Blog written by Sally
Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is an extraordinary contemporary novel about English Muslim PhD student Isma and her younger siblings, 19 year old twins Aneeka and Parvaiz. The family’s history, community and their experience as Muslims living in London is fascinating. Religion, politics, family, love, and violence are central to the story that follows. It is harrowing to read the grooming of Parvaiz to join ISIS. Anneke’s passionate affair with Eamonn and his fractured relationship with his father are engagingly told and unsettling. Based on Sophocles’ Antigone, the ending is truly tragic.
We all liked this book. We admired Shamsie’s exquisite story telling, and appreciated reading a Muslim-told story.
The words we chose to describe the book were: thought provoking, topical, intelligent, insightful and sad. Brave, ambitious and cleverly structured.
We gave it an average rating of 8.5
BBC podcast with Kamila Shamsie talking about Home fire and Greek tragedies
https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/books-and-authors/id331296649?mt=2&i=1000391510769
Our next meeting will be at Robyn's on Oct 24 Wednesday and we will be discussing Unbreakable by Jelena Dokic.
Comments from Lee :
ReplyDeleteI have just finished reading Home Fire, a book that was difficult to put down. An extraordinary story of terrorist recruitment, unrequited love, politics and the horrors of war.
The author says she took her inspiration from Sophocles’ play, Antigone, which I have seen a couple of times, each time performed in different guises, however this take on the story rang truer than most. Perhaps because it is set in our age, with the fear of terror and terrorists allowing unprecedented laws to be accepted in a democratic society, but so was Ancient Greece a democratic society and the rule of law was above the exigencies of love.
The manner in which Shamsie transfers the characters into a modern setting against the background of Muslim families living in twenty first century Britain and a multicultural society is highly informed. The prejudice they face, the need for migrant children to excel, the disillusionment of Parvaiz, his feeling of alienation in society and vulnerability to recruitment into ISIS is not a new story for us in Australia. Her characters replacing the Greek tragic ones are all too believable and the ending really is no shock and is “tragedy” in the Greek tradition for Aneeka/Antigone in the realisation of her fate. The suicide belt forcibly tied to Eamonn and submitted to by Aneeka, is an ‘explosive’ end to their love story again in true tragedy tradition. The other main characters of Isma, Terry, and Karamat especially are brilliant interpretations of their Greek predecessors. And Aunty Naseem is the typical nurse of both Greek and Shakespeare tragedies.
I came to appreciate all these clever juxtapositions of characters only as I read the final chapters, the book in itself was a great read and I wasn’t reading to find the impetus in an ancient tale newly told. The story is very interesting and quite believable in it’s modern context of racial predujice, slanging and of course political convenience, not only the jihadi story. The writing too is compelling, beautifully styled sentences and descriptions which colour the locations and move the plot along. Perhaps I am a romantic at heart but I loved the love story of Eamonn and Aneeka, Aneeka’s love for Parvaiz, and Eamonn’s love and respect for his father, and Karamat’s commitment to his job and country, cruel as it seems.
Wish I could hear what everyone else thinks, but for me giving it a rating, I would say 9.5/10.