Open Door Prophesy

With his new novel, Exit West, Pakistan-born Mohsin Hamid illustrates once again why he is one of the most important voices of our era. Like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, his best-known work, it's a novel of the zeitgeist. But this is a subtler, and therefore more interesting book.

Its omniscient narrator, the unnamed Islamic country at its centre, and its sometimes technical style-brow-sing Facebook is described as "exploring the terrain of social media"-combine to give the novel an atmosphere of magic realism. Moreover, the story hinges on the unexplained appearance of portals that allow citizens of poor and war-torn countries to travel instantly to London or San Francisco or the Greek island of Mykonos. While the allusion to globalisation and the ongoing real-world refugee crisis initially seem overly obvious, the strength of Hamid's characters, his compelling turn of phrase and his keen sense of metaphor keep it from sinking to the level of an episode of Black Mirror.

In the recurring trope of the burqa worn by Nadia, one of the protagonists, for instance, Hamid investigates the identities and masks of conservative Islam and the citizens living under its sway. An atheist, or at least someone who sees no reason to pray, Nadia wears her black robe to discourage unwanted attention from lecherous men, uses a spare one to smuggle her lover, Saeed, into her apartment, and later continues to wear it to send "a signal" about her identity to the nativists of London after the couple join a refugee colony there. Hamid invests Saeed's devout praying with similar nuance, punning cleverly that he "prayed even more, several times a day, and he prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and what would go and could be loved in no other way".

A meditation on exile and migration and inequality and prejudice-"when we migrate, we murder... those we leave behind", the author observes-this is a high-wire act of high art. And Hamid never puts a foot wrong.

The Impostor

I'm reading Paulo Coelho," has long been a celebrity Q+A set piece, signalling literacy-and-depth for everyone from Bollywood beefcakes to Bill Clinton and Malala Yousafzai. Meanwhile, the Alchemist himself, having single-handedly reduced a rainforest the size of Belgium to pulp-350 million copies of his books have been sold-has now gurgled out yet another double-spaced novella, The Spy, framed as a correspondence between the doomed European courtesan Mata Hari and her lawyer.

Accused of being a German spy, Margaretha van Zelle aka Mata Hari was executed by a French firing squad 100 years ago this October. Coelho's offering could therefore be read as a touching homage to a tragic figure whom he has described as "one of our first feminists", but sadly, it's a dull work, a lugubrious ramble through an outline of Mata Hari's life, interspersed with some trademark Coelhicisms on being true to yourself, etc.: "Pianos should never go out of tune. The true sin is something different than what we've been taught; the true sin is living so far removed from absolute harmony." Plink.

For those of you who may be fascinated by the many strands of eroticism, orientalism, dance, drama and death coiled around the true fable of Mata Hari, this book will be a disappointment. It has little to add to the work of the legion of biographers, archivists, film-makers and bloggers-let alone all the hoochie coochie dancers and pornographers-who have celebrated Margaretha van Zelle's legacy over the years..

Coelho has his own global legion of admirers of course (his novel Veronika Decides to Die even inspired a Pakistani B movie, Love Mein Ghum), so go figure. For haters like me, The Spy is just a dull impersonator's book about another much more fascinating impersonator. Margaretha passed herself off as a Javanese Hindu princess, but Coelho, on the evidence of his staggering self-description as someone who "has flirted with death, escaped madness, dallied with drugs, withstood torture, experimented with magic" blablabla, may be the more accomplished self-fabulist. He's certainly earned his place in the library of wisdom kitsch, along with Patience Strong, Khalil Gibran and that Jonathan Livingstone Seagull fellow. Mata Hari may have been pretty hokey herself but she deserves better. Still, what do I know? Chances are she would have loved Coelho too. She was a celebrity after all.

-Jabir