By Kim McCullough
Content warning: images of dead migrants (including children)
It’s clear from the opening pages of Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise that nine-year-old Amir is the only survivor of a shipwrecked boat of migrants. In the pivotal moment where Amir opens his eyes on the beach of a posh resort, his story begins with the “before” of Amir’s arrival and the “after” laid out in alternating chapters. The living boy is spotted by officers, and he flees into the forest. The search, led with a dogged single-mindedness by Colonel Kethros, has begun.
Amir is discovered, filthy and exhausted, by Vänna, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed teenager who is trying hard to retreat from the disappointments in her own family life. Vänna decides to help Amir, finding him shelter, food, and clothing. She takes him to the refugee camp run by a kind woman who directs them on another journey. All the while, their nemesis Colonel Kethros is catching up.
As El Akkad flips between timelines, he pins the reader between an aching sadness over the desperate voyage Amir left behind and a frantic hope that he and Vänna will prevail in their flight and escape the reach of the colonel and his soldiers.
El Akkad’s antagonists are nearly archetypal in their cruelty and dismissiveness, but he adds imaginative and delicate elements that encompass the frailty of the broken, weak, and angry characters. In a few deft scenes, El Akkad humanizes even Colonel Kelcher.
The “before” sections take place mostly on the boat with refugees from many different nations, and inevitable clashes arise. El Akkad chooses his conflicts carefully and writes them with such compassion that it’s hard to villainize any of the migrants. They are everyday people in an untenable situation. In the “after” sections, Amir and Vänna’s fleeting encounters with the tourists at the resort hold a mirror to the migrants. Rich vacationers living a sun-soaked life of ease where waves of dead bodies landing on the beach are an inconvenient interruption to their languid eating, swimming, and sunbathing. El-Akkad’s sharp-eyed details highlight western privilege and self-centredness in a way that is both recognizable and uncomfortable.
A melancholic thread pulled through the book is one of mothers and motherhood. Amir wears a picture of his mother in a locket around his neck, and he longs for her. On the boat, a pregnant woman who champions Amir has pinned her hopes on a bright future for her own unborn child. Vänna mothers Amir from the moment they meet, while her own mother, who appears early in the book, exemplifies all a mother shouldn’t be. Other maternal figures come and go, a beat that pulses under this story of a boy far from home.
In a time when it often seems the world lacks compassion, What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad refines a global discussion into an urgent, contemporary tale of a young, reluctant refugee. The book’s strong characters, clear timeline, propulsive scenes lead to a stunning conclusion that won’t, and shouldn’t be, soon forgotten.
Thank you, Penguin Random House, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!