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Synopsis:

Catch-22 on speed and set in the Middle East, Vulture is a fast-paced, brilliant satire of the war news industry and its moral blind spots.

An ambitious young journalist, Sara is sent to cover a war from the Beach Hotel in Gaza. The four-star hotel is a global media hub, promising safety and generator-powered internet, with hotel staff catering tirelessly to the needs of the world’s media, even as their homes and families are under threat. 

Sara is determined to launch herself as a star correspondent. So, when her fixer Nasser refuses to set up the dangerous story she thinks will win her a front page, she turns instead to Fadi, the youngest member of a powerful militant family. Driven by demons and disappointments, Sara will stop at nothing to prove herself in this war, even if it means bringing disaster upon those around her. 

Greenwood’s debut novel brings readers into the heart of the maelstrom, and with audacity and humor depicts the media’s complicity in the ongoing tragedy. 

Review:

Vulture is marketed as “A Darkly Funny, Heart-wrenching satire”, and this is an important thing to remember when reading about Sara’s journey through the Middle East. Sara is an ambitious journalist trying to get out of the large shadow her father casts. She is staying at a journalist saturated hotel in Gaza, when she sees all of the well established journalists every morning at breakfast getting ready to write their great stories, she feels that pressure to become a more important name in the room. This ambition leads her to be careless, demanding, impulsive, and to forget that there are actual humans involved on the other side of the stories she is trying to write. As a reader, it is difficult to like Sara from the beginning, not because of the way that she treats other people, but the way that she views them as humans, as if they are just props that will help her to succeed. We can see that Sara is one of those people that will use anyone to gain an advantage and if she is successful, she will immediately forget anyone who helped. 

Vulture is a perfectly fitting title. We see vultures as scavengers, ones who eat off of carcasses of animals, but also ones who will kill the animals who are wounded and sick. In the case of Vulture, the entire hotel of journalists is finding nourishment on the bombings and killings of the citizens around them. They are rushing to these events, picking the bones of the victims, asking questions of the survivors that feel intrusive and callous in a moment where a person has lost everything, and rushing back to their computers and Wi-Fi to report these stories back as fast as possible to the world. The satisfaction of getting their articles, meeting their deadlines, and possibly winning an award at the end of the year is the sort of nourishment that the journalists find in all of the death around them. Sara spends the entire book looking for her own carcass, one she does not have to share, even if that means creating one.

I found Vulture to be a frustrating novel at some points. There are moments when the humanity of the situation is not considered because ambition is way more important. There are moments when the citizens, the hotel workers, and the victims are treated as subhuman, people whose intelligence and opinions do not matter in the moment because the journalists know best. I see some of the colonialism that comes from journalists from around the world coming to Gaza to take over, to get stories about a culture they know very little about, and it is almost like the local politics and actual danger of the situation are just hurdles to jump to get the real story. This is satire at it’s best because it is really bringing up these issues without flinching, and it is up to the reader to sort it out and form an opinion. 

I received a galley from Europa Editions in exchange for an honest review.