This novel doesn’t need the old-fashioned disclaimer that any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, because plainly it isn’t. Like her heroine, Sara Byrne, author Phoebe Greenwood was a freelance newspaper correspondent on the Middle East.
Sara manages to find a job in Gaza and gets to stay at the one decent place, the Beach Hotel. It represents the Al Deira, destroyed by Israeli forces last year, to which the book is dedicated. “Much like rich Turks, American network crews like nice hotels,” she writes. “They like airy, sea-fronting suites and restaurants with uniformed waiters where they can eat French fries and safely watch the war raging in the street and skies outside on big TV screens.”
That is what the novel, Greenwood’s debut, mercilessly depicts — the world of the foreign correspondent.
We meet the all-important fixers, the locals who make good money out of providing the hacks with contacts and interviews. Sara launches forays accompanied by fixer Nasser, who regards her with disdain and pity. But he does set up decent interviews, like one with the director of the emergency unit at the hospital who observes: “I would like to ease their pain, but we’re running out of anaesthetic and even basic painkillers.” No fiction there. After a bombing outside the hospital, Sara sees a body: “It came out backwards, very close to my face, one flip-flop dangling from a dusty foot, skinny and bloody but intact. It was the face that was missing.”
But she’s under pressure to outperform the competition. And Sara’s judgment isn’t what it was once. She is also an unattractive character, physically and morally, even among a cohort of unattractive journalists. When she courts disaster and it engulfs others, she has nothing to offer. “You come, you watch us die, you watch us grieve … you take our stories, you go home,” a bereaved mother tells her.
This sobering, blackly humorous and acutely observed book is based on events more than a decade ago. The depressing thing is that nothing much has changed.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for The London Standard
Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood is out now (Europa Editions, £16.99)
