The Last White Man

LoveReading Says

With an opening scene reminiscent of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man is consummately compelling from its arresting first line: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown”.

Though Anders initially only discloses this to Oona, his long-time friend and new lover, it soon emerges that Anders is not the only person to have undergone this metamorphosis, though his boss still reacts with a revealingly blunt one-liner: “I would have killed myself.”

As “it seemed people were continuing to change, white people becoming dark”, there’s growing unrest. People stockpile food and riot as “pale-skinned militants, some dressed almost like soldiers” take to the streets. Meanwhile, Anders’ darkness disturbs his dying father, but he comes to realise, bittersweetly, that “whatever Anders was, whatever his skin was, he was still his father’s son, and still his mother’s son.”

The writing is exquisite - muscular, and supremely paced as it undulates between intensity and characters’ reflecting on who they are, and who and what matters to them. It’s about seeing, accepting and living together as one, with Oona’s transformation revealing much of the novel’s prescient roots. Though her change leaves her melancholic and in a state of mourning for part of herself, she also realises that she’d long been harbouring a desire to escape, to shed her skin, and now she can “abandon the confinement of the past” and grow, “unfettered.” It’s also noted how the population comes to being “better able to tell one dark person from another.”

Ending on a note of hope, The Last White Man casts a timely, empathetic, powerfully thought-provoking spell.

Joanne Owen

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