Enter Ghost (2023)
Why this one?
I’m reading selected entries from the 2024 Women’s Prize Longlist. This one was another that seemed to be getting a lot of positive chatter, and obviously represented a very interesting location to visit given present circumstances.
Isabella Hammad (1991- ; active 2018- ) is a British-Palestinian who grew up in Acton, West London. She studied English at the University of Oxford before completing a creative writing MFA at New York University.
Her short story "Mr Can'aan" (2018) won the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize, also recently won by fellow 2024 Women’s Prize longlister Chetna Maroo. Her debut novel, The Parisian, was published in 2019 to wide acclaim, winning several awards for debut / young novelists as well as the Palestine Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. In 2023, she featured on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, published every 10 years and honouring the most significant British novelists aged under 40.
Thoughts, etc.
Enter Ghost follows Sonia, a 38-year-old British/Dutch actor, with Palestinian heritage, who has recently broken off an affair with a London theatre director. She decides to take some time out from her career to visit her sister, Haneen, in Haifa. The two sisters spent summers in their youth visiting family in Haifa, and the latter returned there to forge a career as an academic. Haneen introduces Sonia to her friend Mariam, a theatre director, who is in the early stages of putting on an Arabic-language production of Hamlet in the West Bank. While Sonia is initially reluctant to get involved, she is pulled in by Mariam’s bluntness and idealistic spirit and agrees to help out with rehearsals, before eventually getting swept up by the energy of the production and taking on the role of Gertrude.
It’s a dense novel with an array of subtley interweaving strands. While the production of Hamlet sits firmly at its centre, there’s also a complex exploration of the relationship between the sisters Sonia and Haneen, and their differing relationships with their father (at home in the UK) and aunt and uncle. In the play’s cast, we get a similarly intricate web of potential conflict and rivalry, which at times explodes into open conflict, but in general, is held in place by Mariam’s firm leadership and a desire to use their art to say something about the circumstances in which they, as Palestinians, live within the Israeli state. These challenges are greatly exacerbated by the wider context: Mariam’s brother is arrested; border forces humiliate several cast members - including their celebrity lead; details of the play are leaked to press and presented as subversive; their venue is commandeered as a ‘military zone’ and their painstakingly-crafted set confiscated; and in vivid and disturbing final scenes, soldiers arrive at the production (in its new border-zone location).
There’s a lot going on here, and for me it occasionally veered towards being a little too much. Seemingly wary of being too one-dimensional in its focus on the intersection between art and politics in the midst of an ongoing conflict, it layers in so many different relationships (present and past) that it becomes difficult to fully engage with all of them - particularly the various romantic sub-plots. The family stories are more vital, especially the one between the two central sisters, but it’s obvious that however much the ‘life must go on’ narrative is pushed by characters of all persuasions, the real story is the one perpetually lurking in the wings - the ever-present military state with eyes and ears everywhere, ready to enter the stage at any moment to disrupt and destroy, a regressive cycle that overrides any attempt to break out of it - even the power of art.
It’s an incredibly well-crafted book and one that felt enriching and timely in terms of its nuanced exploration of the challenges facing Palestinians (both those in the Occupied Territories and those in what the novel refers to as only ‘the ‘48’ or ‘the inside’) - even before the present horrors unfolding in Gaza. It has some very high highs in terms of vividly immersive scenes, most notably Sonia’s first protest and the climactic descriptions of two (very different) performances of Hamlet. And it’s extremely thought-provoking in its interrogation of the usefulness (or otherwise) of art in the face of oppression - at the protest, Sonia muses on the fact that their production requires the circumstances of the protest (and consequent suffering) for its relevance, far more than those suffering actually need the players’ art.
Score
8
A book that I admired rather than particularly enjoyed, I have to be honest. It has depth, range, and insight, but at times felt overbearing in the weight of all that it was trying to cover. With this complexity - admirable in the context of the subject matter - it inevitably sacrificed lightness of touch for a style that felt much heavier and more oppressive-feeling than I tend to prefer. The quality on display is obvious, though, and I’d be surprised if this one didn’t at least make the shortlist.
Next up
Haven’t quite decided yet…
