They bicker about politics, about justice, about what they can expect to find if they manage to gain sanctuary. The migrants aboard the fishing boat are a polyglot lot. El Akkad’s vignettes of life at sea are especially textured. Much of the book takes place in between Europe and the Middle East. “After” chapters alternate with those focusing on Amir’s pre-Europe life “Before”. Their adventures are told in precise, keenly observed prose. 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. Vänna wants to help the boy and this makes her a borderline criminal. Here are two youths, speaking different languages, who improvise a rough and ready camaraderie. Though dark, even pitch-black, What Strange Paradise is also a deeply humanistic fable. She’s the daughter of expats whose dreams of setting up a guesthouse ran aground during the financial crisis in the 2000s. There he finds an adolescent girl, Vänna.
Lazarus-like, he gets up and runs towards a thicket. His body is washed up and he’s assumed to be dead. Amir’s boat, steered by two Ethiopians who have never been off dry land before, runs aground on a Greek island shore. 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. Especially when there are so many other people – poor, dark-skinned, desperate – hellbent on making the same journey. 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. 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. “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. “Y allah, 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.
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