53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliantly Blazing Book, September 7, 2005
This review is from: Incendiary (Hardcover)
In the world of post-9/11 literature, great attention has gone to Jonathan Safran Foer's EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE, Ian McEwan's SATURDAY, and Art Spigelman's IN THE SHADOW OF NO TOWERS. Now comes a first novel less pyrotechnic and histrionic than Foer's, less cold and distant than McEwan's, and less shallow and self-centered than Spigelman's, a book at once more graphically horrifying and touchingly, humanly real than any of them, and it seems to have hardly been noticed. Chris Cleave's INCENDIARY is an extraordinary work, a brilliant discourse on Western culture, class divisions, the meaning of family, and the meaning of freedom (or lack thereof) in an England (or an America) obsessively embroiled in a "war on terror."
Structurally, INCENDIARY takes the form of an extended, Dear Osama letter, written over four seasons by an anonymous, lower middle class housewife whose husband (a bomb squad member for the London police) and four-year-old son were killed in a suicide bombing at an Arsenal football match. At the very moment they were killed, she was engaged in flagrante delicto on her living room sofa with Jasper Black, a well-off social and professional climber who worked as a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. Her lengthy epistle begins as a plea for Osama to stop the terrorism - to "stop making boy-shaped holes in the world" - but evolves as a retelling of her life's downward spiral following May Day, as Londoners come to call their soccer match version of 9/11. She becomes increasingly involved with Paul and his scheming newspaper columnist girlfriend Petra Sutherland, lands a file clerking job with her husband's former boss and anti-terrorism czar Terence Butcher, and ultimately learns a horrifying truth about May Day. The pace of events accelerates in the last fifty pages (the least effective part of this book) and climaxes with another terrorism scare involving the unnamed letter-writer, Jasper, and Petra.
Not surprisingly, INCENDIARY is a book about loss, but not just loss of a husband and a son. Cleave deals with the fallout of terrorism and manmade tragedy: loss of purpose and hope, loss of sanity, loss of principles, and loss of freedom. His heroine loses her identity and seeks to replace it by becoming Petra's upper class double, while at the same time she hallucinates her son's presence and sees bodies bursting into flame or dismembering every time her anxieties flare. INCENDIARY also deals harshly with issues of class - whose lives are worth protecting and whose are expendable - in ways that strikingly foreshadow the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Cleave even takes a veiled poke at Tony Blair and George Bush through Terence Butcher's lament, "It's like the powers that be are poking sticks into the wasps' nests and my job is to run around and stop the wasps stinging us. It's never going to happen. We've simply got to stop doing just a few of the things that make these people want to murder us."
In Cleave's larger, post-May Day London, Muslims are summarily banished from working in hospitals, citizens must abide by a midnight curfew enforced by gun-toting soldiers, the Tower Bridge is closed, the radio is filled with Elton John's newest pop memorial song "England's Heart Is Bleeding" ("...that was going to be number 1 probably forever or at least until the sun and stars burned out like cheap lightbulbs and the universe ended for good and it couldn't come soon enough if you asked me but nobody did."), and the city skies are filled with searchlight-wielding helicopters and hundreds of barrage balloons haplessly called the Shield of Hope. At once a haunting image and a biting slap at post-terrorism "memorials," those barrage balloons are each decorated with the face of one of the 1,003 May Day dead, even as the sun and weather slowly reduce those images to ghostly shadows, as if London was now "defended by ghosts."
What makes INCENDIARY work, however, is not its plot but its voice. Cleave has created a proletarian, homemaking mom ("I am not paranoid I'm working-class there's a difference.") whose edgy life spent busily alphabetizing her shelves while her husband rushed to bomb disposals is shattered by eleven terrorist bombs in a football stadium. His heroine's voice feels surprisingly real, sometimes lost and despairing, other times cynical, and occasionally just desperately trying to understand Why? "Which London is it that Allah especially hates?...The SNEERING TOFFS London [or] the EVIL CRACK MUMS London I mean....I don't see how you can hate the whole of London unless you actually live here on less than 500 quid a week." Along the way, Cleave creates a series of haunting, almost apocalyptic images of a transformed London, "with Tesco bags blowing down [the street] like the ghosts of value shopping" and "cables [from the barrage balloons] disappearing up into the clouds like the weather was bolted onto them."
Cleave's genius here is also in his ambiguity, in his refusal to reduce the "Osama versus the West" struggle to simple black and white. His Londoners are all deeply flawed sinners. INCENDIARY's heroine married at five months pregnant and is a shameless philanderer, her husband and Jasper drink to excess, Jasper succumbs to a massive cocaine habit, Terence cheats on his wife, and Petra is a soulless bitch in Pradas. Cleave makes us empathize with his heroine at the same time that he makes the terrorist attack seem oddly justifiable from a fundamentalist viewpoint. Alternately tragic, poignant, hilarious, and, where it concerns big media and big government, bitterly sarcastic, INCENDIARY is a deeply moving book that deserves at least the readership garnered by Foer and McEwan. I was hooked from the opening page of this book and could hardly put it down until I had finished. INCENDIARY barely alludes to 9/11, but it may well stand as the best (and most deeply human) work of literature to address that subject. I urge you to read this unforgettable book.
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22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chronicling the corrosive aftermath of terrorism., August 6, 2005
This review is from: Incendiary (Hardcover)
Incendiary is as multifaceted, complex and enthralling a novel as I have read in a long time.
Ostensibly this book is about terrorism as represented by a massive suicide bombing at a soccer match in London. In actuality it is about the corrosive aftereffects terrorist acts have on both society and individuals both from the standpoint of dealing with the immediate trauma as well as the more subtle yet equally difficult task of reevaluating ones values and principles to confront an extraordinary yet essentially invisible evil in your own back yard.
The book examines these issues through an artifice-the novel is one long letter from a widow created by the soccer stadium blast to Osama bin laden. I have seen authors use this device before, with a tremendous lack of success, but Chris Cleave pulls it off with aplomb. His unnamed protagonist effectively reflects in her missive the complex dynamics of both her own and society's evolving reactions and responses to the terrorist act.
The book raises many deeply relevant questions. How much of what our narrator feels and acts is a reflection of the act itself or the personal betrayal she was engage din as the act took place? How much of one's values and principles does society wish to abandon to combat the terrorists?
The book also gently ties into the narrative the essentially timeless aspects of these questions. Just as Churchill was faced with the question of what to do about the knowledge he possessed of Nazi intentions (gained through breaking Nazi communications codes), i.e., do we warn people in his target areas and save lives but lose the intelligence pipeline or do we sacrifice those lives to preserve that pipeline? (he chose the latter) the London Police face similar quandaries. The tactics may be new-the war is ancient and ongoing.
The book has some of the flaws one would expect with a debut novel. Some characters appear only to disappear for no apparent reason. Some of the mechanics of the book are stilted and jarring. Not all of the characters are fully fleshed out. Normally these flaws would lead me to lower this to a 4 star rating. However, the highly skilled execution of the letter artifice along with the deeply textured and multifaceted psychological and sociological ruminations of the book, combined with its gripping prose style, overwhelm and minor flaws.
This is an awesome book that everyone in today's world need s to read.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A bracing novel about one woman's response to terrorism, December 15, 2005
This review is from: Incendiary (Hardcover)
"Incendiary" takes the form of a first-person narrative of its central protagonist, an unnamed London resident who was wife and mother to two victims of a fictional terrorist attack in Great Britain by Osama Bin Laden (ironically and creepily, however, the novel was released in Great Britain on the same day as the London commuter rail terror attacks). Taking the form of an open letter to the terrorist leader, the novel discusses all aspects of the current debate about terrorists: their motivations, the West's response, how that response now affects every aspect of our lives, and so on. The novel is strongest when it sticks to a former wife and mother honestly asking Osama Bin Laden how mass murder can make the world a better place for anyone, and gets a bit bogged down when the author injects "plot" in the later going, in the form of possible prior knowledge on the part of the British government about the attack. But through it all, the central character's realistic, heartfelt voice- sometimes angry, sometimes sarcastic, and often surprisingly humorous- holds the whole piece together and places this among the most unique and involving novels I've read in some time.
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