Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > The Last White Man

Moshin Hamid has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (from his four previous novels) most recently for “Exit West” – a novel which examined the issue of migration (and particularly a world which aimed to close borders) both conventionally via the story of a tentative relationship, and very unconventionally via the use of a magic realism device which effectively took supposedly uncontrolled migration to its logical extreme by postulating a series of mysterious Narnia-style doors which open between different parts of the world and which permit (at least temporarily) instant migration, and which from there explored less of a dystopian world than a utopian (or at least optimistic one) as people come to terms with the need to adapt to migration.

The book was a short, easy and enjoyable read but one which prompted reflection on its themes. It was one marked by a distinctive style of writing which was at some times very lyrical and other times almost mundane and with a mix of extremely long paragraph or page style sentences mixed with much shorter sections (although even there the use of “.And” to start sentences gave those sections a similar “run-on” quality when read in one’s head). I described the novel as very reminiscent of the writing of José Saramago, and particularly his “Blindness” - a fable type novel exploring the development of a premise of an alternate world, but also set against a gentle love story. In fact I said it was Saramago but with more punctuation.

This Hamid’s latest novel follows very much in the same lines - in this case examining racism as well effectively as the general mixing of races over time.

In this case the magic realism is introduced immediately - in the first line of the book, which is a very conscious echo of Kafka’s Metamorphosis

“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown”

And from there we have a society where over time, everyone white turns dark, until as per the title there is one man left white (and even that only temporarily).

We experience the story through one couple in a tentative love relationship - Andres (a gym instructor) and Oona, a yoga teacher (both originally white) as well as Ander’s traditional widower father (dying of cancer) and Oona’s conspiracy theorist widowed mother (still mourning her son, Oona’s brother).

The narrative style is for me a natural extrapolation of “Exit West” with far more run-on sentences - in this case with less punctuation and even more like Saramago.

Despite the huge similarities there are two senses in which the book is a reverse of “Exit West”.

The immediate introduction of the fantasy device is I think weaker than its mid-story introduction in “Exit West” as we get little sense of Andre and Oona’s former life or relationship. Instead what we get is a lengthy post script to the scenario, playing out in a society where everyone is brown but concentrating really on Andre and Oona - their relationship and their mourning for their loved ones. The upside of this is that it broadens the scope of the book beyond a didactic parable - as the book becomes a wider exploration of grief and of being truly seen, but the downside is that the book does seem to lose momentum.

And it is also very different to write the book from the viewpoint of white people, rather than the choice of migrants in the previous book, albeit this was a deliberate and effectively anthropological choice by the author based on ”This sense that whiteness itself was worth thinking about from within”.

The novel in its more fable-like element does have some nice initial touches - as Anders reacts violently to his own self (a concept perhaps taken a little too far in an incident in which a gun-toting homeowner confronts and shoots an intruder who is himself).

And another memorable and comic aspect is Andre’s cringy attempts to befriend the already dark cleaner as his previously white-only gym.

Oona’s mother was for me the real highlight of the book.

Already fiercely proud but defensive of her identity and “kind - the only people who could not call themselves a people in this country, and there were not so many of them left”, her conspiracy theories prove initially founded as she had read rumours of some early changers and after that her paranoia about the erasure of her identity (the culmination for her and those she follows of something they had warned about for many years) as well convinced that some form of backlash will come (a rather brilliant cameo has her feeling a little thrill when she hears an explosion that at last “something was happening, something big, maybe the tide was shifting, maybe the last real heroes had come” only to dissolve in tears when she realises it was thunder.

And like Exit West the book is effectively an optimistic one - in this case describing how, at least for some characters, they realise it is possible to embrace memories of their past and their previous identity while also accepting a new and much more inclusive identity.

Overall I thought this was another excellent, easy to read, enjoyable but thought provoking novel.

My thanks to Hamish Hamilon, Penguin Random House for an ARC via NetGalley.