Home Fire

In Sophocles’ play Antigone a teenage girl is forced to choose between obeying the law of the land and religious law. And this, essentially, is the dilemma faced by Aneeka, the beating heart of Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie’s Man Booker-longlisted loose contemporary reworking of Antigone. Her twin brother, Parvaiz, has left London to work for the media arm of Isis, after discovering that his absent father died en route to Guantanamo. Her sister Isma tells the police where he has gone and Aneeka is appalled. It is a beautifully Sophoclean touch that Aneeka is far angrier with her sister for betraying their brother than she is with her brother for betraying them both.

Kamila Shamsie’s challenging and engrossing new novel, Home Fire, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has been given a ghastly urgency by the attacks in London in June, and the focus in their aftermath on homegrown terrorists. Like Khuram Butt, one of the London Bridge assailants, Parvaiz, the misguided young catalyst of Shamsie’s novel, is a supporter of the Arsenal soccer team. He and his ISIS recruiter, a supporter of Real Madrid, bond over their mutual admiration for Mesut Ozil, the German star of Turkish descent who has played for both teams, and is a practising Muslim. It’s a tiny but resonant detail, indicative of the subtle intimacy of Shamsie’s work. The Pakistani-born author of six previous novels – this is her first set predominantly in Britain, where she now resides – she’s acutely attuned to the vagaries of allegiance, whether to nation, faith, family or club.

Home Fire is a literary thriller about prejudice and the slide into radicalisation, but it is also an expansive novel about love. Fittingly perhaps, as Shamsie draws on Sophocles’ Antigone, the love affair that anchors the book between Aneeka and Eamonn Lone, son of a prominent British Asian politician and his Irish-American businesswoman wife, is almost overshadowed by the dutiful and loving bond between the three siblings. Eamonn and Aneeka’s secret love affair spills out into the tabloids after bad news about Parvaiz drives both families to the edge. Shamsie’s imagining of how the British tabloids would cover a romance between the daughter of a jihad and the son of a leading British politician is deftly done – perhaps not surprisingly, as she has lived in London for several years. Similarly, the ending seems alternately as if it were a made-for-television event that is impossible to draw yourself away from and a morality play that underlines the folly of our political zeitgeist. I read the book twice trying to decide which of the two it was, but mostly because I had fallen under its spell.

Home Fire is as much its own story as a re-telling that dares to relocate Sophoclean tragedy to the bathetic streets of Wembley, with two British Asian families replacing the Theban royals of the original. The only heavy-handedness is in the names: the Greek sisters, Antigone and Ismene, are here Aneeka and Isma, while their brother, Polynices, is 19-year-old Parvaiz. Sophocles’ play revolves around the burial of Polynices, an enemy of the state whose corpse Antigone is prepared to defend to the death. In Shamsie’s story, his burial is not the central pivot but the abiding theme is still violence against the state – and the tyrannies inflicted by it. Shamsie is known for the internationalism in her fiction, to which she often braids historical connections. This novel does neither of those things. Its focus is on Britishness and it is by far her strongest – a rightful contender on the Man Booker longlist. Despite the dust-jacket homage to Sophocles, Home Fire is utterly contemporary and deeply original too.