Who deserves to win a major award? A lot of people do, but far from everybody. There’s such a thing as quality, although Black and other writers of colour have lately questioned whether the creative writing school definition of literary quality is rooted in a white male aesthetic. Show Don’t Tell. Is that a buttoned-down mid-20^thcentury cis white male directive? Do other techniques, often rooted in female and traditional story-telling, routinely break it in fertile fashion? Story-telling, after all. Are rules like Show Don’t Tell a way of putting down outsider writing? 

I think there’s some of that going on, and that quality expresses itself in many different ways. Also that we can sense quality when we read it. After that, taste comes into play. Most of us can recognize good work but can amiably disagree on whether we like it, meanwhile enjoying books we know are stinkers. The other night, I was out with some friends, and one woman refused to name the book she was reading to relax because she knew it was awful. 

Which is to say once again: A lot of writers deserve to win major awards, but not everybody. 

However, I’m writing this to congratulate Omar El Akkad on winning the Giller Prize last night because I think his novel is wonderful. I haven’t read all the finalists. I’m sure they’re deserving of notice and approbation as well. But one thing I like about El Akkad’s book, What Strange Paradise, is the way it’s told. It’s a fable.

El Akkad is a former journalist, and he could have gone big with facts and politics to tell his story. Instead, he writes a short book, little more than a novella, focusing on a Syrian boy named Amir who is cast ashore on a Greek island. Amir is a refugee, a passenger on a rickety, overpacked fishing boat that people from many war-torn lands have been tricked into boarding. They thought they were paying to reach Europe on a ferry, but have been off-loaded onto an unseaworthy vessel unable to weather a storm. And of course a storm sinks it.

In the opening chapter, Amir is shown surviving the wreck. He awakens from a stupor amid splayed bodies, and almost immediately has to run off the beach to escape a party of soldiers. Inland he meets a teenaged girl named Vänna who hides him from the soldiers, and especially from the wounded Colonel who commands them. 

The novel is divided into alternating Before and After chapters. One part tells of Amir’s life before he arrives on the island, fleeing Syria for Egypt, haphazardly leaving Egypt as he follows his Quiet Uncle on board the ship of refugees. Quiet Uncle is Amir’s stepfather as well his uncle. His father disappeared before the story begins, and the uncle ends up living with Amir’s mother and providing Amir with a baby brother. When they board the ship, they are leaving both Amir’s mother and his brother behind.

In the After part, Vänna takes Amir on a journey one step ahead of the Colonel, first heading for an overcrowded refugee camp where she hopes the boy can find help. There, a humanitarian bureaucrat tells the girl to get Amir off the island before he’s registered as a refugee. This would condemn him to years in the camp. Instead, the woman tells Vänna to take Amir to the north of the island, where they will find a ferryman at an abandoned lighthouse. The ferryman will take Amir to the mainland. If all goes well, refugees with papers will take the boy in. 

Spoiler alert. I can’t say what I want to about the novel without revealing the ending, so stop here if you don’t want to know. Just take my advice and read it.

I hadn’t finished the book myself when a friend phoned, and we talked about what we were reading. When I mentioned What Strange Paradise, she asked, “Do you think Amir really survived the wreck?” After we hung up, I skipped ahead to the final chapter, a mirror of the first. In it, a small boy lies splayed on a Greek beach, a bell-shaped locket around his neck like the one we have seen Amir wear. In this case, the boy is dead, drowned like everyone else lost in a shipwreck. Is this a different boy? Is El Akkad saying that one child after another will try to find refuge and that many will fail?

Or maybe there’s a clue in the title. Maybe Amir has arrived in a strange paradise, a weird after-life, or a passage to it. He is called upon to journey across a bleak land to find a ferryman who, like Charon in Greek mythology, carries dead souls to the underworld. Along the way, Amir meets helpers like Vänna. The root of the Greek name Vänna—like Giovanna in Italian or Joan in English—is a Hebrew word meaning “God’s gift,” or “God is merciful.”

And, as in Shakespeare, “the quality of mercy is not strained. 

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes…

‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes 

The thronèd monarch better than his crown.

His scepter shows the force of temporal power, 

The attribute to awe and majesty 

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings, 

But mercy is above this sceptered sway.

It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings. 

It is an attribute to God himself. 

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s 

When mercy seasons justice.”

A fable, as I say. Congratulations to Omar El Akkad on his Giller Prize. Very well deserved.