What if you love an enemy of the state?

Soon after the Manchester Arena bombing in May, the city’s central mosque declared it would not perform Islamic obsequies for the attacker. “We cannot offer prayers over someone who has committed such an act,” said the imam. His words reminded me of Sophocles’ play Antigone, in which Creon insists the traitorous Polynices cannot be buried within the walls of Thebes. Clearly, I wasn’t the first one to notice the parallel. In Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie’s seventh novel and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the BritishPakistani writer re-imagines Antigone for our age of terror.

Her Polynices is called Parvaiz, a British Muslim boy attracted by the siren call of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. He and his two sisters, Aneeka and Isma, grew up in Wembley, west London, in the shadow of their father, a jihadist who died being transferred to Guantánamo. In most other respects, though, Parvaiz is an ordinary boy who helps out at his local library and is “never seen without his headphones and a mic”.

Everything changes when a sinister recruiter, “a compact but powerfully built man, muscles distorting the shape of his tightly fitting bomber jacket”, tells Parvaiz that his father was tortured by the Americans in Bagram, Afghanistan, and that to avenge him he must join Isil – a group, he says, that has been misrepresented by the West.

Aneeka (our Antigone) is distraught when she discovers her brother has left for Syria. She had thought his moodiness was over a girl but it turns out a darker kind of love was drawing him. By chance she meets Eamonn, the son of the Home Secretary, who comes from a very different Muslim background. Karamat, his wealthy father (our Creon), is a British-Pakistani who has climbed the greasy pole by chastising his own community for backwardness. In return Muslims call him a “sell-out”, “coconut”, “opportunist” and “traitor.”

Eamonn is a trust-fund dropout and so it seems a bit odd when the politicised Aneeka, who wears a headscarf and dislikes his father, seduces him. Is this love across a political divide? Or a cynical tactic to get a powerful family on side?

Although she does have feelings for him, it turns out she wants to enlist the Home Secretary’s help in getting her brother back. The naive Parvaiz is shocked by what he finds in the so-called caliphate – “heads of enemy soldiers mounted on spiked railings” – and wants out.

This novel tells each character’s story from his or her point of view in separate chapters. Unifying the book are motifs. When Aneeka showers after sex, she sprays on Eamonn’s cologne to keep his scent. When Parvaiz is waterboarded as part of his training, he smells his recruiter’s cologne. “A hand touched his head, tenderly,” Shamsie writes, picking up on the erotic side of ideological grooming.

Names shape identity. Eamonn is both an Irish name (for his mother) but also a Muslim one – Ayman – a repressed part of his past that he comes to reclaim. In Syria, Parvaiz is Mohamed bin Bagram, or “son of Bagram”, to keep open the wound that led to his radicalisation.

It’s only 250-odd pages, but Home Fire feels sprawling, almost epic. In the last third, after Parvaiz is killed trying to escape Isil, the Antigone parallels become more pronounced. Karamat declares that dual nationals who have betrayed their country are stripped of British citizenship. ( Theresa May did the same when she was at the Home Office.) So Parvaiz’s dead body ends up in Pakistan with Aneeka, transformed by grief, keeping vigil over him in a public park until he is allowed back home.

At the start, Ismat, a clever, pious girl who seems the most sensible sibling, questions why we describe Muslim terrorists as “British-born” rather than just “British”. Humans naturally shun those who have done evil, but if a nation is a kind of family, then we cannot simply eject those who have strayed. Perhaps it was this “not-feeling-at-home” that encouraged alienation in the first place. As the novel illustrates, you see the same dynamic in Muslim calls to deny that terrorists are really Muslim – by denying them burial rights, for example. This is sensitive material, and Shamsie is aware of the nuances. She doesn’t let anyone off the hook. The language can be over-lush (“The world was dark and there you were, blazing with light. How can anyone fail to love hope?”) but this may partly be down to her Greek source material; still, a less forgiving editorial pencil would have been helpful.

More powerful is the speech made on television by Aneeka to Karamat, which directly echoes the Antigone-Creon debates: “In the stories of the wicked tyrants men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families – their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice.” But whose justice should we follow? Especially when, in the words of the Seamus Heaney translation of Antigone, which provides the novel’s epigraph, “The ones we love… are enemies of the state”?

Sameer Rahim enjoys a retelling of ‘Antigone’ for the age of terror Creon here is a Cabinet Minister who climbed the greasy pole by ticking off his fellow Muslims