sensation.
I picked up The Lady and the Unicorn at the secondhand book stall at my youngest daughter’s school summer fair and read a large chunk of it whilst there. It would not normally have caught my eye on a bookshelf as the cover is more suggestive of a cheap sexy romance (nothing wrong with that if that’s your thing!), but I was very quickly drawn into the world that Chevalier evokes, as she also did so brilliantly in Girl with a Pearl Earring. 
I am an admirer of Gillian Anderson, not since her X-Files days, but since watching The Fall, the hugely popular television drama about a misogynistic and brutal serial killer in Northern Ireland, in which Anderson played the beautiful, enigmatic, but also rather damaged DSI Stella Gibson. The drama ran for three series between 2013-2016 and I was hooked. (It also starred Jamie Dornan, which helped). Jennifer Nadel, Anderson’s co-author, is a former journalist, writer and activist. Both women are open about their experiences of depression and poor self-esteem, despite their hugely successful careers and enviable lifestyles, and this book is their account of recovery and a ‘guidebook’ for other women who may be suffering from mental health issues.
This is actually my July reading challenge book, which was to borrow something from the library. I read it in virtually one sitting on a train journey to London. For a weighty non-fiction book it’s very readable and the writing is resonant of Evan’s relaxed and articulate presenting style. There were parts where I could almost hear him reading it out. There are many references to the help and support he has had in the acknowledgements, so I’m sure he had plenty of research assistance (how could he not – with Newsnight, The Bottom Line and Dragon’s Den he is a very busy fellow!), but the authorial voice is definitely authentic, and I would bet it isn’t ghost-written, which just makes me love him all the more!
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