Wanting to make clear that I do read beyond the precious canon of sorts that I have created for myself; Kamila Shamsie’s highly acclaimed Home Fire comes to mind as a recent example. I must say I often shy at a crescendo of superlatives, so whilst I do agree this is a terrific read I don’t necessarily consider it an extraordinary literary highlight as some would have it – just a really good contemporary novel (finding its way onto the BBC list of “Novels That Shaped Our World”) with a lot more depth than most; exploring the themes of belonging (or not) to nation, family, religion, and what is to be done with the divided loyalties that may almost certainly arise in our globalised world amongst the many of us moving on from the place of our birth. And courageous it is, especially as a British-Pakistani Muslim woman, to write a novel in which the jihadi, ISIS, and so-called “home-grown terrorism” are central themes. And the latter leads one to consider all the connotations to be imagined in the title; “home” is just one of those words I guess – where the heart is, where fires are kept burning, that has an Office and a Secretary. And who has the right to claim a place as home, and who has the right to take it away. And how many homes can any one person have. A concept I would suggest that may very well have lost its place in our contemporary world – too tainted by a multitude of identity crises gone haywire.
Spoken in the varying participant voices, the narrative is well paced and succinct. A British Muslim family is drawn, through circumstance or design, into the cesspool of Islamic fanaticism, and must navigate the conflicting loyalties of family and state, tradition and reason. So confronted, the sisters, Isma and Aneeka, react differently in their attempts to extricate their brother, Parvaiz, from his dangerous predicament – Isma, the senior member of this fractured family, places hope in the machinations of the state, and Aneeka, the younger and Parvaiz’s twin, distrusting of government and its institutions, and its prejudices, either real or perceived, seeks to intervene directly. Neither woman will save Parvaiz, but his death is only the prologue – for Aneeka, if she can not save her brother’s life, is determined to save his death.
Bringing home Parvaiz’s body becomes for Aneeka more than just a religious ritualistic gesture, but an act of defiance against the State that deprived her brother of his statehood and right of burial. The personification of that despised entity is satisfied by Karamat Lone, who has seemingly conquered all the societal and institutional hurdles placed before him and risen to the political heights as new Home Secretary; at the expense of being ostracised from the Muslim community. The relationship Aneeka forms with Lone’s son, Eamon, in the first instance as a means to secure Parvaiz safe return, is ultimately the fatal link between two families, two traditions on collision course.
We know – from author, blurb, review – that this is a modern adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone, and a reading of the tragedy, or even a summary of, confirms that. Shamsie is not alone in turning to the classics as a narrative device, but her elegant fitting of a very contemporary story within the frame of an ancient drama works I think very well. Striking are the parallels between Antigone’s and Aneeka’s respective acts of civil disobedience and the accepted consequences. One may wonder that, two and half thousand odd years after Sophocles, the repatriation of the dead to their nearest and dearest remains a matter of contention – and a tool of statecraft.