PositiveThe New York Times Book Review[Shamsie is] acutely attuned to the vagaries of allegiance, whether to nation, faith, family or club ... Shamsie is achingly good at capturing the claustrophobic self-consciousness of British Muslims ... We’re seeing a glut of novelistic rehashes of classical and classic texts...But Shamsie’s choice is nonetheless notable. She places herself in the same predicament as her characters. Just as they wrestle with their clashing duties to family, faith and nation, she wrestles with their prescribed narrative roles. Beyond this, of course, it’s a shrewdly subversive move to tell this immigrant story via a tale so central to the Western canon. In doing so, Shamsie quietly capsizes easy sound bites about a 'clash of civilizations.' Still, for all its brilliance, there’s some cost to this strategy. The timelessness of the tale at times feels at odds with its timeliness, the fated quality of the narrative at odds with the psychological choices of the individual figures...The upshot is a headlong final act that aims at stark political theater but at times comes off as only stagy. Tellingly, much of this closing action is viewed through screens, the way most of us engage with terror. And yet, at its finest, the quiet emotional power of Home Fire is that it draws us close to that horror — behind the scenes of tragedy.
Shirley Hazzard
PositiveThe Chicago Tribune...both timely and timeless. The timeliness is rooted in the book's focus on the aftermath of war, in this case World War II, and the responsibilities and burdens of its victors. Much of the action takes place in Japan, in Kure, near Hiroshima, where the book's protagonist, Aldred Leith, a decorated British war hero and the scion of an eminent novelist, has come to write a politically sensitive account of the occupation … The title, of course, refers to the war just past, and perhaps most immediately to the fires of Hiroshima and the Blitz, but it also evokes the Great Fire of London, a devastating cataclysm for the capital that nonetheless presaged an opportunity for rebirth and beauty. That possibility of rebirth lies off the page at the end of The Great Fire – there are stirrings of hope, the book has too much integrity to offer more – but the beauty is felt in almost every line of this austerely gorgeous work.
