As recently as 2015, Britain boasted of being China’s “best partner in the west.” It had become a founding member of Beijing’s controversial Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, against American opposition. While still a member of the European Union, its diplomats pushed for the EU to agree to a formal trade-and-investment deal with China. And Xi Jinping had even been honored with a lavish state visit to London. For Britain, the future was unmistakably Chinese.

From 2020 onward, however, Britain transformed itself from China’s best partner in Europe to its harshest critic, sweeping away decades of foreign-policy consensus in the most drastic such shift in the Western world. Britain became the first European power to formally block Huawei from its 5G telecoms network, led the global condemnation of Beijing’s barbaric treatment of its Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, revoked the U.K. broadcasting license of China’s state-controlled CGTN, and offered a route to British citizenship for millions of people in Hong Kong who want to flee Beijing’s political repression.

The reasons for this turn were many: Brexit meant that Britain, having cut ties with its closest economic partner, the EU, could not afford to risk its relationship with its closest security ally, the United States, as well. The pandemic then entrenched public concern about Western reliance on China. And perhaps most important of all was Donald Trump. Even as he imposed steel tariffs on allies and belittled their leaders, the American president demanded that they stand with the United States against China.

Whereas Britain’s future had once seemed Chinese, it was back to being American. But in recent months, something strange started happening: London began softening its stance toward China again. Outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson this year approved a reopening of trade talks with China, and his government approved the sale of a microchip manufacturer to a Chinese company (though this is now in doubt).

Britain’s diplomatic back-and-forth in recent years has offered among the most extreme examples of how states are dealing with the wider geopolitical upheaval that has been taking place in response to China’s rise, a problem that no one yet seems to know the answer to. In Washington, a bipartisan consensus has formed around the notion that “engagement” with Beijing has failed, and that China is the only great rival to American supremacy in the 21st century. For continental Europe, Beijing is less an adversary than a risk to be accommodated, managed, and recognized, and the growth of its power an opportunity to carve out more “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. For Britain, trapped between the U.S. and Europe, it is a mixture of all of these things.

[Read: What returning to China taught me about China]

To understand what was going on, I spoke with more than a dozen senior government officials, diplomats, foreign-policy analysts, and lawmakers across the U.S., Britain, and Europe. (Many spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive government deliberations.) From these conversations a picture emerged of Britain clinging tightly to the new U.S. consensus, partly through judgment of its best interests and partly because of American pressure, while seeking to ensure its economic priorities with China are kept alive as much as possible as it faces up to the reality of the 21st century. Britain’s example shows how the widening standoff between Washington and Beijing will transform midsize powers that seek to avoid being drawn into a new cold war—and, more important, how the U.S. will not easily be able to maintain its grip on the world order that it created.

For decades, Britain followed a fairly consistent line in its policy toward Beijing, trying to balance security concerns against economic opportunities but typically erring on the side of engagement.

As early as 2003, Britain’s main telecommunications company approached Tony Blair’s government to seek permission to work with what was then a little-known Chinese company, Huawei, to upgrade the U.K.’s network. The partnership was waved through by officials who were more concerned with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, and Russia than some harmless Chinese firm.

By 2008, however, British intelligence agencies were warning that the Chinese state could use Huawei to gain access to Britain’s telecoms network. Soon after, the government—then led by Gordon Brown—established a watchdog to monitor Huawei, creating a first-of-its-kind arrangement involving a group of security-cleared former British officials and experts who would keep an eye on Huawei from inside the company on behalf of Britain. In effect, Britain had become sufficiently concerned about China spying on it that it demanded a special unit be created within Huawei to spy on the Chinese, but was insufficiently concerned to cancel Huawei contracts.

This was the environment in which David Cameron took over as prime minister in 2010—one in which cautious partnership with China had yielded concrete benefits for the U.K., but with hard-to-gauge costs. Over his six years in charge, Cameron would expand the relationship in an attempt to upgrade Britain’s infrastructure and open new markets for its financial-services industry. In 2014, London became one of the first international clearing centers for Chinese currency, before racing ahead of its competitors to become the major offshore center for renminbi trading. The following year, Cameron welcomed Xi to London for a state visit during which the British leader declared the beginning of a “golden era” in relations.

This was no one-off, but the culmination of a British strategy stretching back to at least the turn of the century. Britain was using its membership in the EU to turn itself into China’s financial gateway to the continent. Then came Brexit.

Following the referendum, Cameron was replaced by Theresa May, a more security-conscious China hawk who had spent the previous six years in the Home Office and was responsible for the domestic-intelligence agency MI5. In one of her first acts, she paused a decision on the construction of a British nuclear plant that was to receive Chinese investment. Then, in early 2018, on a three-day trip to China, May refused to sign off on a deal in which Britain would offer formal support for Xi’s infrastructure-building (and influence-generating) Belt and Road Initiative.

Once again, economic interests squashed political concerns. May’s early caution over China gave way to the same pressures that had pushed Cameron, Brown, and Blair: In April 2019, news leaked that May was preparing to give the go-ahead for Huawei’s involvement in building the country’s 5G network. By then, she had put aside her concerns about Chinese involvement in Britain’s nuclear industry as well. And then, once again, Brexit intervened.

May was replaced by Johnson, a far more liberal figure when it came to security and China. Immediately, Johnson slipped back into the old British policy, announcing that despite furious opposition from the U.S., the U.K. would allow Huawei to play a part in Britain’s 5G rollout. It was, in essence, a continuation of the Mayite policy—which itself was little more than a continuation of the cautious engagement that had been in place for decades.

[David Frum: Why Biden is right to end ambiguity on China]

The morning after Johnson’s Huawei decision, however, a Chinese student in Britain rang an emergency health line complaining that he and his mother visiting from Hubei felt unwell. At 7:50 p.m. that night, two paramedics dressed in hazmat suits arrived at the hotel where they were staying to take them to hospital. They would be the first people in Britain to test positive for the coronavirus. More than 200,000 people would ultimately die of COVID-19 in Britain. China’s role as nation zero, and its initial attempts to suppress news of the outbreak, would spark denunciations across the democratic world and demands for retaliation.

Even before the pandemic, opinion in the U.S. had shifted sharply against China, thanks in large part to the ferocity—and centrality—of Trump’s attacks on the country. This discord was almost inevitable anyway, given the great-power competition between the pair, but Trump played his part in speeding this process up and giving it political fire.

By May 2020, the U.S. had increased pressure on Britain and other European allies by unveiling sanctions on Huawei that, in effect, stopped it from being able to use American technology, a move that meant the British security services could no longer guarantee Huawei’s safety, because the company would soon be using non-Western technology that the British did not fully understand. This, in fact, was the very reason the U.S. had imposed its sanctions, and they served as a hammer blow to Britain’s strategy of careful engagement with China. In July 2020, Johnson’s government became the first in Europe to announce that Huawei would be banned from Britain’s 5G network. Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador in London, said Britain’s decision on Huawei, as well as the U.K.’s policies toward Xinjiang and Hong Kong, had “poisoned the atmosphere” between the two countries and Britain would “pay the price.” The Chinese state media threatened “retaliatory responses.”

In the end, London’s long-held strategy thus collapsed not through its own proactive choice but because of choices being made elsewhere. British foreign policy was forced to adapt to a world it did not want, and had tried to avoid.

When I put this to British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, she rejected (albeit somewhat unconvincingly) the idea that Britain had, effectively, been made to change its China policy.

Truss, the favorite to replace Johnson as prime minister, told me that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had brought together countries against Russia, some of which might not be liberal or democratic but that nevertheless did not want to see “a world where might is right.”

In reply, I suggested that, in part, might is right. After all, we live in an American world, where the U.S. uses its power to set the rules. “I don’t agree with that,” Truss replied. “We don’t live in an American world. We live in a world where there is a coalition of nations who … subscribe to the values of freedom and democracy.”

I cited the example of China. As late as 2019, Britain was trying to push ahead with the Huawei 5G deal. “We changed because the Americans changed,” I said.

“That was not the reason we changed,” she responded.

I pushed back. “The Americans changed the rules of the game, and we didn’t have the ability to guarantee the security” of the telecoms network.

Again, she was insistent. “That was not the reason we changed. We changed because it was the right thing to do. I was in the government when the policy changed, and we changed because it was the right thing to do.”

[Read: How China wants to replace the U.S. order]

I pointed out that the same government, made up of the same people, had made a different decision earlier in the same year about what was right before changing its mind.

“Well, that is true,” Truss replied. “Every government, Tom, has its internal discussions and I can’t reveal the internal discussions that took place on both occasions. However, we did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Whatever your conclusion, to look at British foreign policy now is to see almost a complete overlap with the U.S., whether on the Iranian nuclear deal, climate change, the importance of spending more on defense, NATO, the threat posed by Russia, or—now—China. One of the lessons of the Huawei policy shift, and Britain’s shift more broadly, is that the U.S. can still force its allies into line if it is prepared to take its gloves off.

But under the surface, things are not quite so simple.

There are signs that, actually, Britain’s old policy is once again being quietly rebuilt. Amid intense U.S. pressure, including threats to curtail transatlantic intelligence sharing, Britain changed tack, falling into line. Yet since then, Britain has drifted back toward its position of cautiously opening up to China as far as it feels is safe—in part spurred by a frustration with Washington.

In February, it emerged that Johnson had given the green light to reopen trade talks with China that had been paused for years. Then it was revealed that the U.K. government had apparently approved the sale of a British microchip factory to a Chinese-owned firm, only for that decision to be kicked into the long grass. On each occasion, the announcements sparked a backlash among China skeptics in London. May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy, who had pushed for stricter controls on any economic opening to China, reacted with resigned alarm. “It seems we will never learn,” he wrote. Tough policies over Xinjiang and Hong Kong remain in place, but the recent reports point to a softening of the hardest edges of Britain’s China policy. The reasons indicate the limits of Washington’s leadership in its confrontation with Beijing.

Today, some within the British government share a sense that Brexit and Johnson’s previous, seemingly warm relationship with Trump continue to be held against the U.K. by some in the Biden administration. Despite Britain’s being the most hawkish European ally on Russia and China, spending more than 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and supporting U.S. efforts on curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.K. believes it is treated as just another ally, criticized for its push to renegotiate its Brexit deal with the EU and ignored in its ambition to strike a free-trade deal with Washington. If this is the case, some in London wonder, why not be more independent where Britain’s core national interests are concerned?

In one sense, what does Britain have to lose from exploring deeper economic ties with China? The Biden administration has made clear there will be no trade deal with the U.S. anytime soon and, besides, the EU continues to pursue its own policy of engagement with China, despite continuing Chinese economic support for Russia during Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The rationale that long drove British policy is reasserting itself: The size and wealth of China means Britain simply cannot afford not to engage. With Britain outside the EU, economic growth sluggish, debt high, and few other obvious alternatives to increase trade, will any future prime minister really be able to ignore what China has to offer?

[Michael Schuman: What Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip says about China]

Britain’s apparent return to a more open China policy is a reminder of the difficulty Washington is going to have constructing and leading any kind of alliance—democratic or otherwise—to contain Beijing. Though it can use a policy of maximum pressure to force some countries into line, as it did with Britain over 5G—effectively removing London’s ability to sustain an independent policy—such a stance can go only so far. The U.S. remains powerful enough that its sticks can and do work, but without any carrots at all, this strategy will have limits.

Perhaps the main lesson of Britain’s experience with China is that core national interests are likely to reassert themselves in the long term, no matter which party, prime minister, chancellor, or president is in power in Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere. In London, Johnson has pursued a policy that would have been familiar to any of the previous four British prime ministers this century, Labour and Conservative among them. The same is true of the EU. Such is the depth of economic entanglement with China today that it will take far more than talk of “democratic alliances” and threats to the rules-based order for Brussels, Berlin, Paris—and London—to seriously change course.

What does that mean for the U.S.? If it wants to construct a coalition behind its attempt to contain China, it will need to be prepared to threaten and cajole, yes, but also bribe far more effectively than it has until now. No longer is America the only dog in the pound, even if it still has the biggest bark.

A man wakes to find himself transformed. He looks around, seeking his bearings as he tries to come to terms with what has happened to him overnight, perhaps after uneasy dreams. He looks at his hand, which he knows like … well, like the back of his hand. It is unfamiliar, the hand of another. He seeks out his reflection. The man who looks back at him is a stranger.

These are the opening beats of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, The Last White Man: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” These are also the opening beats—albeit about a black man who wakes up white—of A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2015), the epigraph of which cites Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” to make the debt explicit. It’s also the premise of a chapter of Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) about a black woman who wakes up white, which, per its title, “Jekyll in Hyde Park,” alludes to Robert Louis Stevenson’s scene from 1886: “The hand of Henry Jekyll … large, firm, white, and comely” appears “in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bed-clothes … lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair.” Perhaps Hamid is hoping to make good on a saying from his first novel, Moth Smoke (2000): “Tales with unoriginal beginnings are those most likely later to surprise.”

Like the hero of Herman Raucher’s novelization of Watermelon Man (1970), Anders’s first impulse is to mistake himself for a dark-skinned home intruder. Like the hero of Harry Stephen Keeler’s The Man Who Changed His Skin (1959), Anders soon realizes this isn’t just a tan, either: “He looked like another person, not just another person, but a different kind of person, utterly different.” Like the hero of Mortimer Weisinger’s pulp story, “Pigments Is Pigments” (1935), Anders reacts with shock at his darkening, then falls into a “murderous rage.” As with the more scientifically minded versions of this plot, like Jess Row’s Your Face in Mine (2014) and Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow (2019), we’ll soon find out whether the transformation is explicable or reversible. We’ll discover whether it afflicts just Anders or spreads to others like a fad, as in George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), or like a plague, as in Junot Díaz’s story “Monstro” (2012).

Even if you’re unfamiliar with this tradition of stories about race transformation, you’ll suspect what’s coming. Distinguishing between those born dark and the newly transformed will become fraught. Violence will erupt. Some will come to believe that a genocidal conspiracy is to blame; some will kill themselves; some will kill others. “Militants” will take over, emitting fear and hate like a musk. Love will blossom. Heightened scenes of interracial sex and awkward perusals of genitals will follow. In the end, skin color will be shown to be meaningless for identity, a mere construct. Yet it will prove almost atavistically fascinating as an aesthetic surface and a conductor of feeling.

Tone above all distinguishes Hamid from these precursors. Whereas most of these writers bend race transformation toward satire, offering us topsy-turvy and hysterical tales, Hamid is deeply earnest about his conceit. The novel is that wan 21st-century banality, a “meditation,” and it meditates on how losing whiteness is going to make white people feel. Mostly sad, as it turns out.

Anders is haunted by his entrance into double consciousness, which W. E. B. Du Bois famously first described in The Atlantic as being divided between your sense of yourself and your sense of how others perceive you. Anders obsesses over how white people will treat him now that they have no way “to know he was white,” and seems to sense their “contempt and fascination.” As for his new kind, “all these dark people around, more dark people than white people … made Anders uneasy, even though he was dark too.” He feels he’s been recast as a supporting character in his life; he feels “triply imprisoned, in his skin, in this house, in this town.” He dons a hoodie and sunglasses to hide himself from strangers and family.

[From the August 1897 issue: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Strivings of the Negro People”]

Anders feels comfortable enough to reveal his new body only to his sometime lover, a high-school friend named Oona. They smoke some weed and give it a spin:

He started to undress, and then she did the same, warily, and they joined with a degree of caution, almost as though one was stalking the other, which of them stalking and which of them being stalked unclear, maybe both doing both, in a way, and so it was that they came to have that night’s sex.

Anders worked at a gym and Oona taught yoga, and their bodies were youthful and fit, and if we, writing or reading this, were to find ourselves indulging in a kind of voyeuristic pleasure at their coupling, we could perhaps be forgiven, for they too were experiencing something not entirely dissimilar, pale-skinned Oona watching herself performing her grind with a dark-skinned stranger, Anders the stranger watching the same, and the performance was strong for them, visceral, touching them where, unexpectedly, or not so unexpectedly, they discovered a jarring and discomforting satisfaction at being touched.

The sex improves; the prose does not. A phrase from a later scene, “arousal shadowed by gloom,” captures the general feeling. The novel evinces the worst of Hamid’s style, intensifying his turn in Exit West (2017) toward folksy transitions (“and so it was”), diction that manages to be both officious and purple (“the performance was strong for them, visceral”), and run-ons that feel less breathless than halting, laden as they are with comma-capped redundancies (“maybe both doing both, in a way”) and reversals (“unexpectedly, or not so unexpectedly”). As in his earlier novels about social mobility and immigration, romance supplies the plot and casts an aura of “love” over the politico-speculative gimmick. But Hamid here emphasizes the familial, perhaps as a stand-in for the genetic: The love between generations meets the idea that race is an inherited trait.

The titular last white man is in fact Anders’s widowed father, who responds to his son’s new condition by weeping “like a shudder, like an endless cough, without a sound,” then giving him a gun. Anders feels guilty for his darkness; “just by being here, Anders was taking something from his father, taking his dignity.” But his father makes it his dying task to accept Anders, even though

he could understand those who wanted [his son] gone from town now, who were afraid of him, or threatened by him, by the dark man his boy had become, and they had a right to be, he would have felt the same in their shoes, he liked it no better than they did, and he could see the end his boy signaled, the end of things.

Family blood and racial blood are pitted against each other.

Oona’s mother, who vomits when she catches the interracial couple in flagrante, is also averse to the barbarian transformation, which she predicts: “People are changing,” she warns her daughter early on. “All over. Our people.” Hooked up to an IV of online fearmongering and cable news, she has become a “fantasist”; her belief “that life was fair and would turn out for the best and good people like them got what they deserved” has warped upon the death of her husband into an embittered crouch, a “deep, abiding panic” that springs into a “brittle” joy once the violence begins. Oona, “a realist” unnerved by this nativist zealotry, is inspired by Anders’s transformation to paint herself with brown makeup. But this flirtation with blackface leaves Oona “ashamed,” and though she appreciates her new features when she too turns dark, “a feeling of melancholy” yet touches her, “a sadness at the losing of something.”

Things settle down. Darkness—in the novel’s conception, more a symbolic hue than an ethnicity—sweeps inexorably, beneficently over town. A child’s notion: If everyone is “the same, just dark,” what is there to fight about? Anders’s father dies; the last white man is buried; you might think the newly darkened (the darkies?) will get together for a block party. Instead, they take walks to process their feelings. Oona and Anders fall in love, move in together, have a daughter—she comes out “brown” and “ferocious.” By then, Oona’s mother has lost her whiteness, too. When she waxes nostalgic about the glories of the white past, her brown granddaughter stills her with a word, “stop,” and a kiss. This is the novel’s cure for white despair over the loss of whiteness: Keep calm and carry on.

Never one to let us get away with missing an analogy, Hamid tells us of our baleful lovers:

Sometimes it felt like the town was a town in mourning, and the country a country in mourning, and this suited Anders, and suited Oona, coinciding as it did with their own feelings, but at other times it felt like the opposite, that something new was being born, and strangely enough this suited them too.

What exactly is being mourned? Whiteness in The Last White Man is a dream. It’s the neighborhood watch and home security. It’s weight lifting in an old-school gym, men testing themselves against gravity. It’s yoga in a scentless studio, women “staving off aging through attempts to remain supple.” It’s going out drinking, going out dancing, going out to dinner. It’s the myth that “a gun was a marker on the journey of death, and was to be respected as such, like a coffin or a grave or a meal in winter.” It’s having no vocation and curating yourself online. It’s feeling “cashed out, emotion-wise” but flush enough in cash for provisions to survive a race riot. Primarily, it’s not being “dark.” (The word black is verboten in The Last White Man, appearing only once, to describe iron.)

What exactly is being born—or rather, borne? Darkness in The Last White Man is an ordeal. Those who were already dark have little presence and no internal life in the novel. There is no sense that they have cultures or mores; Anders still sees them, “he could not help it, … like a group of animals.” Darkened Oona comes to notice “finer gradations in the texture of someone’s skin and the shape of their cheekbones and the nature of their hair,” but this somehow leads to a conceit comparing people to trees. Darkness awakens “the ancient horrors … the almost forgotten savagery upon which [the] town was founded.” Anders wonders if “maybe that was the point, the point of it was to break him, to break all of them, all of us, yes us, how strange to be forced into such an us.”

Despite its conciliatory tone, this echoes the narratives that Oona’s mother reads online about

the savagery, the savagery of the dark people, how it had been in them from the beginning, and had manifested itself again and again throughout history, and could not be denied, and she read the examples, the examples of when groups of whites had fallen, and the rapes and slaughters and tortures we had been subjected to, and how that was their way, the way of the dark people, whenever they seized the upper hand.

The Last White Man in this way dramatizes the inane, paranoiac interpretation of migration known as the “Great Replacement,” which was just condemned in a 2022 resolution by the U.S. House of Representatives.

This conspiracy theory claims that the West is being colonized in reverse by the global South, and has inspired a string of white-supremacist terrorist attacks in places such as Christchurch, New Zealand, and, most recently, Buffalo, New York. The trope of “colored hordes” overwhelming white nationhood is an old and eugenicist idea. The French author Renaud Camus gave it new life when he named it the “Great Replacement” in a short book he published on the subject in 2011. That same year, Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb that killed eight people, then went on to hunt down and murder 69 members of the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League, mostly teenagers. What are we meant to make of Hamid’s giving his latest hero the name of the man who applied the logic of “the last white man” so horrifically?

If Hamid’s novel were a self-aware satire of this ideology of whiteness and its violent effects, it would be pitch-perfect. But The Last White Man’s structure affords us no way to know if this is what Hamid intends: It includes no higher judgment, no specific history, no novelistic frame against which to measure the reliability of the narration, no backdrop across which irony can dance.

The characters are mostly presented as your basic good white people, trying their best to deal with the coming darkness: “Oona wondered … if her mother was always going to find a way to carry on, and had simply been mourning, or not simply, there was nothing simple about it, but mainly, mainly been mourning, as a woman who had lost her husband and her son was entitled to do.” Hamid lets them grieve for what is posited as a genuine loss of whiteness, with no compulsive melancholy, no unhealthy attachments, no obsessive shrines left over. Just mementos and a brown child who symbolizes a race-blind future. The Last White Man feels like a primer for mourning whiteness, not a critique of it.

To accede to the idea that whiteness can be lost, albeit in the name of open-endedness and open-mindedness, is to exculpate the capitalist imperialism that invented race in the first place. Whiteness isn’t monolithic any more than darkness is—remember the Irish, the Jews? Nor is it a dream for everyone. Remember James Joyce’s line? “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Hamid’s commitment to a liberal literary ethos veers close to a vague both-sides-ism:

Online you could form your own opinion of what was going on and your opinion was, likely as not, different from the next person’s, and there was no real way to determine which of you was right, and the boundary between what was in your mind and what was in the world beyond was blurry, so blurry there was almost no boundary at all.

It’s one thing for a character to be afflicted with blurred vision or the race “blindness” that grants Oona a “new kind of sight”; it’s another for the novel to suffer the same confusion of perspective.

There are two cracks in the humanist glaze, patches of clarity in the blur. A dark man follows Oona and Anders on a walk, scares them with a shout, then walks off, laughing at their hysterical reaction. And a dark-from-the-start, nameless “cleaning guy” at the gym where Anders works declines Anders’s belated offer to train him. “What I would like,” the man adds, “is a raise.” Both of these fleeting scenes are genuinely funny. Why don’t we follow these dark men home? Or any of the other people born dark, who must surely be annoyed as well as amused by these confused, deracinated, sad-sack interlopers? Wouldn’t their lives offer an interesting foil or counterpoint?

An earlier novel by the same author might have pursued this tack. Hamid’s characters sometimes offer scathing indictments of racial capitalism, like this one from a rapscallion in Moth Smoke:

Well, what about the guys who give out the Nobel Prize? What are they? They’re money launderers. They take the fortunes made out of dynamite, out of blowing people into bits, and make the family name of Nobel noble. The Rhodes Scholarship folks? They do the same thing: dry-clean our memories of one of the great white colonialists, of the men who didn’t let niggers like us into their clubs or their parliaments, who gunned us down in gardens when we tried to protest.

Hamid’s narrators often refer matter-of-factly, sometimes with delight, to the variety of darker complexions, to the difference between being a brown Muslim and a black Muslim, to the internal diversity within Pakistani or Nigerian culture. It is taken for granted that “darkness” is not just half of a simplistic racial binary, but rather a pluriform, diasporic, and syncretic cultural phenomenon.

Hamid seems to have sacrificed this sort of specificity in favor of a polished brand of globalish allegory. If in this latest work his characters grow black, over his career, they seem to have grown ever more blank. The primary political dialectic of Moth Smoke is rich Lahore and poor Lahore; in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), it’s New York City and Lahore. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) never names the Asian country where it’s set; the protagonists of Exit West leave an unnamed, presumably Muslim, country in the putative East and move steadily West. And in the unnamed, probably European country of The Last White Man, we have shifted to an even larger-scale paradigm: the dark and the white. This drift toward the general is also a drift toward the didactic, one that is only nominally secular insofar as it amounts to a righteous liberalism that promises us a peek, as Oona says, into “a mystical truth, a terrible mystical truth” about humanity. Hamid’s work is starting to look a lot like high-flown self-help, Paulo Coelho or Robin DiAngelo for the jet-setting smart set.

Hamid has always tended to map the rising tensions of romance onto the movements of social mobility onto metafictional asides about the relations between authors and readers—as if love, politics, and literature were all simply different ways to negotiate intimacy. The absurdity of these equivalences becomes clear in the closing lines of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia:

You have courage, and you have dignity, and you have calmness in the face of terror, and awe, and the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end.

Beyond the creepiness, this pablum presumes reversibility. Yes, the political affects the personal, and both affect the literary. But having sex with the right person won’t change the world; reading the right book won’t either. Dark-washing characters won’t disappear race, nor will believing that brown kids are our future.

Yet this kind of magical thinking will no doubt continue to meet with success in an era obsessed with the conviction that we are all in a moment of racial reckoning. What Hamid’s novels actually offer isn’t education but recognition, a self-congratulatory reconfirmation of ideas like “migration is a death” and “race is a construct,” which are true enough but also truisms by now. Despite the horrors it has conjured, “the end of whiteness” is just another mantra of our current discourse; whether you are troubled by it or merely curious, Hamid is here to talk you through it.

But who is you? Whom is this novel for? Hamid has never shied from connecting his characters’ identity crises to his own. “I was not certain where I belonged,” the narrator of The Reluctant Fundamentalist says, “in New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither.” In a recent New Yorker interview, Hamid explains the origin and intent of The Last White Man:

After 9/11, I experienced a profound sense of loss. I was constantly stopped at immigration, held for hours at the airport, once pulled off a flight that was already on the tarmac. I had become an object of suspicion, even fear. I had lost something. And, over the years, I began to realize that I had lost my partial whiteness. Not that I had been white before: I am brown-skinned, with a Muslim name. But I had been able to partake in many of the benefits of whiteness. And I had been complicit in that system …

So we have to imagine our way out of it, excavate our way out of it, and over generations grow our way out of it … As a writer, I build environments out of words that readers enter and make their own—and in that process puzzle out a bit of what it is they think. What might it feel like to live in a town that undergoes the transformation that Anders’s town undergoes?

This way of putting it hums with the soothing privilege of the elite. Apparently, the solutions to the problem—to the violence—of the color line were with us all along: Fiction! Imagination! Empathy!

The Last White Man offers no news for the nonwhite among us. Maybe Hamid wants it that way. This is unfortunate, because now is a good time to remind ourselves that “dark” people, despite our erasure from national narratives, have been in the West for centuries. We have our own perspectives; we have said and written and done many things—and not just about whiteness, or race, or racism. We are not, and have never been, mere symbols or surfaces for melancholy reflection. You might even say that we have tended on the whole to add some color to things, with our highly particular food, fashion, words, music, art—with that stuff of life that usually goes by the name of culture.

This article appears in the September 2022 print edition with the headline “A World Without White People”

Indexes in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Australia dip ahead of expected trip.