Love and Terror

Home Fire
by Kamila Shamsie
Bloomsbury, 2017, 260 pages, $24.99
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For years now Kamila Shamsie, Pakistani-born, long resident in London, has been one of those novelists you have to watch. Books like Burnt Shadows and A God in Every Stone succeeded in inhabiting contrasting worlds, British and subcontinental, with absolute credibility. Shamsie has always been a writer who could tell a story and capture a voice and show the ways in which worlds that shared so much could seem to converge, then fall apart. Now she has written a book which should rivet the attention of the world.

Home Fire has every appearance of being the most significant novel about terrorism since Don Delillo wrote Mao II all those years before 9/11. But a subject is only a pretext for art and this is art which will make the mind reel and the eyes fill with tears. With this book Kamila Shamsie is looking like the most significant writer to come out of the lands the Raj ransacked since the long-ago heyday of Salman Rushdie.

The epigraph to Home Fire is from Sophocles’s Antigone in a starkly spectacularised translation by Seamus Heaney and we hardly notice it, “The ones we love … are enemies of the state.” Instead we relax into the quiet soothing rhythms of the interpersonal with faintly courtly, beautifully observed flirting and fencing between a boy and two sisters.

The girls are Londoners of Pakistani background. One, plainish and turban-wearing, is subjected to a rebarbative, nasty but credible interrogation when she heads to do postgraduate study in the US for no better reason (but then is there a better in a fallen world?) than the fact that her younger brother went off to join ISIS.

But we see this very intelligent girl after she meets in Massachusetts a young Englishman who has a Pakistani father but speaks like a member of the royal family and looks like a Greek god. Flash to London where the posh dreamboat of a boy hooks up—secretively and absolutely credibly, with an enthralling erotic delicacy—with the younger sister of the postgrad girl, who is studying law at the LSE and is the twin of the chap who’s gone off to Syria and spent a while doing media work under the aegis of that black-and-white flag (and, yes, we all know what decapitating ghastliness these supporters of Daesh like to publicise to the world).

Two complicating factors shadow Home Fire spectrally and skeletally, just a bit the way the mythography of Oedipus and co shadow Antigone: the dead father of the family was himself a terrorist who may have been sent to Guantanamo, and the brother repents his folly and wants to come back to Britain, the land of his birth, the home of his sisters (who abhor his politics: the elder one reported his defection to ISIS to the authorities, out of caution).

But none of this is in the foreground of our consciousness as we follow the shadow quasi-clandestine love affair of the younger sister and the posh boy as they discover sexual love with something like the innocence of children playing doctors. Shamsie makes their encounters enthralling, exotic and strange. The boy never knows when the girl will see him, she is a law unto herself, she is forever looming out of the darkness, her body all bare except for her hijab. The way in which they fall for each other, the way they get naked, is done with a superlative tenderness that stops the heart.

At the same time there are circles of mystery, shroudings of darkness. And there is the remote note of what might—could it possibly, amid all this lyricism and rapture?—be something ominous. It’s a bit (it really is) like the moment in Romeo and Juliet when Romeo says, “It is the lark, the herald of the morn”. And then all bets, the best bet in the world, the love card that trumps all, seem off.

Who is the boy’s father, the man who shares his face with the lines of gravity and judgment written into its handsomeness, and what, more particularly, does he do? Why, he is the Home Secretary, the occupier of one of the great offices of state and one who takes it as his destiny that he (a Muslim born and bred, he still sometimes mutters the forms of prayers, though he has no faith he can credit) will annihilate terrorism and those who have any truck with it. Indeed he has strengthened the law so that anyone who joins a terrorist organisation forfeits British citizenship. An interviewer on Newsnight says to him he has been accused of hating Muslims and he replies—very quietly (and the quietness is a mark of why Kamila Shamsie is a great writer)—“I hate the kind of Muslims who make people hate Muslims.”

Do you see where we’re headed? I didn’t. Home Fire has such warmth, such a caressing brilliance, such a glinting sympathy. If there’s a tragedy in this book it’s more like the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet which made the young Albert Finney say it made no sense to him when he played the boy lover: “The pair should just run away together.”

But then death rears its black-cowled head, death and the burying of the dead, and you realise, quite belatedly, that you are in Antigone territory—Hegelian dichotomies of opposing rights, brother and sister, the boy who will meet anything rather than bow to his father and deny the girl he loves.

It would be wrong to say how it turns out, whether tragedy hits or is averted, or how in either case. What are the lines Sophocles gave to his Creon figure, the lord and master of the majesties and ferocities of the state, something about “The sin, the sin of the erring soul, drives hard as death.” What does the girl say? Something about how God stands above every human law and will give no vindication to it when it turns from love and the bonds of love.

The ending of Home Fire is staggering. Kamila Shamsie’s thriller-like book, full of very hot fingering and fiddling and mystery and romance, has some of the enthralling colour and hope and poignancy of Shakespeare’s story of panting youngsters and something of the towering sculptural symmetry of Antigone. Romeo and Juliet, Haemon and Antigone, Ismene and Polynices, they glide like ghosts, they hover like stencils over this stupefying revelation of a book.

The best account of ISIS I know of is David Kilcullen’s Quarterly Essay (2016). The best fictional embodiment I’ve encountered of its tragic fallout is Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire.