Tim Evans reviewed Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
"The ones we love ... are enemies of the state"
4 stars
Since reading Burnt Shadows I've wanted to discover more of Kamila Shamsie's fiction. She is a fine novelist. Her prose is never tedious or clumsy. She can manage a range from the everyday to the urgent, and in the everyday she repeatedly slips in observations about how life feels which make me marvel and assent. She can sketch in a character's backstory without boring you. She is wry, empathetic, economical in her effects, truly serious without solemnity, able to handle a variety of narrative viewpoints. I'll be reading more, I hope.
Home Fire (a title which invokes both the family and the military) is set in 2015, when IS was rampant and the UK government was throwing its forces and propaganda behind the security state. Anyone with brown skin was likely to be searched, prevented from travelling, and spat at in the streets -- even more than usual, I should …
Since reading Burnt Shadows I've wanted to discover more of Kamila Shamsie's fiction. She is a fine novelist. Her prose is never tedious or clumsy. She can manage a range from the everyday to the urgent, and in the everyday she repeatedly slips in observations about how life feels which make me marvel and assent. She can sketch in a character's backstory without boring you. She is wry, empathetic, economical in her effects, truly serious without solemnity, able to handle a variety of narrative viewpoints. I'll be reading more, I hope.
Home Fire (a title which invokes both the family and the military) is set in 2015, when IS was rampant and the UK government was throwing its forces and propaganda behind the security state. Anyone with brown skin was likely to be searched, prevented from travelling, and spat at in the streets -- even more than usual, I should add. British muslims had to consider where they went and what they googled. Shamsie depicts the lives of three siblings who respond in different ways to their time and predicament.
The novel's structure, protagonists and theme are taken from the story of Antigone, which you definitely don't have to know, but can look up if you want spoilers. The epigraph is from Seamus Heaney's translation of Sophocles's play: "The ones we love ... are enemies of the state." Which is Shamsie's theme.