Story Structure in Omar el Akkad's What Strange Paradise

Reading like a writer, one of the things I appreciated most in el Akkad’s novel was its storyline, an interweaving of plot that unfolds in two times/spaces: Before and After. Before takes place mostly on the migrant boat Calypso, adrift on the Mediterranean Sea. After is a Greek island, with its uncomfortable mix of locals and tourists. The story moves back and forth from one to other, charging toward the moment in between.

The tension that burns in this book is cooking in both the Before and the After plot lines. They each feature a vulnerable main character who is in jeopardy and struggling for his life and freedom. As often happens in the real world, random bad luck has put Amir’s story in motion. He follows his stepfather, Quiet Uncle, to a market and is lured onto a migrant ship with the promise of a sightseeing tour. In fact, the ship is packed with illegal refugees heading toward Europe.

When Quiet Uncle discovers that Amir has boarded the boat, he pleads with the ship’s handlers to send the 8 year-old back to Alexandria.

“What difference does it make to you? He got on by accident.”

“Nobody got on by accident,” the man said. “We’re happy to pay his fare if you can’t, but then he’s not yours anymore. He’s ours, and we have a right to recoup our costs.”

So Quiet Uncle pays for a place for Amir on the upper deck using the remains of his cache of money.

El Akkad ratchets up the tension gradually but inexorably in both the Before and After storylines. We know, because After precedes Before in the book, that the ship capsizes and spreads its human cargo along the beach of a vacationer’s paradise. That only spurs on us further to find out just what happened.

I noticed that little events were all that was needed for readers to reach the grand and weighty ideas about justice, truth, morality. When the stakes are life and death, it is better to ground your scenes in the mundane and the trivial—peoples’ petty disputes and habits and comforts—or it will all feel too much.

What Strange Paradise was excruciating but never too much. In the After, the tension is just as high. Will Amir escape, or be caught? Here the conflict is not brought by confrontation with Nature (the mighty Sea) but so-called Civilization—sharpened to a lethal weapon in the hands of Colonel Kethros. Kethros will stop at nothing to catch the two children, for Amir has a local host and would-be saviour, Vanna.

In Colonel Kethros’ quest, he visits the director of a refugee camp to probe her for information about the missing children. Madame el Ward is in fact secretly helping Vanna to help Amir escape. She tells Kethros she’s too busy to be bothered by his missing kid; she’s managing a population of traumatized survivors, without proper support, and plenty of bureaucratic hurdles.

“We have children who can’t sleep though the night, we have people who don’t talk anymore, who try to slit their wrists with canned-food lids. This place is hell.”

“Hell? Really?”

Kethros shares a memory with her, from his days as a peacekeeper. The soldiers he worked with took bribes from their captives which increased with “inflation” once there was disparity and some people who could pay more than others. The lesson Kethros wants the director to take from his tale is that “inflation” has happened at her refugee camp too.

“…Now the going rate for suffering is higher. Now everyone has to claim they’ve been raped, tortured, their whole family wiped out, down to the pet dogs and the goldfish. Pretty soon they’ll be claiming they’re already dead….”

Colonel Kethros’ ugly logic—a kind of capitalist calculation, the “inflation” of suffering—of course assumes that it is only refugees playing this game of one-up-manship. They are the ones who need to impress with their suffering, they must use it, they must embellish, even lie, to try to cash in that suffering for freedom. To exit the Before and be granted an After.

Before/After turns out to be not just a structure for the novel’s story, but also its theme, as the title of the novel suggests. What is this, that comes after life? Paradise? Death? A second chance, or a dead end? What is the After in relation to the Before, and how much of what it is relies on what we presume it will be? At the limit, at the divide, what gets us from one thing to the other. Perhaps a fantasy, a preconceived idea. Perhaps it is (in)justice. Or else just physics and biology, an accident of Nature?