How Does Home Fire End?

'Home Fire' is a heartbreak of a novel that ends with the inevitable yet shocking deaths of Aneeka and Eamonn. Isma’s survival is a muted kind of punishment, left to grieve in a world that has moved on. Home Fire is a novel that does not offer any comfort to its readers and reveals how systems of power are able to dehumanize people. The last pages of the novel are a masterclass in understated tragedy.

First of all, I didn’t see that ending of ‘Home Fire’ coming. After a bitter, conflicted, often negative but also deeply powerful and chaotic novel, Aneeka’s seemingly madness-driven single-mindedness to give Parvaiz a proper burial leads to a full-blown confrontation with the British government, with Eamonn caught in the crossfire of his love for her and his family’s current politics. How her, and his, extreme failure and their consequent deaths in the crossfire affects the others, especially Isma, is then, after the high-octane drama of the bulk of the novel, played out in almost complete silence to poignant, suffocating loss for the one surviving member of the family. It’s not a ‘message’ novel but, through accurate and harrowing portrayal of complex reality, it makes you think lots about the extreme costs of sacrifice and the very random, inhuman distinction between life and death of people who are just trying to do their best as human beings in an extreme, hard and irrational system.

‘Home Fire’ was another very quick read for me and the ending has been lingering long after I finished reading it. Aneeka refuses to let her brother Parvaiz be written off as just another terrorist and her determination culminates in a massive protest which turns deadly. Eamonn was torn between his loyalty to Aneeka and his father’s-politics but in the end he dies protecting her. Older sister Isma, the pragmatic one, survives but is left a hollow shell of a person. Home Fire is a brilliant exploration of how love can be as destructive as any ideology. The focus isn’t on the extremism or the State but on how difficult it is to love someone who is perceived to be outside of society. The last image of us is of Isma alone mourning the loss of her sister. No grand scenes or closure, just the stark reality of how hard it is to be a member of a family that is perceived to be outside of human in today’s world.

Kamila Shamsie’s ‘Home Fire’ is a heart-breaking take on Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’ and its ending is as harsh and unyielding as the political climate that inspired it. After Parvaiz dies as a jihadi in Syria, his sister Aneeka tries to retrieve his body from the Home Office. When that fails, she reluctantly turns to a public protest. Isma, the eldest sister, tries to negotiate with her but she is ignored by Aneeka’s lover, Eamonn, son of the Home Secretary, Kipelora Motta. A violent and chaotic confrontation between Aneeka and Eamonn ends with both of them killed. The rest of the novel is a less powerful exploration of the lives left behind by the system. But Isma, slowly and painfully, buries her two siblings while the Home Secretary kisses his son dead on the cheek. Home Fire is a searing exploration of the force that loyalty is pitted against in today’s world. The title Home Fire refers to the line in a_song_at_twelfth_night about the fierce love of family. In Shamsie’s novel that love of family, the force of the siblings’ love of each other, is pitted against the force of a politics so cruel that it condemns to death anyone who dares to defy it.

The final scenes of the book are stark. Isma’s quiet grief is told in stark contrast to the earlier scenes of public outrage and The final scenes of the book are stark. Isma’s quiet grief is told in stark contrast to the earlier scenes of public outrage and anger and as a reader, it really brings home how quickly personal tragedy can be swollowed up by bigger issues. There’s no easy resolution to the book and that’s what makes it so brilliant. Shamsie doesn’t give her readers any redemption and what’s left is the quiet aftermath of the characters’ near impossible choices.