Not all, but some writers still believe the novel has powers of moral clarification. So it was never going to be long before one was set in the new world epicentre of clashing sympathies. The foreign correspondent Phoebe Greenwood’s debut novel, Vulture, follows a war reporter through the warrens and wreckage of 21st-century Gaza.
Sara Byrne, stringer for Tribune, is staying at The Beach, a war-zone journo hotel on the model of Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn. And indeed there is much here from the Fleet Street war novel’s standard legend. Byrne must negotiate hard-drinking big shots, wily local fixers and newsroom cynicism. She worries at one point that “only so many bombed families” can win front pages.
Sara tries to land a career-making scoop. She is almost introduced to a commander in Hamas’s tunnels, but he is blown up before the interview can happen. She sneaks her next high-profile contact into The Beach, since Israel never bombs it, but this plan also meets catastrophe.
Greenwood knows the humid claustrophobia of Middle Eastern war. And the descriptions of “that agelessness particular to war-prone places” and such like are quite persuasive. Still, as is noted, Western media access to Gaza unavoidably ends at the Erez Crossing. Beyond that, the evocation relies a little too heavily on heat, dust and cigarettes.
But the horror of war is just one of many pains the book strives to represent. Byrne is haunted by the loss of her father. Her mother is cruelly distant. Also, she feels guilty about sleeping with one of her father’s friends. He was cheating on his wife who had cancer. On top of that, he has now left “Cancer Cathy” for another, even younger woman. The perspective is further complicated by the trauma, psychosis and hallucinations of avian poltergeists.
This is an ambitious book and a book whose ambitions are plain. You can enjoy it a fair bit just for the hysteria of its conception. At the same time, Vulture does seem occasionally to be struggling to do everything it wants to.
Sara’s character, for instance, is of the English daddy-issues, alcoholic-mess cast. But she doesn’t really renew or advance that model. I do not think very deep psychological research went into “I would still fuck him. Or wished he was my dad. Either or.” And we know by now that women sometimes do not shave their legs. Or, even, their “pussy” – a word whose shock power Greenwood trusts will endure its 11 deployments.
This voice is occasionally replaced by one quite flatly didactic. Sara questions the wisdom of firing bullets into the air as celebration. “Like your culture is never stupid,” her companion rebuts. “No, they just give away countries that aren’t theirs to give, starting wars that spread across the world and burn for generations. Sykes-Picot. Kissinger. Things like that.” Not much in what we know of Sara indicates a character who would listen to her fixer’s lesson so attentively here. But fixers are essential: they understand “the place, the people, the history, the complex politics and spoke the language”.
The book’s world is studded with oddities. A father-and-son pair are both called Jihad, for example. “Salamtek Jihads,” Sara greets them. The father is enormous and something of a “cyclops” – constant praying has worn a mark into his forehead, so he appears to have either one eye or three. The son, however, is tiny but has an old man’s face, and he surprises Sara midway through with baroque and fluent English and a deep knowledge of Charles Dickens. It’s unusual, but the reader can imagine quite easily that the idea for these two came by Greenwood knowing the Islamic concept of Greater and Lesser Jihad, then building out from there. Generally it is a little too easy to trace the architecture of these quirks.
Vulture’s blurb calls it Catch-22 on speed. But Catch-22 knew absurdity was inextricable from – and constitutive of – war’s tragedy. That book, like war, is experienced as total disorientation. We can see Vulture’s design too easily for the same to be true of it. There is never the total, harrowing incoherence you feel was sought. It is less a war novel than a novel set in a war. It can say that war is weird, but not that war is hell. In Catch-22, the project is confusion; in Vulture, the project is confused.
Vulture
Phoebe Greenwood
Europa Editions, 300pp, £16.99
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[See also: A question of intent]
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This article appears in the 16 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, A Question of Intent