It’s late in the twenty-first century and America is once again in
the throes of civil war. It has been wracked by climate change and the free
Southern States have refused to give up fossil fuel. The Chestnut family live
in a metal shack in a wasteland, terrified of the ever closening war. Benjamin,
the father, is killed in a suicide bombing while attempting to organise a way
for his family to move to the North. Martina and her three children; Dana,
Sarat, and Simon, are forced to move to Camp Patience, a sprawling refugee camp
that will be their home for years to come. The book goes on to show the
irreversible damage war does to the Chestnut family.
Sarat is the main focus of the text. Tall, tough, and trusting, we
see the war gradually break the innocent trust and curiosity she held at the
opening. She is radicalized and tortured and commits acts of terrorism that the
reader may struggle to reconcile with their desire for a happy ending and admirable
protagonist. El Akkad has said that his aim was not to create a likeable or
even a sympathetic character in Sarat but for the reader to understand how she
came to be the person she becomes. In this he certainly succeeds, and although
her actions are at time shocking it feels difficult to entirely condemn her.
Camp Patience has all the hallmarks of the refugee camps we are
familiar with hearing about, yet being thrown into the day to day, knowing the
characters are there for years, brings home the realities of displacement in
war-torn countries, that the struggle continues long after the cameras have
gone. El Akkad based the experiences in the novel deeply in fact, both from his
time as a journalist and in research for the novel. This is also true of
Sugarloaf, the detention centre where atrocious tortures are doled out. Again,
he has made nothing up, and the reader knows this, making it all the more
harrowing.
With the current problems in America it is easy to read this as a
cautionary tale, and yet it was written before Trump announced his intention to
run for President. Instead it is concerned with the past and the present and
bringing atrocities that people turn a blind eye to into such close proximity
that they can’t be ignored. A difficult read that rings true on many levels.
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