What Strange Paradise

Career journalist El Akkad burst onto the literary scene with 2017’s American War, a work of near-future political dystopia told from the vantage of a second American civil war. This follow-up mines its material from a more immediate international bent, tracing the before and after, in bifurcated structure, of a Mediterranean migrant crossing from the perspective of a young Middle Eastern boy, Amir. In most ways, this second effort is a better fit for the author. His reportage background—so clinically used in his first effort—is more affectingly applied to the present-day ethnography here, creating a twofold tension-filled narrative of a boy’s dangerous sea crossing and his subsequent ally-aided flight toward “freedom.” At the novel’s best, El Akkad uses this charged setup to interrogate Western-exceptionalist notions of globalist philosophy: At one point, a character casually announces, “The two kinds of people in this world aren’t good and bad—they’re engine and fuel.” This intellectual potency doesn’t always abide, as the author’s would-be exploration of a Middle East diaspora regrettably falls prey to more rote character arcs, the good and bad guys all too easily explicated.