#Around the World #Pakistan

This brilliant story by Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie was winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2017 and long listed for the Booker Prize. The book is based on the Greek tragedy Antigone.

Siblings Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz are British Muslims with family origins in Pakistan. They have grown up together, surviving an absentee jihadi father who was away fighting for years before disappearing, and then the death of their mother. They have also been subject to all the racism and suspicion of local people, governments and security personnel. When her younger twin siblings are grown up and stable, Isma finally feels able to pursue her dreams in the USA. Here she meets Eamonn, son of wealthy British politician Karamat Lone, who has distanced himself from his Muslim roots and takes a hard line or terrorism, security and the need to assimilate. This meeting has far reaching consequences for both families.

Parvaiz goes from being an innocent young man campaigning to save his library to meeting a new friend, who takes him under his wing, to radicalise him and take him to Syria to work for ISIS. As their lives are increasingly turned upside down the siblings all pull in different directions with dramatic outcomes.

I really enjoyed the book, it challenges you to think and presents so many aspects, in particular of life as a British Muslim. It presents this from multiple perspectives, looking at the hardship and at times fear of living as a Muslim in the West, facing constant, unfairly directed scrutiny and criticism. It examines how terrorist recruiting and radicalisation occurs, and the conditions that may lead to British youth being subject to this. It also examines the hypocrisy within the system and the dubious nature of political decisions around race and religion.

The characters were complex, likeable and captivating. I could not put this book down and would highly recommend it. 5 stars. ( )

Once I had worked out where I was and who was speaking, I found Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie to be a gripping tale and flew through it. It’s a very British book, due, in part, to a pervasively underlying sense of class polemic. I liked the way the author structured the story through the different perspectives of each of the main characters but she had a most annoying habit of trying to create suspense by referring to things the reader was yet to find out about. This meant I became disorientated several times and had to re-read to find out who was talking about what.
There are moments when Shamsie soars, for example,

…grief was bad-tempered, grief was kind; grief saw nothing but itself, grief saw every speck of pain in the world; grief spread its wings like an eagle, grief huddled small like a porcupine; grief needed company, grief craved solitude, grief wanted to remember, wanted to forget, grief raged, grief whimpered; grief made time compress and contract; grief tasted like hunger, felt like numbness, sounded like silence; grief tased like bile, felt like blades, sounded like all the noise of the world. Grief was a shapeshifter and invisible too; grief could be captured as a reflection in a twin’s eye. Grief heard its death sentence the morning you both woke up and one was singing and the other caught the song.

The Antigone theme was not laboured and lent the book a depth that it really didn’t need.
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Magically brutal finishing stretch. The final two pages are heartbreaking. So good. ( )

At first I was a bit underwhelmed with this book; I found it to be a bit slow and simple, especially because of the way the chapters were set up (each character had their own part) but as I progressed, I was blown away. The pacing of the last third of the book was really extraordinary and I thought that the use of the articles, closed captions, and various displays of social media was a perfect way to modernize the classic Antigone. ( )

Home Fire is a modernised retelling of the myth of Antigone, her brother Polynices and her lover Haemon.

Isma and her twin siblings Aneeka and Parvaiz have grown up in the absence of their father and mother. Isma has left Aneeka in London to go study in the USA, and Parvaiz has also left her to fight for ISIS. Isma meets the feckless Eamonn, the son of a Muslim politician who is now Home Secretary. Eamonn ignores her flirting but starts a relationship with the beautiful Aneeka on his return to London. Meanwhile rumours abound that Parvaiz is coming home, but can he do so safely given the implacable opposition of the Home Secretary to jihadis?

Shamsie has done a very good job of adapting this classic myth. She manages to convey the overwrought emotion of a Greek tragedy without making either the story or the characters ring false. In doing so she gets beyond the headline cliches of evil jihadists to expose the humanity beneath these radicalised young people. ( )