Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead Books)
The Greeks had a word for it, tragodia, tragedy. We have apps for it instead. Almost every day, brought to our screens by social media, another unspeakable sadness blazes into our collective consciousness, burns bright, and is promptly extinguished by the next one. We can’t keep up, let alone turn it into art that will bring us to action. We have no Sophocles. But we have Kamila Shamsie, who has taken Antigone and brought it into our own time, shockingly and unforgettably, in Home Fire.
Beautiful twins, orphans, cared for by their older sister--the boy runs away to the unexpected emotional support of a dangerous path his father followed long ago, the girl studies English law, “knowing everything about her rights,” until the loss of her brother shows her how fragile those rights can become, erased by one rapid decision.
At first this novel seems almost like chick-lit, with an overlay of contemporary political realities. Then Shamsie turns her kaleidoscope to another character, then another, and the picture expands and deepens. A sister who is burdened by becoming a maternal substitute far too young, the brother who is seduced by the history and fraternity of jihad, his twin sister who finds a way to help him but discovers this may destroy her own happiness, the young man who gives her his future, the father who holds the fates of all four, encoiling them with his own ambition--through them, the puzzle pieces come together.
From America, where citizens emblazons “their political beliefs on bumper stickers” to England, where a boy feels he’s without a country until his father’s destiny claims him, to a deserted park in Pakistan where a young man and woman hold each other, waiting for the flames--the different facets blend into a whole. The truth sears. The moral righteousness of power becomes a scar that is inescapable and indelible.
“The personal is the political,” but it’s even more true is the political is personal, although it’s convenient to pretend it isn’t. The brilliant sister, the passionate teenage twins, the man who defies his family, the father who loses everything--all unite in a horrible “butterfly effect” that reechoes headlines and click-bait topic sentences that are easy to ignore. What we’ve overlooked on Twitter becomes a story which keeps us from turning away.
If an old woman didn’t have a fondness for M&Ms, if a boy hadn’t taken a job in a neighborhood grocery, if a girl hadn’t said to a man in a railway carriage, “Do you live alone? Take me there,” if a politician hadn’t ignored the corpse of one of his countrymen, this particular tragedy might never have happened. Perhaps the ending would truly have been “two lovers in a park, sun-dappled, beautiful, and at peace.”
Only a skilled writer can keep contemporary issues within the realm of art, rather than wandering off into propaganda. Now more than ever, these writers are essential. By bringing humanity to what seems inhuman, by illustrating the cruelty of what’s perceived as justice, by showing how love in its many forms can be the greatest danger, Kamila Shamsie has given life to myth, a novel’s power to an ancient drama, and a terrible knowledge and understanding to everyone who reads her book.~Janet Brown