In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s great satire of journalism in general and foreign correspondents in particular, newspaper magnate Lord Copper sends a reporter to the African Republic of Ishmaelia to cover the crisis unfolding there. “We think it a very promising little war,” he declares. “A microcosm, as you might say, of world drama.” Phoebe Greenwood’s debut, Vulture, sets its satirical sights on the same topics. However, its protagonist is not dispatched to report on a “very promising little war” but rather the latest flare-up of hostilities in a grindingly long and seemingly unending conflict.

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The book begins with a nod to the opening of Alex Garland’s backpackers’ bible, The Beach. It quickly becomes clear that we are not dealing with a secret sandy idyll in Thailand. Our narrator, thirtysomething British reporter Sara Byrne, explains that she was in Jerusalem when she first learned about The Beach — a hotel in Gaza. Back in 2000, its owner envisioned it as a gleaming seafront palace catering to Turkish tourists with dollars to spend. Then the Second Intifada broke out, bringing violence and chaos. Since then, the place has been a hub for U.N. officials, aid agency personnel, and, above all, foreign correspondents. One tells Sara it is “an oasis of humanity in an otherwise blighted desert.”

Sara checks into The Beach in November 2012, harboring high hopes that her current assignment will elevate her from freelancer to foreign correspondent. Hamas military chief Ahmed Al Jabari has just been killed by an Israeli Predator drone, and the London Tribune’s award-winning Middle East correspondent, Anthony Harper, is not around to cover the story. With no better backup available, Sara is drafted in. “This would be my war,” she gushes. It is a war that has the potential to turn her life around. Not only might her insightful reporting on it help build her reputation, it might also show both her judgmental mother back home in London and her older, married boyfriend, Michael, that she is “a brilliant, young woman, conquering the bloody cradle of civilization with her understanding.”

Donning an oversized flak jacket and a too-tight helmet, Sara embarks on her mission, accompanied by her translator and fixer, Nasser. She finds herself encountering one tragedy after another. She turns up at scenes of carnage, from the ruins of government buildings to what’s left of the home of a man whose family was killed in an Israeli airstrike — an attack launched on the unfounded suspicion that the man’s son, a humble traffic policeman, was a senior figure in Hamas. She witnesses horrors in emergency wards and morgues, and desperation at a U.N. school housing 300 evacuated families. On more than one occasion, she ends up in the line of fire and is floored and shaken by bomb blasts.

But soon Sara becomes concerned that “it was all getting a bit samey.” Frustrated by “monkey journalism” comprising routine responses of Palestinian victims and vague, noncommittal comments from her contact in the Israel Defense Forces, Sara decides she needs to hear from different voices — those of Hamas operatives running the war in underground bases. She asks Nasser to set up an interview, but he tells her it is too dangerous and refuses. Undeterred, she turns instead to Fadi, the nephew of a resistance fighter, who offers to get her into the network of “terror tunnels” to meet the commander of a militant faction. 

Sara is energized by this golden opportunity to secure a career-changing, front-page story. She is also relieved, for her editor wanted to replace her after growing dissatisfied with what he considered erratic copy. This scoop will restore faith and grant her a second chance. But before Sara can meet her interviewee in a cemetery one night, a rocket goes off in his hands, “taking out half of his mother’s kitchen and all of him.” With her hopes thwarted and her position threatened, she is forced to take even more drastic measures to keep her job and make her name.

Vulture is a hugely accomplished first novel, one that manages to be entertaining and sobering in equal measure. Greenwood was a stringer based in Jerusalem from 2010 to 2013, and she brings her experience of that period and of war reporting and transmutes it into something gritty, witty, moving, and thought-provoking. The background — or, in some cases, foreground — depictions of chaos and bloodshed feel strikingly authentic. They also feel depressingly familiar. The novel’s events may relate to 2012, but the grim array of explosions and executions, the tales of civilian casualties, and the accounts of beleaguered hospitals struggling on with shortages of drugs, equipment, and staff, could just as well be today’s news.

Benefitting from the brutality are the hordes of Western journalists — or flocks of greedy vultures. Sara has never heard the term “vultures” before and has to have it explained to her. “People who make a living from death and disaster,” she is told. “Misery merchants. Conflict cowboys.” Greenwood renders her novel caustically humorous when she lampoons Sara and her cohorts going about their business, whether disdaining the locals and their culture, sitting idle in The Beach, bewailing “saturated” wars, or revelling in the newsworthy calamities in this one. It requires great skill switching from catastrophe to comedy or vice versa, and Greenwood handles it with aplomb, producing deft chiaroscuro effects, sometimes on the same page.

Vulture is a scabrous send-up of war reporting, but it is also an unflinching portrait of a reporter who wreaks havoc in her feverish pursuit of an exclusive. Sara is an expertly drawn antiheroine, both ruthless and reckless, self-driven and self-centered. Greenwood shows her forming rash judgments and steadily spiralling out of control with drink, men, meds, grief, trauma, and the constant pressure of trying to prove herself. We read on, transfixed, to find out whether this war will make her or break her.

WHEN THE MURDER MYSTERY AND THE CAMPUS SATIRE COLLIDE

The novel runs out of steam when Greenwood flashes back to Sara’s time on the home front — her affair with Michael, quality moments with her eminent journalist father, frosty exchanges with her mother. But any lost momentum is immediately restored once the focus is again on Sara floundering out of her depth in “Palestinian Death World.” She is a compelling presence, all the more so when she is repellently impatient and insensitive (“the only story we could do was sad Mohammeds talking about their dead kids and wives”) or increasingly delusional, such as her demand for her interviewee to be “the intelligent, open, reasonable terrorist to change the narrative.”

Greenwood saves her most powerful scene for the bitter end. It is during a short yet memorable confrontation that we see just how blinkered her character is and the extent to which she has overreached herself. Sharp, condemnatory words continue to resound like a warning long after we have closed the book and left behind a battle lost and won.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.