VULTURE, by Phoebe Greenwood
In the early 2000s, the go-to destination for the Western media in Gaza was the Al Deira Hotel, opened during the brief period of optimism that followed the Oslo Accords. An Ottoman-style palace by the sea, the establishment offered a five-star refuge from the missile and drone strikes just outside its walls. During one reporting trip to Gaza in April 2004, I shuttled from the scene of a targeted assassination — mangled car, remains of a Hamas leader — to Al Deira’s beachfront restaurant, where I dined on hummus and fresh shrimp as the sun set over the Mediterranean.
Phoebe Greenwood’s novel, “Vulture,” conjures up this world with mordant humor and breathtaking immediacy. A Jerusalem-based stringer for British newspapers between 2010 and 2013, and later an editor and correspondent for The Guardian, Greenwood sets much of her story at a Gaza City hotel called the Beach, an unmistakable stand-in for Al Deira.
The Beach’s Palestinian owners had once expected “flocks of Turkish tourists with their bum-bags full of dollars to descend” on the hotel. Now it’s late 2012, much of Gaza is a destitute and overcrowded prison, and Israel’s killing of a Hamas commander has prompted a wave of rocket attacks on Israeli cities and retaliatory I.D.F. bombings.
Into this free-fire zone arrives Sara Byrne, a stringer for The Tribune, a British daily. Byrne joins the pack of seasoned reporters and photographers — the “vultures” of Greenwood’s title — who hustle back and forth between the Beach and scenes of carnage. The solicitous hotel staff, including a one-eyed room cleaner who arranges “an elaborate twist in the green top sheet so that it looked something like a swan,” tries to instill a sense of normality.
Byrne is a gifted reporter with a sharp eye for detail and a cynical attitude. Observing a group of Italian photographers in the hotel lobby, she mocks their war-zone fashion sense: “White linen shirts or tight black T-shirts, chunky sports watches, too many piercings, tattoos and kaffiyehs worn as scarves. They talked too loudly and laughed too much as they fiddled with their batteries and tightened their packs.”
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The post In This Novel, Chasing a Scoop Leads to Bad News in a War Zone appeared first on New York Times.
