4.5 Stars
Readers should be forewarned that this book, which explores the global refugee crisis, will not leave them unaffected.
Amir Utu is a 9-year-old Syrian boy who is the only survivor when an overloaded, unequipped, and dilapidated boat sinks. He washes up on the beach of an unnamed Mediterranean island where he encounters a local girl, 15-year-old Vänna Hermes. In chapters entitled “Before” we learn about Amir’s past and how he came to be on the boat; in alternating chapters entitled “After” we see how Vänna tries to help Amir escape authorities and get to safety.
Like the author’s debut novel, American War, this one asks readers to put themselves in the position of displaced and desperate people. Amir’s family faces disbelief, selfishness, indifference, and callousness wherever they go. They leave Syria because their home was destroyed and stay with Mona, a distant relative in Damascus, though “it was clear that Mona intended theirs to be a short visit, a temporary respite to wherever they were going.” Mona, clearly a Bashar al-Assad supporter, tells Amir’s mother that she must be exaggerating what happened and that the destruction shown on television is “all made up” and tells her “’you really can’t let yourself be so easily fooled.’”
Of course the migrants come under the control of smugglers who are concerned only with money. Migrants are deceived into thinking they will get safe passage on a seaworthy craft, but conditions are horrific. I found the description of the sea passage particularly harrowing; more than once I was reminded of what slave ships must have been like. In fact, some are intended “’for the market.’” Even the migrants become concerned only with their own survival: “somewhere along the journey they’d passed the point where human goodness gave way to the calculus of survival.”
Any refugees who do make it to land do not receive the most compassionate of care: “those who survived the passage were taken to wait while, slowly and with well-honed inefficiency, the system considered their appeals for asylum.” A coast guard officer who finds that migrants were given faulty life jackets blames the migrants: “’These people, they don’t think . . . They don’t plan.’” For the tourism industry and wealthy tourists, migrants are an inconvenience: a wreck on the beach “has ruined the tourists’ day, confining them to the grounds of their hotel. . . . a middle-aged couple argue about whether to demand a refund.” A nationalist politician, questioning why all the migrants have phones and why the women keep asking for contraceptive pills, illustrates an ignorance of the nature of the migrants’ plight.
Many of the migrants hope to make it to the West, but they are warned about what awaits them. One of the smugglers who admits to being a “black-market hustler” says, “’You think the black market is bad? Brother, wait till you see the white market’” because “’when you finally get over there to the promised land, . . . you [will] see how those dignified, civilized Westerners treat you – when you find out what they expect of you is to live your whole life like a dog under their dinner table.’” Amir is told, “’You are the temporary object of their fraudulent outrage, their fraudulent grief. They will march the streets on your behalf, they will write to politicians on your behalf, they will cry on your behalf, but you are to them in the end nothing but a hook on which to hang the best possible image of themselves. Today you are the only boy in the world and tomorrow it will be as though you never existed.’”
It is the children in the book who possess admirable traits. Amir, who has so little, more than once shares food with others. Vänna is empathetic and courageous; she vows that only when she sees Amir to safety will she return home to face the consequences of her actions. Appropriately, her surname is that of the Greek god who served as the messenger of the gods and protector of travellers; she shows how the gods want humans to act. Most of the adults lack empathy and behave cowardly, though of course, “’only a coward survives the absurd.’”
This book has so many strengths; it has realistic, well-developed characters and lots of suspense, as well as a theme which should have everyone thinking. The ending may be unsatisfactory to some, but I found it most appropriate.
Read this book about people who have “shed their belongings and their roots and their safety and their place of purpose and all claim to agency over their own being” and ask yourself what you would do if you were to encounter Amir. Would you act like Vänna or like Dimitri Kethros? We also need to ask ourselves what we have done since seeing the photo of Alan Kurdi in 2015, a photo which this novel certainly brought to mind.
Note: I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.
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