Book Review: Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood

Phoebe Greenwood is by no means the first novelist to write a war satire, nor the first to specifically lampoon the way in which journalists and those who publish and consume the news treat war as a commodity to be packaged, branded and sold. But, well, we keep having wars and we keep using wars to sell papers and boost ratings. Which means we still need war satires to point out the horrific absurdity of conflict, and Vulture is a positive addition to the genre.

One expects to find damaged and denatured individuals within the pages of books about war, but what makes Greenwood’s protagonist, the wannabe war correspondent Sara Byrne, more interesting than your typical trauma victim is that it’s her issues that take her to war, rather than being caused by it. I won’t bore you with the formulaic cocktail of the messing-up that she endures at the hands of parents and lovers, but the Sara who shows up in Gaza determined to make this war her war is a delightfully horrifying sociopath.

After all, as she reminds her poor fixer, Nasser, ‘there were only so many bombed families that could sustain… interest’, and when he suggests it might not be either possible or a good idea to try and interview a rebel leader in a ‘terror tunnel’, she simply points out ‘that reporters in Afghanistan didn’t seem to have any of this trouble getting to the Taliban, who were frankly way more hardcore than Hamas’. Sara is determined to let nothing stand in her way, not editorial orders, not sexually transmitted disease, not a lack of journalistic training, and certainly not the potential risk to her life and those of many others. While Sara’s commitment to making the news her own doesn’t need a great deal of encouragement, she finds some anyway in the form of a talking pigeon who initially terrorises and then seems to spur her on, and whom she decides is the spirit of her dead father in bird form. We’ve all been there, of course.

Needless to say, things don’t work out, though Sara does make the front page. And it’s this deliberate ambivalence whereby her psychosis is both rewarded and reviled that finally exposes the hypocrisy and lunacy of the entire war/media machine. Greenwood’s real achievement is how she manages to get her message across while walking the line between loathing and sympathy, able to come so close in her writing to the trite and cliché while never falling over the edge. Vulture is bold and it’s deft, and that’s a great and necessary combination for good satire.