Home Fire

He looked like a taunt
tasted like a world apart
felt like barriers dissolving

He looked like opportunity
tasted like hope
felt like love

He looked like a miracle
tasted like a miracle
felt like a miracle

A real
actual
straight from God
prostrate yourself in prayer
as you hadn't done since your brother left
miracle

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie is a modern retelling of Sophocles' 5thC BC play Antigone, which explored whether or not phusis (natural law) ought to take precedence over nomos (man-made law). Shamsie updates this debate by setting her story in modern-day London and centering on two families of British Muslims who are of Pakistani descent. There's no denying that Muslims in the West have been the focus of extra security measures since 9/11, and according to Shamsie, the vast majority of them conduct their lives just trying to avoid the notice of the state (“Googling While Muslim” seems the threat equivalent of “Driving While Black”). So if a family or community member needed help, and giving that help would run you afoul of seemingly draconian laws, what risk would you endure to give that help? Would you risk your reputation? Your citizenship? Your life? This book feels very timely and weighty, the prose was clear and rarely overwrought, but I don't feel like Shamsie – in directly mirroring the plot of Antigone – quite pulled off the inevitability of a Greek tragedy; modern characters aren't irrevocably tied to hamartia, and I always had the sense that different decisions could have been made. Still worth reading.

Fathers and sons, sons and fathers. An Asian family drama dragged into Parliament.

In one family, Eamonn is handsome and feckless; a young adult with a trust fund and no career path; the son of a wealthy white mother and a notorious Pakistani-British father: rockstar politician Karamat Lone (the atheist, Muslim-raised, newly appointed Home Secretary; “sellout, coconut, opportunist, traitor”). The tough on crime Karamat, as an ex-Muslim, is able to voice concerns about Muslim extremism that a white person couldn't quite get away with, and to prove his seriousness, Karamat muses about not only taking away British citizenship from dual passport holders who travel abroad to join jihadist groups, but taking away citizenship from any Brit joining such groups; intending to leave such people stateless. The question is: How far will Karamat go if the people he loves find themselves on the wrong side of his political posturing?

For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.

On the other side of the tracks, Isma is the eldest of three children of a known (long dead) jihadist, and ever since their mother and grandmother died, she has acted as a substitute parent to her much younger twin siblings; the beautiful and pious Aneeka and the shiftless Parvaiz. Now that the twins are nineteen and out of high school, Isma has decided to leave home and finish her PhD, and with Aneeka having earned a scholarship to law school and Parvaiz finding himself without direction, he becomes easy prey for an ISIS recruiter who offers him purpose, brotherhood, and the story of a father to be proud of. Before this, Parvaiz's greatest ambition had been to record and engineer enough street noises to get a job creating soundscapes for videogames, but Farooq insists that the young man is already qualified to join the “media arm” of the caliphate. Farooq leaves Parvaiz to flip through a series of pictures on his tablet:

Men fishing together against the backdrop of a beautiful sunrise; children on swings in a playground; a man riding through a city on the back of a beautiful stallion, carts of fresh vegetables lining the street; an elderly but powerful-looking man beneath a canopy of green grapes, reaching up to pluck a bunch; young men of different ethnicities sitting together on a carpet laid out in a field; standing men pointing their guns at the heads of kneeling men; an aerial night-time view of a street thrumming with life, car headlights and electric lights blazing; men and boys in a large swimming pool; boys and girls queuing up outside a bouncy castle at an amusement park; a blood donation clinic; smiling men sweeping an already clean street; a bird sanctuary; the bloodied corpse of a child.

Despite what seem like warning bells, Parvaiz is just naive enough to allow himself to be lured to Raqqa (where he will, soon enough, learn to distinguish the difference in sound between a nail piercing a hand during a crucifixion and a sword slicing through a neck during a beheading), and meanwhile back home, Isma wants to distance herself from her brother's bewildering actions and Aneeka is willing to do anything it takes to bring her twin safely home. 

In the stories of wicked tyrants men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families – their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice.

So it comes down to justice and the conflict between phusis and nomos; is it better to keep your head down and leave others to the fate they've chosen, or do you take a stand against bad laws at the risk of your own freedom and safety? This idea of man-made laws seems not only to apply to the bills coming out of Parliament, but also to the interpretation of Islam: there's a huge chasm between the gentle and reverent practise that Isma and Aneeka observe, the quiet prayers that Karamat still finds himself reciting, and the burka-imposing, sword-wielding thuggery that shock Parvaiz in the caliphate. 

Updating Antigone allows Shamsie to explore this issue as tragedy, and the lives of these characters do seem tragic; so much is out of their control as to seem the whims of the gods. But by tying herself to Sophocles' millenias-old play, Shamsie committed to a climax of tragic proportions that didn't ring true to me in modern times. The fact that I was mentally resisting the narrative of Parvaiz joining the jihad as a helpless dupe probably proves that I needed to read a story in which this happens: I know that peace-loving people can be radicalised, but in the wake of attacks like in Manchester and Barcelona, I'm not interested in root causes (but do like being challenged by the idea of someone who regrets his choice to join ISIS once he sees the truth of them). So, overall, I didn't love Home Fire as a novel, but I was certainly interested in it as a book of ideas. It wasn't my favourite on the Man Booker longlist this year, but I can totally appreciate why it's there.

The Man Booker 2017 Longlist: 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry 
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid 
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack 
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 
Elmet by Fiona Mozley 
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie 
Autumn by Ali Smith 
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:

Autumn

Exit West

Lincoln in the Bardo

Elmet

4321

History of Wolves