This very confident first novel from journalist Phoebe Greenwood is a satire which sometimes contorts itself into horror. The narrator Sara Byrne, a young English journalist, covers the 2012 Gaza War from The Beach, a hotel filled with reporters and photographers. She writes for The Tribune, not as a correspondent but as a stringer, so she’s a little lucky to be put up at Gaza’s nicest hotel. Her fixer, Nasser, is paid well for showing her where the action is, but he balks when she asks him to get her in touch with someone senior in Hamas, which would involve going into the secret network of “terror tunnels.” She is ambitious enough not to appear bothered by the awful sights of war, all the bombed families. Her employers keep her under relentless pressure, and she is also chasing the example of her father, a famous foreign affairs correspondent, even if he wanted her to stick to Classics. At dinner, he questions her choice at university with cruelty: “International relations? Pah! I’m yet to see her pick up a newspaper without chips in it!” Some of Vulture’s chapters are in flashback to her life in London, including that difficult scene. There she became involved with a married man, Michael, whose ailing wife she calls “Cancer Cathy.” In Gaza, her company is a lascivious Italian photographer who makes her sick, which added to her rather stressful profession is soon to push her mind out of balance. She finds another fixer, Fadi, and makes some progress, but she is endangering herself and others. When a large bird on Sara’s balcony starts to threaten her, it signals that in the midst of death there are other depths to be avoided, and another more personal tragedy which has its special mordant humor.
The book does not breathe much, nor is it meant to. A bomb has fallen by the fourth page, and before then, Greenwood has set out the absurd situation of the hotel, where the war can be watched on television while one eats shrimps in a clay pot, or Sara’s preferred hummus. The unlucky owner opened the place right before the Second Intifada, and war is a major problem for the hospitality industry, as he explains to Sara: “Wallahi Sara, a siege? For five years not so much as a bread stick without Israeli permission. And thanks Hamas, I haven’t seen a drop of whiskey in a year!” The tones of incredulity and anger will dominate, except in interludes which Sara spends in London with her quietly baffled, baffling mother. From the bombsite Sara goes into the morgue, and if she is horrified, it does not register, as she is concerned with whether this incident could be called a “massacre” with only six definite victims. Gaza has been on the front page of the Tribune for four days and without a bigger military operation, “it was all getting a bit samey.” Episodes of war quickly bring demands on Sara to find an even better story or get better access, and back at the hotel, everyone is frantic. A Danish reporter, trying to file his copy during an internet outage, has “the hunched shoulders of a person who had been hitting send repeatedly without success.” Everything must be turned around as quickly as possible, and so it is in the novel, with its short chapters and its brusque, journalistic exposition. Too much happens for Sara to stop and ruminate. Greenwood has achieved the sense of the uncontainable, indescribable and eventually irrational as it wrestles and throws Sara’s professionalism and sanity.
The critical view of western media is thankfully not over-explained, the author having trusted the title to do its work, so the story continues its hectic movement, and while the flashbacks threaten to explain away Sara’s problems, they never quite do, and they remain in parallel as views of her life before all this violence, remarkably and strangely the same life. In later visits to London after her father’s death, her alienated experience of what had been quotidian suggests very deep damage. A talent show on tv, her mother’s regular fare, looks strange now: “A flourish of swirling graphics was followed by a cluster of waxy-looking hosts laughing.” The warzone hotel in the Middle East is no home, but home is no longer homely. Sara’s life was comfortable, but it was never innocent, at least in her account. Something very sad precedes the tragedies of the story, which is why, though she vaguely recognizes them as such, they have no cathartic shape and no teaching value. Vulture is a cruel story. It may also be a cruel book.
FICTION
Vulture
By Phoebe Greenwood
Europa Editions
Published August 12, 2025
