Home Fire
Kamila Shamsie
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Home Fire
Kamila Shamsie
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Shamsie excels at lovely descriptive writing of small moments.
It is in this move away from the earliest incarnations of the myth that Shamsie’s novel is most successful: she drops the incestuous nature of the children’s parentage, and ditches the second brother, so that Parvaiz is guilty of all kinds of things, but not fratricide. This costs her something in the ambivalence the reader must feel about Parvaiz and correspondingly reduces some of the potency of Aneeka’s sacrifice. But it grounds the novel in the here and now, rather than allowing it to slide into melodrama, an undeniable risk with tragedy-turned-fiction – although it perhaps contributes to the novel’s slightly frustrating conclusion. Shamsie’s prose is, as always, elegant and evocative. Home Fire pulls off a fine balancing act: it is a powerful exploration of the clash between society, family and faith in the modern world, while tipping its hat to the same dilemma in the ancient one..
...[an] ingenious and love-struck novel.
Gut-wrenching and undeniably relevant to today’s world.
...[an] urgent and explosive new novel.
Ms. Shamsie develops crosscutting lines of loyalty to family, faith and public duty. Isma and Aneeka are divided on the question of whether their responsibility is to report their wayward brother to officials or try to covertly secure his return. Lone, the book’s most complex and intriguing figure, has won the acceptance of the suspicious populace through unforgiving crackdowns of his fellow Muslims. Alas, Ms. Shamsie disperses much of the tension in these conflicts by fragmenting the story among different points of view. Home Fire is thoughtful and thought-provoking, but too piecemeal to build to a satisfying tragedy..
[Shamsie is] acutely attuned to the vagaries of allegiance, whether to nation, faith, family or club.
Home Fire, Shamsie’s seventh novel, is set against a backdrop that is instantly recognisable: the rising prejudice that Muslims in the west now face, which is only worsening at a time when some of their young become militants or join Isis ...a literary thriller about prejudice and the slide into radicalisation, but it is also an expansive novel about love ...mostly a domestic saga, although the distance between working-class Wembley and the Lones’ home in posh Holland Park is marked by a class divide, sometimes jarringly amplified by Shamsie.
Shamsie, who has matured as global citizen and international writer in the age of social media, goes beyond mere plot adaptation to explore the nature of storytelling itself: who gets to tell the story, how will the story get retold, which story might last to become history.
As Home Fire telescopes out to accommodate Antigone’s structure, it loses some of what made the first half so compelling. The careful portrait of this specific family unravels so that Shamsie can shift her focus to enemy states. Clever, practical Isma all but disappears (her analogue in Antigone is a very minor character), and she is so clearly Shamsie’s best invention that her absence leaves a noticeable void in the story. And Parvaiz’s slow brainwashing by ISIS, and subsequent struggle against his brainwashing, only narrowly avoids becoming a wholesale cliché. What stays constant is Shamsie’s careful, lovely prose. She will deftly break your heart.
...an absorbing and incisive study of race and roots, attachment and affiliation — to a cause, a country, a person, a family — which encompasses five fascinatingly divergent viewpoints. After a stuttering start that relies too heavily on coincidence (that fateful, catalytic meeting), Home Fire quickly ignites and roars into life.
Kamila Shamsie’s contemporary take on Sophocles’ work, Home Fire, a novel that follows its characters from the United States to London to Raqqa to Pakistan, is remarkable in several ways. Besides its timely subject matter, Shamsie is brings new life to ancient characters, developing a handful of distinct perspectives with modern prose...The narratives of these characters soon become inexorably interconnected and reveal the complex intersections of religion, politics, love, and personal identity … Shamsie’s patience in plot allows the novel to accelerate like a runaway toboggan, gaining speed with every page, the ultimate destination as unavoidable as a gargantuan tree near the base of the hill. The ride is exhilarating, and even as the shadow of tragedy nears, it’s impossible to look away..
The novel is separated into five parts, and each reveals a portion of the story from a different character’s perspective. The highlights are the sections devoted to Parvaiz’s recruitment and personal transformation—they’re both salient and heartbreaking, culminating in a shocking ending..
Shamsie’s latest is a haunting and arrestingly current portrait of two families forever caught in the insurmountable gap between love and country, loyalty and desire.