Homesick

With a title that, frankly, invites associations with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it shouldn't be surprising that Eshkol Nevo's novel does confront the bloody and seemingly intractable dispute that has blighted the region for so many years. Yet I did find myself surprised - for there's something about the way this book sets its tone, how it initially draws you in, that had me thinking more at first about the everyday sights and sounds of Israel, and of the people that seemed like they could belong anywhere.

Perhaps this is partly because characters like the students Noa and Amir, setting up their first home together, or their next door neighbours the Zakians and their young family, seem so familiar, so troubled by the doubts, fears and insecurities that we recognise from our own lives and from other books. It's also partly that Nevo has placed most of the action in the Castel village, half way between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and therefore a place that cannot be immediately conjured up thanks to frequent media coverage. We have to learn of this place through him, and leave our own images behind.

But from the moment Noa and Amir, looking for the flat they want to rent, accidentally stumble into the shiva for a young man killed in Lebanon, it's of course obvious that the Castel does not exist in uncharted territory. And when Saddiq, a builder in the Castel, discovers that one of the houses was his home as a child, familiar pictures seem to suggest themselves once more. 

Yet it seems clear to me that Nevo's intention is to show us that Israelis (and by extension Palestinians) are both more and less than their sad and turbulent history. That the agonising grief of a family who have lost a son can be shown as the tragedy that it would be for any family (and as he does show, movingly), but that the cause of their loss cannot be ignored. That the suicide attempts both Noa and Amir have in their pasts belong to them, uniquely, but can also echo the words of Amos Oz about 'what we, Israeli Jews, really are - a bunch of half-hysterical refugees and survivors, haunted by dreadful nightmares'. That it is no coincidence that Amir volunteers at a psychiatric unit, where he thinks of the 'thin line' that separates him from the patients - the thin line that can clearly be seen elsewhere. That a book heavy with questions of separation, longing, grief, insanity - and yes, homesickness - could be set anywhere else, but isn't, and it would do no good to pretend that it is.

It will perhaps have to fight reader preconceptions more than most, and the conclusions it comes to - such as they are - will certainly not be politically satisfying to many. But what it does offer, and offer generously, is emotional satisfaction, and the gift of engendering great affinity with characters whose lives are shaped by forces quite beyond our experience.