'Home Fire' by Kamila Shamsie

How can love survive betrayal?

For as long as they remember, siblings Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz have had nothing but each other. But darker, stronger forces will divide Parvaiz from his sisters and drive him to the other side of the world, as he sets out to fulfil the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.

In Sophocles' play Antigone, a young woman is forced to choose between obeying the law of the state and religious law. Her uncle Creon, the ruler of Thebes, has forbidden the burial of a traitor, who gathered an army and attacked the city. That traitor to the state was Antigone's brother Polynices, who died killing his own brother Eteocles in battle. Eteocles, declared the "good" brother, is given a hero's burial, while the body of Polynices is left to rot. Antigone has to choose between giving Polynices a proper funeral - an act which is punishable by death due to his traitor status - or obeying the law of the state and leaving his body to be picked apart by vultures and wild dogs.

Antigone chooses divine law over the law of the land, but is horribly punished by Creon, who imprisons her alive in a tomb. The play ends in disaster: Antigone hangs herself, and Creon's son, Haemon, who was engaged to Antigone, stabs himself upon discovering her dead body. Sophocles' play is a typical representation of the Greek tragedy with inherent flaws of the acting characters that result in negative and irreversible consequences.

What Kamila Shamsie does is bring an ancient tragedy into a contemporary setting and situation. We start with Isma's interrogation in airport security as she tries to leave the UK for the United States. Isma, the older sister to twins Aneeka and Parvaiz, having finished raising her siblings, has chosen to follow her set-aside dream of studying in America. However, Parvaiz has left their home in Wembley to join the media unity of Isis, after learning the fate of their jihadist father, who died too long ago for any of his children to remember him. When Eamonn, son of the British-Muslim Home Secretary, enters their lives, Aneeka sees a way out for her twin. Shamsie therefore separates her novel enough from the Greek myth as to make the parallells clear, but not convoluted. Parvaiz is guilty, but not of fratricide, whereas Polynices was. The novel is grounded in the twenty-first century and the thriller genre, rather than Greek melodrama. All of the characters are sympathetic, even Karamat Lone, Eamonn's father. Shamsie's prose is wonderfully evocative, which is a very useful tool in humanising a deeply political story. Her descriptions of nature are wonderfully poetic: 

The sky was a rich blue, the water surged like blood leaving a heart, a lean young man from a world very distant from hers was waiting for her to walk back to him.

This is a very visceral description, suggestion that nature and the human body are very strongly connected. Shamsie comes back to this idea a few times in the novel: "She came from a city veined with canals", "the cold impersonal heart of London", etc. This reminded me of Hobbes's Leviathan, where he envisions the body politic as being similar to the human body. As the capital of England, London is seen as the heart. Shamsie suggests that as Home Secretary, Karamat Lone ought to represent home values. Karamat is unpopular wherever he goes, a "lone wolf". The novel really makes us question what the word 'home' means. Upon reading the title, I couldn't help thinking of a song I learned at school, Keep the Home Fires Burning It is a British patriotic First World War song composed in 1914 by Ivor Novello with words by Lena Guilbert Ford. It is a song incredibly relevant to the events of this story, and if you can listen to it, I highly recommend that you do and think of what has been happening over the past few years.

This is a story about different kinds of loyalty - to the state, to your family, to the person you love, and to what you believe in. More importantly, the characters know that they have to be seen to be loyal. Isma has to be loyal to her family in bringing them up. Karamat has to be loyal to being English; early on in the novel, he is described as being "integrationist" and "class-obscuring". Karamat has climbed the unstable ladder of British politics by chastising his own community for being backwards-looking. He is dubbed "sellout, coconut, opportunist, traitor" in response to showing contempt for the conventions of a mosque. Later, he declares that dual nationals who have betrayed their country ought to be stripped of British citizenship. This reminded me of  Shamima Begum, who was stripped of her UK citizenship in February. Humans naturally shun those that they consider to be 'evil', but if a nation is a kind of family, then we cannot simply eject those who have strayed. There's a strong idea about belonging and how feeling the pressure to belong somewhere or to something affects our personal identity. The concept of proving one's "Britishness" while pushing away one's "Muslimness" feels wrong somehow. Eamonn is guilty of this: 

He was nearing a mosque and crossed the street to avoid it, then crossed back so as not to be seen as trying to avoid a mosque.

It is amazing how Shamsie is able to capture the tortured, isolated feeling of being an outsider in a country that calls itself "enlightened", but which maintains, under a very thick surface, strong anti-foreigner feelings. One cannot deny that prejudice against Muslims is on the rise, that Brexiteers argue that immigration is a "problem" to Britain, that everyone is pretending that everything is fine and normal when the harsh reality is that it is not.

I love this novel. It is amazing that Shamsie has managed to contain such a sprawling, epic story in a mere 300 pages. This is a story of love, loss, war, terror, anger, justice, hope, honour, trust, betrayal - all the tropes of a classic Greek tragedy. When I finished reading it, I could not help but wonder how ironic it is that history repeats itself, but we refuse to learn from our mistakes. This novel shows us so much about what is wrong with British culture today, about how we are in danger of becoming isolationist and xenophobic because we are frightened and uncertain of our country's future.This is a tense thriller that shows great insight into human psychology and the dark side of patriotism. I strongly urge you to read this and to think about what it is you learn from this novel.



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