A review by mxmorganic
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I was rereading Sophocles’ Antigone a few weeks ago, as the start of a larger “revisiting Antigone” project, in which I was also reading post-Sophocles adaptations and re-imaginings of the story. That’s how I came to Home Fire.
 
The novel follows more or less the same story as Antigone, but framed around a British family of Palestinian ancestry. The brother of the family, Parvaiz (filling the role of Polynices in the original play) leaves home to join ISIS. It’s hard to say much more than that without giving away a lot of the novel’s best moments, but the upshot is that in retelling Antigone, Shamsie ends up also telling a story about the unexpected ways terrorism can rip families apart, and the ways that efforts to combat terrorism have often done little more than exacerbate existing anti-Muslim racism.
 
Shamsie’s adaptation of Sophocles for her novel is stunning. She opens the novel by greatly expanding upon Sophocles’ Ismene through how she writes Isma (the novel’s equivalent), giving a proper voice and a tragic story to a character who has very little to do in the original play. Similarly, through her character Eamonn, who fills the role of Sophocles’ Haemon, Shamsie believably imagines why and how Haemon and Antigone might have fallen in love, where Sophocles simply says “Haemon is Antigone’s fiancé” and leaves it to the audience to fill in that gap. Parvaiz is a very interesting take on Polynices, keeping Polynices’ belief that he’s acting justly and for the greater good while adding a key difference in that Parvaiz comes to regret what he’s done. Aneeka, Shamsie’s take on Antigone, embodies the headstrong insistence of Sophocles’ character to an even greater degree. It’s a hard task to write a character who would believably go to the extreme lengths Antigone does for her brother Polynices, but Shamsie succeeds: Aneeka is exactly the sort of person who would do what she does for Parvaiz. Finally, Shamsie’s take on Creon, Karamet, feels exactly right as a modern version of Sophocles’ character, a man whose insistence on law and political power cost him everything. He also reminds me a good deal of the Creon in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (a play I also recommend), adding another fascinating angle to an already rich character – indeed, one of several such characters in an incredibly rich novel.
 
To demonstrate how this all works, I include here two quotes that I think beautifully encapsulate both what Shamsie is doing with Sophocles, and what she’s doing with the modern world: 
 
“[Parvaiz] didn’t know how to break out of these currents of history, how to shake free of the demons he had attached to his own heels.” (pg. 175)
 
“‘[Aneeka] has been abused for the crime of daring to love while covering her head, vilified for believing that she had the right to want a life with someone whose history is at odds with hers, denounced for wanting to bury her brother beside her mother…’” (pg. 258)
 
Anyway, Home Fire’s a brilliant novel for how it retells Antigone, and an incredibly rewarding read besides, but as the premise would suggest, it’s not for the faint of heart. If you’re up for a read that’s quite tough emotionally, I recommend it very, very highly.
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