Review | Review: Isis meets Antigone in Home Fire, a love story both ancient and modern

Home Fire
by Kamila Shamsie
Riverhead Books

Home Fire, the seventh novel by Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie, is at once the most topical and most ancient novel on 2017’s Man Booker longlist.

Its contemporaneity derives from a story set in the present day, whose drama is generated by a young man (Parvaiz Pasha) travelling from London to Raqqa to join Isis. Adding to the sense of the present, there are sibling relationships conducted on Skype and FaceTime, and a narrative that at one point moves forward through Twitter #trends.

Home Fire’s debt to the distant past is paid by borrowing liberally from Sophocles’ Antigone, whose potent brew of chance and mischance shapes Shamsie’s story. Her Antigone is Aneeka Pasha, a beautiful 19-year-old Londoner, who wears a hijab and prays devoutly, if not quite five times a day. Her fate is shaped by factors beyond her control. Firstly, her father, Adil, a “laughing, broad-shouldered man”, whose personal charm is undermined by his quenchless wanderlust that eventually compels him to join the jihad in Kashmir, Chechnya and Kosovo. Following 9/11, Adil transfers to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, is arrested and brutalised in Bagram Prison and (so the family learns second-hand) dies while being transferred to Guantánamo in 2002.

The second character determining Aneeka’s life is Parvaiz, her beloved twin brother. As the novel starts, we know only that he is Aneeka’s soul mate and that he has vanished, but Shamsie’s hints encourage us to suspect the worst: that he has absconded to Syria and joined Isis as a sound engineer in their grisly propaganda department.

The first casualty of Parvaiz’s disappearance is Aneeka’s relationship with her older sister, Isma, who is studying for a PhD in the United States. Later it will distort her intense romance with Eamonn, who befriends Isma in Massachusetts and meets Aneeka when he delivers a parcel of confectionery to her home in north London. While the reader never doubts the strength and sincerity of Aneeka’s passion for Eammon, the initial reason she follows him to his upmarket flat in Notting Hill is to gain access to his father: Karamat Lone, a politician of “Muslim background” who defies the class system and inherent racism of his homeland to become home secretary. Aneeka wants Lone to use his influence and help Parvaiz return to Britain.