In The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel, the protagonist, Anders, wakes up to discover that he has changed race. He looks in the mirror to see not the familiar white face, but “the dark man who had been Anders”. Drawing on literary models from Kafka’s Metamorphosis to José Saramago’s Blindness, Hamid doesn’t seek to explain why this dramatic transformation takes place, but rather to explore the impact that it has on the people of the unnamed American town in which Anders lives. For although he is one of the first to undergo the transformation, the novel is true to its title and eventually there is just one white man left, and then there are none.
Hamid’s last novel, the Booker-shortlisted Exit West, was an extraordinary and perspective-altering allegory on the experience of refugees. In that book, mysterious “doorways” conveyed refugees from one country to another – a sci-fi trope that spoke to the randomness and lack of agency at the heart of the migrant experience. The conceit in The Last White Man works in a similar fashion, forcing us to examine the way that race conditions our reaction to others, and our conception of ourselves.
