Home Fire

Coincidentally I blogged my WorldReads from Greece a couple of days ago. The five include a Sophocles play, but it is Oedipus not Antigone which I haven't yet read so I can't comment on how closely Home Fire follows the storyline of the original. Home Fire certainly didn't feel like just a retelling of an ancient story because it is very up-to-date in its presentation. Tweets and hashtags cleverly contribute to pace and atmosphere in the later stages. The themes of love, persecution and intolerance are at least as old as human society though so in that respect the narrative is universal and historic.

I liked how Shamsie switches viewpoints between her protagonists and I found myself completely swept into their lives almost from the novel's first page. For a short novel there is a satisfying depth to all the characters. Home Fire is not a particularly comfortable read for a white Brit such as myself. Many instances of my country's casual racism and prejudice against those we perceive as 'other', regardless of their birthplace, are depicted. I was frequently angered and disappointed by hypocritical events and attitudes as well as being made ultra-aware of how language is habitually twisted by politicians and media to inflame emotions and misrepresent people and stories.

I think Home Fire is an important novel of our times so I am delighted to see longlisted for the Booker Prize and hope it also makes the shortlist. Books realistically featuring Muslim characters need to become mainstream in order to help us move away from the aggressive and unhelpful demonisation of so many people.

Since reading Burnt Shadows I've wanted to discover more of Kamila Shamsie's fiction. She is a fine novelist. Her prose is never tedious or clumsy. She can manage a range from the everyday to the urgent, and in the everyday she repeatedly slips in observations about how life feels which make me marvel and assent. She can sketch in a character's backstory without boring you. She is wry, empathetic, economical in her effects, truly serious without solemnity, able to handle a variety of narrative viewpoints. I'll be reading more, I hope.

Home Fire (a title which invokes both the family and the military) is set in 2015, when IS was rampant and the UK government was throwing its forces and propaganda behind the security state. Anyone with brown skin was likely to be searched, prevented from travelling, and spat at in the streets -- even more than usual, I should add. British muslims had to consider where they went and what they googled. Shamsie depicts the lives of three siblings who respond in different ways to their time and predicament.

The novel's structure, protagonists and theme are taken from the story of Antigone, which you definitely don't have to know, but can look up if you want spoilers. The epigraph is from Seamus Heaney's translation of Sophocles's play: "The ones we love ... are enemies of the state." Which is Shamsie's theme.

 I had trepidation about reading yet another book about Muslims living in Western cultures and being treated unfairly, blah, blah, blah, and sure enough this book begins with a main character spending a long time at an airport because of her being Muslim. It seems to be a common scene in such books.
 I was wrong. Home Fire is fascinating and relatable to someone like me, who's never set foot in a mosque or spent any time talking to a Muslim. It's also brilliantly written.
It takes many elements of the Greek tragedy Antigone, but don't worry if you're not familiar with Sophocles' 441 BCE work. It won't help or hurt your understanding of it if you are. Actually, knowing the play might even be a little of a spoiler, but not the kind that would ruin Home Fire for you.
 [a:Kamila Shamsie|168076|Kamila Shamsie|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1264510720p2/168076.jpg] has the kind of observational power and ability to put it into words that most other writers can envy but never copy.
 Here's a scene in which a man thinks about his girlfriend, who comes and goes without much notice, after she's departed:

He no longer had feelings of dread if she didn't turn up when he expected, or of relief when she did—he had come to accept that he was who she wanted to be with. The joy of that moved through the days with him, burnishing every moment, even this one in which stretched out on his sofa, listening to the different tones of the rain—clattering against windows, slapping against leaves, pinging off bricks. In Aneeka's company he'd learned to listen to the sounds of the world. "Hear that," she used to say in the beginning, somewhere between a command and a question. Soon he learned the pleasure of being the one to say it to her, hear that, the London we never enter together: the lawn mower rattling against pebbles at the edges of the garden; the differing weight of vehicles on the street outside—the swoosh of the motorcycle, the trundle of the van; the voices of drunk English lovers, matched in pitch though not in tone by caffeinated Italian tourists. Hear that, the varied creaks of the bed frame: the short cry of disappointment when you leave, the long groan of pleasure when you return. Hear that, the quickening of my breath, my blood, when you touch me, just so.