A Review of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Riverhead, 2017)

[sorayaz]

A Review of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Riverhead, 2017)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

This book has been on my “to-read” list for quite some time. It was one of about four books I have been reading simultaneously. I read this book over a couple of weeks.

Let’s let the editorial description get us started: “Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she’s accepted an invitation from a mentor in America that allows her to resume a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London, or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream, to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. When he resurfaces half a globe away, Isma’s worst fears are confirmed. Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Son of a powerful political figure, he has his own birthright to live up to—or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Suddenly, two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined, in this searing novel that asks: What sacrifices will we make in the name of love?”

About two thirds through the novel, I realized that it was a contemporary re-imagining of Sophocles’s Antigone. Shamsie is not the first South Asian Anglophone writer to use that play as the starting point for a fictional re-imagining. Indeed, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s The Watch takes a similar angle, but that novel is set primarily in Afghanistan. Shamsie’s novel takes its cues from the transnational connections among the United States, England, Turkey, and Pakistan.

I’ll have to provide a spoiler warning here—turn away if you haven’t already—but what made me realize we were working in the frame of Antigone was the plotting reveal that Parvaiz was killed just outside an embassy. Because Parvaiz was suspected of working with subversive entities, his body is not allowed to be buried in England and is instead sent to Pakistan, his ethnic homeland. When Aneeka travels to Pakistan to take proper claims over his body and to give Parvaiz the burial he deserves, it is clear at this point that Shamsie is now working with the general framework of the play in mind. Of course, Shamsie does use names that roughly provide us with ethnic analogues: Aneeka/ Antigone; Parvaiz/ Polynices; Isma/ Ismene.

What I especially appreciate about Shamsie’s novel is its portrayal of the Creon figure, a politician by the name of Karamat Lone, who must find the complicated balance of upholding the law while also being aware that his ethnic heritage means higher expectations about community and loyalty. When Shamsie shifts to his interiority at the novel’s conclusion, we get a sense of the very large stakes of Shamsie’s work, which explores the damaging ways in which the juridical system fractures family and disables the reparative work of mourning. Further still, the surprise and tragic ending to Home Fire gestures to the ongoing struggles over the way the supposed “war on terror” is being waged. How can justice be wrought in a war in which so many are caught up, willing or not, in its ever-widening grasp? This question hovers over the novel as a dark and ominous cloud. Shamsie’s one salve is in her poetically positioned omniscient narrator, who leads us into the lush and dark psyches of these multifaceted characters.

Buy the Book Here.

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu