A journalist pursues headline-making scoops whatever the cost to those in the conflict zone in this astute and darkly humorous debut novel by a former foreign correspondent
‘M
iddle East on Fire: Israel positions tanks on Gaza border.” Journalist Phoebe Greenwood’s debut novel follows Sara Byrne, a freelance journalist in Gaza in 2012, who is reporting for a “pretty rightwing” British newspaper. Staying at the Beach Hotel, which is occupied exclusively by “middle-aged foreign correspondents”, she jostles with other reporters for stories while maintaining less-than-cordial relations with her fixer, Nasser. It could almost be a comedy of manners, with sketches of staff members and scenes from the hotel lobby. But it isn’t because, as the hotel owner puts it, “Gaza is a prison in non-stop war”.
Vulture is a caustic study of what it means to report from a conflict, and particularly relevant to the current moment. It’s a knowing portrait by Greenwood, who was a freelance reporter in Jerusalem between 2010 and 2013, and later a foreign affairs correspondent at this newspaper. Her antiheroine visits a morgue, where the bodies of children, “dusted in sand and blood”, wear torn Spider-Man pyjamas. She narrowly escapes a bombed hospital, which is “running out of anaesthetic and even basic painkillers”. Still, her editor requires stories, and so – oblivious to the personal toll on Nasser – she pursues increasingly dangerous lines of inquiry. None of the other journalists has “stepped foot near a terror tunnel”, Greenwood tells us, so we follow Byrne in pursuit of this exclusive. Meanwhile, a photographer is killed, and she befriends a strange, hostile child, all the while witnessing scene after scene of unimaginable destruction.
