What Strange Paradise

By Omar El Akkad

Penguin Random House/July 2021

Reviewed by John Delacourt

December 5, 2021

Omar El Akkad’s novel What Strange Paradise begins with an image, one that many Canadian readers will immediately recognize for its tragic power:

“The child lies on the shore. All around him the beach is littered with the wreckage of the boat and the wreckage of its passengers: shards of decking, knapsacks cleaved and gutted, bodies frozen in unnatural contortion. Dispossessed of nightfall’s temporary burial, the dead ferment indecency. There’s too much of the spring in the day, too much light.

Facedown, with his arms outstretched, the child appears from a distance as though playing at flight. And so too in the bodies that surround him, though distended with seawater and hardening, there flicker the remnants of some silent levitation, a severance from the laws of being.”

For those of us who, in the summer of 2015, saw the photo of the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi on a Turkish beach, the struggle of thousands of Syrians seeking a new life by any means necessary suddenly and viscerally struck home.

El Akkad has other interests than to evoke such transitory political ramifications, however. In a meta-fictional encapsulation of the novelist’s craft, he shocks us out of our mediated remembering, just a few paragraphs later with two simple, but sharply vivid sentences:

“A wave brushes gently against the child’s hair. He opens his eyes.”

El Akkad breathes life into the child on the shore, gives him another name: Amir. And he gives the boy a story that oscillates, in alternating chapters, between the time frame of Amir’s journey from Alexandria on an old ruin of a fishing boat to the period of his arrival into a world of notional refuge on a Greek island. It is in these chapters where he meets Vanna, a young girl whose parents have sought their own, very different kind of refuge from their former lives in the Nordic, economically stable part of Europe – made suddenly less than stable in the wake of the global financial crash of 2008.

El Akkad has said that the story of Vanna’s efforts to bring her secret friend Amir to safety and elude the incarceration of the migrant camp on the island was loosely inspired by J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. But what he has distilled from the rich complexity of that children’s story is a central theme of innocence seeking escape – flying in its broadest sense – from the world of experience. The theme resonates so strongly in both time frames, for we soon discover that Vanna’s parents, with their floundering hopes for keeping their guest house going, are in their own purgatory with nowhere to escape to. And in the chapters titled simply “Before,” the innocents are the migrants who pass through to experience on their journey from Africa to Europe.

Strong thematic foundations aside, the quality of the writing, from line to line, largely remains at that pitch of those opening paragraphs that introduce Amir. There are just a few authorial tics that could have benefited from one more pass of an editor up to this work’s standard. The characters on the boat with Amir do a lot of “rummaging” through belongings, and it brought to mind Zadie Smith’s well-turned line: “to rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence.” Such missteps are rare, though.

Yet as precise and richly visual as much of El Akkad’s omniscient third person is, it is with his dialogue that the author reveals his former war zone reporter’s ear for character and counterpoint. The voices of Walid and Mohamed, the men who pilot the creaking wreck of a fishing boat with its freight of migrants, have all the dark eloquence of those who have trawled the liminal and exploited the desperation of those who have literally lost their place in the world.

Mohamed at one point speaks to Maher, a passenger whom he predicts “won’t make it” because he brought books with him. “You carry books around. You’ve got a storybook idea about how it’ll end up, you’ve got a storybook view of the world.” When Maher counters that books are “good for the soul … books will wean you off cruelty.” Mohamed asks “And what will you be left with then?”

As precise and richly visual as much of El Akkad’s omniscient third person is, it is with his dialogue that the author reveals his former war zone reporter’s ear for character and counterpoint.

His realism has been scorched by his transactions in refuge, and the commodification of migrants that reduces them to “fuel.” In one violent moment, he calls his passengers “sad, stupid people … The West you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale, a fantasy you sell yourself because the alternative is to admit that you’re the least important character in your own story.” To him their hope and optimism for a new life is defined by a “simplistic morality,” drawing a neat line between some fictional conception of good and bad people. The people of the West draw a different line with the other: “the two kinds of people aren’t good or bad – they’re engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be engines and you will always, always be fuel.”

What Strange Paradise won this year’s Giller Prize, which should not be surprising. There is no tastefully non-descript writing in What Strange Paradise. There is such a deep sense of engagement with the characters that any authorial anxiety of self-presentation is nonexistent. This is fiction written from a world view that, as El Akkad has described it, is defined by absence of place, perceived “through the lens of movement.” As he has said, “the places in which I set my fiction are Frankensteins – hybrids of the many countries and cultures that shaped my view of the world. My fiction is a migrant.”

The most remarkable thing about that absence of place, that ‘lens of movement’ from which El Akkad writes, is that it is so captivating, so uniquely a voice and point of view, and so truly – if fatefully – contemporary. And paradoxically enough, despite a sketchy claim to provenance, there may be something essentially Canadian about that lens of movement too, transcending any provincial notion of CanLit we may be stubbornly attempting to preserve or celebrate.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt not only reads but writes fiction, including the novels Ocular Proof, Black Irises and Butterfly. He is Vice President and Group Leader of Hill + Knowlton public affairs practice in Ottawa.