In the early 2000s, the go-to destination for the Western media in Gaza was the Al Deira Hotel, opened during the brief period of optimism that followed the Oslo Accords. An Ottoman-style palace by the sea, the establishment offered a five-star refuge from the missile and drone strikes just outside its walls. During one reporting trip to Gaza in April 2004, I shuttled from the scene of a targeted assassination — mangled car, remains of a Hamas leader — to Al Deira’s beachfront restaurant, where I dined on hummus and fresh shrimp as the sun set over the Mediterranean.
Phoebe Greenwood’s novel, “Vulture,” conjures up this world with mordant humor and breathtaking immediacy. A Jerusalem-based stringer for British newspapers between 2010 and 2013, and later an editor and correspondent for The Guardian, Greenwood sets much of her story at a Gaza City hotel called the Beach, an unmistakable stand-in for Al Deira.
The Beach’s Palestinian owners had once expected “flocks of Turkish tourists with their bum-bags full of dollars to descend” on the hotel. Now it’s late 2012, much of Gaza is a destitute and overcrowded prison, and Israel’s killing of a Hamas commander has prompted a wave of rocket attacks on Israeli cities and retaliatory I.D.F. bombings.
Into this free-fire zone arrives Sara Byrne, a stringer for The Tribune, a British daily. Byrne joins the pack of seasoned reporters and photographers — the “vultures” of Greenwood’s title — who hustle back and forth between the Beach and scenes of carnage. The solicitous hotel staff, including a one-eyed room cleaner who arranges “an elaborate twist in the green top sheet so that it looked something like a swan,” tries to instill a sense of normality.
Byrne is a gifted reporter with a sharp eye for detail and a cynical attitude. Observing a group of Italian photographers in the hotel lobby, she mocks their war-zone fashion sense: “White linen shirts or tight black T-shirts, chunky sports watches, too many piercings, tattoos and kaffiyehs worn as scarves. They talked too loudly and laughed too much as they fiddled with their batteries and tightened their packs.”
Hungry children Byrne encounters on a Gaza street are “unclean hydras with head lice and one or two English phrases they chant over and over again in a creepy singsong while pushing and shoving and trying to get close to you.” But when she confronts maimed and dead civilians at Al Shifa Hospital after a missile strike, her arid detachment drops away: “I looked back at the mummified kid and thought about the life he was going to have when he woke up. If he woke up. Grotesquely messed-up face and body, no parents, or home, or school, maybe no friends, never any girlfriends or wives.”
She also has a burning ambition that will ultimately prove to be her undoing. Seeking an exclusive story that will land her on the front page and vault her past her colleagues, Byrne abandons her cautious fixer, Nasser, and hooks up with Fadi, a slippery character with connections to a private militia. He “wore skin-tight black jeans and a black T-shirt with I Heart Brooklyn written on it in red, loopy letters,” she observes. “He stank of aftershave that could easily have been his sister’s perfume and smoked cigarettes greedily, letting his hands fall between his open knees between puffs.” In exchange for $1,000, Fadi promises Byrne an interview with the militia commander and a visit to a “terror tunnel” used to protect fighters and store weapons.
Greenwood breaks away from the combat zone to flash back to Byrne’s life in London before the Gaza stint. Scenes of family dissolution offer clues to her emotional fragility. Her father, a famed former correspondent and columnist whose legacy looms large in Byrne’s career, wastes away from cancer. After his death, her grieving mother sells off nearly all her late husband’s possessions and lives alone in an empty flat. And Byrne’s own romantic life has yielded little but humiliation.
Eventually the violence of Gaza catches up with Byrne, and she hurtles toward a physical and emotional collapse. She throws herself into a desperate fling with a chain-smoking, combat-addicted Italian photographer. Illness wreaks havoc on her body.
Greenwood deftly portrays Byrne’s downward spiral, though some of her touches don’t quite work. Little Jihad, the creepy son of the one-eyed room cleaner, lurks in the hotel shadows, spying on Byrne; when she finally gets him to speak, he delivers soliloquies in perfect English about Charles Dickens and “The Bold and the Beautiful.” And frequent appearances by a pigeon that perches on her windowsill like a Greek chorus, mocking her self-abasement and growing detachment from reality, seem a tad heavy-handed.
The devastating consequences of Byrne’s recklessness foreshadow the apocalypse unfolding in contemporary Gaza. One resident offers a stinging rebuke to the journalists who stake their careers on tragedy. “You come, you watch us die, you watch us grieve, take our stories, go home,” she tells Byrne. “Do you help? No. My husband cleans your sheets. You kill his family.”
Today, international journalists are largely barred from Gaza, and their luxurious refuge from the dying and grieving has disappeared. Early last year, I.D.F. bombs struck Al Deira, leaving the hotel, like almost all of Gaza, a mound of rubble.
