Shamsie excels at lovely descriptive writing of small moments ... there is no doubting that Antigone inspired her, but Home Fire succeeds without forcing this context. While Colm Tóibín’s recent (and extraordinary) novel House of Names is a retelling of Clytemnestra’s story of murder and revenge, Home Fire treats its source much more distantly. This is a haunting novel, full of dazzling moments and not a few surprising turns, that manages to be suspenseful despite its uneven momentum. When deep religious and political conflicts get personal in this story, beliefs and choices and agendas are inevitably on a fatal collision course. Home Fire blazes with the kind of annihilating devastation that transcends grief.
It is in this move away from the earliest incarnations of the myth that Shamsie’s novel is most successful: she drops the incestuous nature of the children’s parentage, and ditches the second brother, so that Parvaiz is guilty of all kinds of things, but not fratricide. This costs her something in the ambivalence the reader must feel about Parvaiz and correspondingly reduces some of the potency of Aneeka’s sacrifice. But it grounds the novel in the here and now, rather than allowing it to slide into melodrama, an undeniable risk with tragedy-turned-fiction – although it perhaps contributes to the novel’s slightly frustrating conclusion. Shamsie’s prose is, as always, elegant and evocative. Home Fire pulls off a fine balancing act: it is a powerful exploration of the clash between society, family and faith in the modern world, while tipping its hat to the same dilemma in the ancient one.
...[an] ingenious and love-struck novel ... This novel may seem to wobble in the minutes after its landing gear retracts. There are lurching shifts of tone as it moves between matters of the heart and of state. Do not panic. Order something from the drinks cart. Shamsie drives this gleaming machine home in a manner that, if I weren’t handling airplane metaphors, I would call smashing ... Home Fire builds to one of the most memorable final scenes I’ve read in a novel this century.
Gut-wrenching and undeniably relevant to today’s world ... In this multiple-perspective novel, Shamsie peers deeply into her characters’ innermost selves, delineating the complicated emotions, idealistic principles, and vulnerabilities that drive them. Scenes showing Parvaiz’s mindset as he is indoctrinated into ISIS are daring and incredibly disturbing. In accessible, unwavering prose and without any heavy-handedness, Shamsie addresses an impressive mix of contemporary issues, from Muslim profiling to cultural assimilation and identity to the nuances of international relations. This shattering work leaves a lasting emotional impression.
...[an] urgent and explosive new novel ... Home Fire is essentially a retelling of Antigone, which works both for and against the novel. Shamsie moves the setting to the present time ably, and nothing about it seems forced. But it's hard to surprise readers when they know what's going to happen, and the novel hews a little too closely to the Sophocles play. The ending of Shamsie's novel departs from Antigone, thankfully, and it's heartbreaking and beyond explosive. The pacing in Home Fire is near perfect; it's a difficult book to put down, especially once the reader becomes invested in the characters. And thanks to Shamsie's detailed look at the members of the two families, that doesn't take long. The most impressive part of Home Fire, though, is Shamsie's writing, which is beautiful without being florid, and urgent without being rushed.
Ms. Shamsie develops crosscutting lines of loyalty to family, faith and public duty. Isma and Aneeka are divided on the question of whether their responsibility is to report their wayward brother to officials or try to covertly secure his return. Lone, the book’s most complex and intriguing figure, has won the acceptance of the suspicious populace through unforgiving crackdowns of his fellow Muslims. Alas, Ms. Shamsie disperses much of the tension in these conflicts by fragmenting the story among different points of view. Home Fire is thoughtful and thought-provoking, but too piecemeal to build to a satisfying tragedy.
[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.
Home Fire, Shamsie’s seventh novel, is set against a backdrop that is instantly recognisable: the rising prejudice that Muslims in the west now face, which is only worsening at a time when some of their young become militants or join Isis ...a literary thriller about prejudice and the slide into radicalisation, but it is also an expansive novel about love ...mostly a domestic saga, although the distance between working-class Wembley and the Lones’ home in posh Holland Park is marked by a class divide, sometimes jarringly amplified by Shamsie ... Similarly, the ending seems alternately as if it were a made-for-television event that is impossible to draw yourself away from and a morality play that underlines the folly of our political zeitgeist.
Shamsie, who has matured as global citizen and international writer in the age of social media, goes beyond mere plot adaptation to explore the nature of storytelling itself: who gets to tell the story, how will the story get retold, which story might last to become history ... Although just one in a substantial library of Antigones through centuries, cultures, and countries, Shamsie’s latest is a compelling, stupendous stand-out to be witnessed, honored, and deeply commended.
As Home Fire telescopes out to accommodate Antigone’s structure, it loses some of what made the first half so compelling. The careful portrait of this specific family unravels so that Shamsie can shift her focus to enemy states. Clever, practical Isma all but disappears (her analogue in Antigone is a very minor character), and she is so clearly Shamsie’s best invention that her absence leaves a noticeable void in the story. And Parvaiz’s slow brainwashing by ISIS, and subsequent struggle against his brainwashing, only narrowly avoids becoming a wholesale cliché. What stays constant is Shamsie’s careful, lovely prose. She will deftly break your heart ... in the book’s final scene, the intimacy of the first half unites with the scope of the second half in a single, transcendent moment that will leave you breathless.
...an absorbing and incisive study of race and roots, attachment and affiliation — to a cause, a country, a person, a family — which encompasses five fascinatingly divergent viewpoints. After a stuttering start that relies too heavily on coincidence (that fateful, catalytic meeting), Home Fire quickly ignites and roars into life ... The novel is marred in places by some unconvincing dialogue. Fortunately, though, Shamsie’s heavy-hitting drama and piercing insight provide more than adequate compensation ... a timely and incendiary read about the differences that divide and break us and the shared strengths that keep us together.
Kamila Shamsie’s contemporary take on Sophocles’ work, Home Fire, a novel that follows its characters from the United States to London to Raqqa to Pakistan, is remarkable in several ways. Besides its timely subject matter, Shamsie is brings new life to ancient characters, developing a handful of distinct perspectives with modern prose...The narratives of these characters soon become inexorably interconnected and reveal the complex intersections of religion, politics, love, and personal identity … Shamsie’s patience in plot allows the novel to accelerate like a runaway toboggan, gaining speed with every page, the ultimate destination as unavoidable as a gargantuan tree near the base of the hill. The ride is exhilarating, and even as the shadow of tragedy nears, it’s impossible to look away.
The novel is separated into five parts, and each reveals a portion of the story from a different character’s perspective. The highlights are the sections devoted to Parvaiz’s recruitment and personal transformation—they’re both salient and heartbreaking, culminating in a shocking ending.
Shamsie’s latest is a haunting and arrestingly current portrait of two families forever caught in the insurmountable gap between love and country, loyalty and desire ... an explosive novel with big questions about the nature of justice, defiance, and love. Though its characters are trembling with humanity writ large—all of them are tragic figures—they don’t quite come alive, remaining Grecian archetypes, dramatic embodiments of powerful ideas. As a result, despite its obvious power, the book remains emotionally disconnected, unsettling—moving, even—but poetically removed, as though a dance behind glass. A powerful novel and a timely one.
