“Yallah, yallah!” The words are Arabic: “Let’s go!” According to the narrator of Cairo-born, Doha-raised Omar El Akkad’s second novel What Strange Paradise, their very sound conveys restlessness and movement. They can be grasped universally. “Following its phrases for greeting and introduction,” he claims, “every culture’s first linguistic export should be the directive Let’s go.” That’s what eight-year-old Amir Utu does. Like so many of his fellow Syrians, he escapes his benighted homeland, decamping from Homs to Damascus, down through Jordan, across to Alexandria in Egypt. Then, late one evening, he sneakily follows his uncle on board a rickety boat and joins hundreds of wretched strangers trying to cross the Mediterranean.
Let’s go. It’s easier to say than to do. Especially when there are so many other people – poor, dark-skinned, desperate – hellbent on making the same journey. One of them, surely in El Akkad’s mind, was three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi, a photograph of whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach made news headlines across the world in 2015. Amir’s boat, steered by two Ethiopians who have never been off dry land before, runs aground on a Greek island shore. His body is washed up and he’s assumed to be dead. Lazarus-like, he gets up and runs towards a thicket. There he finds an adolescent girl, Vänna. She’s the daughter of expats whose dreams of setting up a guesthouse ran aground during the financial crisis in the 2000s.
Though dark, even pitch-black, What Strange Paradise is also a deeply humanistic fable. Here are two youths, speaking different languages, who improvise a rough and ready camaraderie. Vänna wants to help the boy and this makes her a borderline criminal. Alienated and adrift, one step ahead of police officers who are tracking them, they are reliant on the kindness or indifference of strangers for food. Their adventures are told in precise, keenly observed prose. “After” chapters alternate with those focusing on Amir’s pre-Europe life “Before”.
Much of the book takes place in between Europe and the Middle East. El Akkad’s vignettes of life at sea are especially textured. The migrants aboard the fishing boat are a polyglot lot. They bicker about politics, about justice, about what they can expect to find if they manage to gain sanctuary. Some cleave to their religious identities; others, notably women who transform their hijabs into scarves, shed them. They snore and they snigger, rehearse backstories they intend to tell immigration officials, belly dance and sing along to a tinny banger by singer Amr Diab that someone plays on a mobile phone. Through fog and mist, storms and blazing sun, they perform acts of small kindness – and dog-eat-dog selfishness.
Performance is itself one of the novel’s key motifs. Would-be migrants are forced to self-fashion and fabulate, to pretend to be individuals they’re not. Nationalist politicians huff and puff like pantomime baddies. Almost everyone seems in denial about the scale of the problem, or thinks it can be tackled without also addressing age-old environmental and economic faultlines. Even the shipwreck that begins the novel is turned into a managed spectacle, as police officers try to shield locals from the horror. “In this way the destruction takes on an air of queer unreality, a stage play bled of movement, a fairy tale upturned.”
It is left to Mohamed, an apprentice people-smuggler, to tell his customer-passengers what they don’t want to hear. Accused of being no better than a black-market hustler, he replies: “Wait until you see how those dignified, civilised Westerners treat you … You think the black market is bad? Brother, wait till you see the white market.” There are times when What Strange Paradise resembles the bleakest existential ledger. “The two kinds of people in this world aren’t good and bad – they’re engines and fuel,” declares Mohamed. “Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent … you will always, always be fuel.”
In scenes like this, El Akkad, an award-winning reporter who has covered the Arab spring and military trials in Guantánamo Bay, and whose debut fiction, 2017’s speculative American War, dealt with the climate emergency, gives the impression of wanting to write a rather different novel, one whose narrative arc isn’t so closely pegged to such young and psychologically elusive protagonists. Another important character, a one-legged colonel who doggedly pursues Amir, is rather undercooked.
For all that, there are many passages in What Strange Paradise that startle and are hard to forget. Vänna recalling local children running through fields of flowers, the sound of their hardened petals exploding to disperse seeds “like firecrackers going off”. The girl’s quiet reverie as she gazes at the cracks and blemishes of her parents’ home, its slow erosion a premonition of other things that fall apart – cities, coastlines, weather systems, whole societies. This is truly a timely, unconsoling book.
• What Strange Paradise is published by Picador (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
