Customer Reviews

Incendiary

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

This book is one of the most emotionally powerful books I've read in a long time. It made me want to cry at times.

The story is basically about a woman who loses her husband and son in a horrific fictional terrorist attack in London (ironically, the book was released either a day before or a day after the London Subway attacks).

The book chronicles her pain and suffering as everything she knows falls apart and she piteously tries to hold on to something, anything.

This book will seriously tear at your heart as you read it.

Imagine that you're a working class Cockney mother with a husband who detonates bombs and a young son who is four years and three months old. You stave off your anxieties about the uncertainty of your life through mindless sex encounters. Eventually, you meet a neighbor - a journalist named Jasper - and, while your husband and son are at a soccer game, you invite him to your flat. At the exact same time you are in the throes of sexual recklessness, there's a massive terrorist bomb attack at the London soccer stadium, vaporizing over one thousand people - your husband and son among them. How do you go on? How do you live with the remorse?

Chris Cleave explores that question in an epistolary structure; the nameless woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the attack. The epistolary form is used with caution as a framing device (Nicole Krauss's The Great House and Moshid Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist come to mind), because it is not easy to pull off. The reader is a fly-on-the-wall and can choose to connect with the narrator - or not. And if truth be known, Mr. Cleave is not entirely successful in his narrative control as the conceit of writing to Osama begins to wear thin.

What he is successful with is developing a fragile persona - an obsessive woman who is gradually unraveling as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder and who is quickly spiraling downward. The anonymity of the character makes her everywoman, trying to survive in a post-terrorist world. The woman writes, "Before you bombed my boy Osama I always through an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops...I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop."

The bombing and PSTD, though, is only the beginning. London is quickly transformed into a virtual occupied territory as the woman fights her own inward battles. She is drawn into a psychological maelstrom with Jasper and his fiancée, Petra, an upper-class fashion journalist who happens to resemble her closely.

Indeed, Petra and the narrator may very well represent two parts of London, which is described as "a smiling liar his front teeth are very nice but you can smell his back teeth rotten and stinking." Each cannot exist without the other. And so they enter a danse-a-deux of symbiosis and betrayal. Eventually, the novel veers toward a stunning denouement and an over-the-top ending.

It's extraordinary ambitious for a first-time novelist (this book was written before Chris Cleave's more well-known Little Bee) and sometimes the prose comes across as rather self-congratulatory or forced. Mr. Cleave's intention, it seems, is to portray a decadent Western society that struggles to break free of its class distinctions - without success, setting itself up as something to tear down. Yet at the core of the novel, there is an emotional void. The characters are not quite satirical, yet not quite real. And as a result of the epistolary form, we, as readers, are held at arm's length, not quite embracing them.

This often disturbing, sometimes macabre novel has its own intriguing history. The morning after its initial launch party, in July 0f 2005, three suicide bombers detonated their devices in the London Underground. The book tour was shelves and the novel was temporarily withdrawn from sale by many UK retailers. Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction. And in Chris Cleave's world, fiction is very strange indeed.

The city of London has suffered a devastating terrorist attack, with over one thousand of its inhabitants innocently slaughtered. The city is now under siege - nightly curfews have been enacted, Moslems interned and banned from working in public service industries, helicopters are constantly patrolling overhead, and above the city hangs a series of gigantic barrage balloons, the images of the victims forever embedded on them; hung, ostensibly to remind people of the terrible tragedy, but also to prevent terrorists from running planes into the city's landmarks.

Against this terrifying background, a narrator, simply called Petal, writes a letter to Osama Bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist. Petal's world is simple; she's a working-class woman, who lives in a flat of dirty East End brick tower blocks "that smell of chip fat inside." Petal is also wife to a police bomb disposal expert, mother to a four-year-old boy and, fond of casual sex.

One day, our heroine is watching football match on television, while she has sex with a gutless cynic, Jasper Black, a Sunday Telegraph journalist who gets turned by Petal's working class ways. Suddenly, eleven-suicide bombers strike and she sees her husband, son, and a thousand other people instantly incinerated in front of her. Desperate to save her family, Petal races to the scene, but she is injured and ends up spending eight weeks in a London hospital.

Upon her release Petal's life is never the same. Plagued with ghostly images of her young son being consumed by flames and begging for her help, Petal seeks solace with Jasper and his pompous and striving upper-class girlfriend Petra, while she's also comforted by Terrence Butcher, her late husband's boss. Petal is fraught with grief, and unable to cope with her loss. Her journey is one of insanity, mixed with inconsolable defeat and the only way she can cope is to entreat confidences to Osama Bin Laden, telling him "I am a mother Osama I just want you to love my son."

Questions of good and evil, justice and revenge permeate this violent, timely, and trenchant tale. As Petal postulates the nature of this madness, that "fills the sky with barrage balloons and people's eyes with hate," she becomes almost paralyzed with sorrow: "I can't think of anything else for one second. And I'm so scared all the time. I look at people and I see them blown to bits." To Petal, every teaspoon that drops now sounds like bombs, and she's scared to carry on even for one more day.

Petal now lives in a London that has turned itself into police state, becoming a misty floating city with the thousand thick cables of the balloons lifting it into the sky. Yet with all her angst and grief, Petal remains steadfast in challenging Osama and the nature of terrorism. The terrorists may be able to topple the office blocks like dominoes, make the Thames run red, and murder with impunity, "but I will only build myself again and stronger/ I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself."

Author, Chris Cleave has a richly resilient, pumping, and fast-paced style and he deftly weaves the themes of terrorism, class, media, and government cover-ups into the narrative. The pacing never lets up as Petal is thrust from one terrifying situation to another. Her world is left reeling: She watched as her husband and child were torn to bits by rusty nails and bolts flying through the air at supersonic speed, yet the flash of terror is never over because the fire has caught hold inside her, and the noise will never stop. It's a fire that much like the scourge of terrorism keeps roaring on with incredible noise and fury. Mike Leonard August 05.

I listened to this novel on CD, narrated by Susan Lyons. What a fabulous job! This story was about the pain and the passion of the main character, who had lost her son and husband in a terrorist bombing--Ms. Lyons translated all of this pathos elegantly, missing none of the anger, the incredulity, the bitterness, the near-lunacy of the grieving woman. I think I would've have missed some of the nuance of this novel if I'd read it myself instead of listened to this fine narration.

I'm really glad I didn't listen to some of the negative reviews I read on here. I just finished this book and I absolutely loved it. One of the best books I've read in a while. I enjoyed Little Bee and I wanted to read more by Chris Cleave. It was a little difficult to get the hang of reading this book. The narrator and main character of the book is clearly not a literary genius, so Cleave didn't write his book that way. Thoughts were choppy and sentences were run ons. But that's what made it unique and real. Once I got used to the writing style, I actually enjoyed this book more than Little Bee. I definitely recommend this book to someone who is open to a different type of book. However, if you are looking for something similar to Little Bee, this is not the book for you.

This story, of a suicide bomb impact at a London soccer stadium, was released to British bookstores on 7 Jul 2005. On the same day, terrorist bombs killed more than 50 people during London's morning rush hour. What an eerily grisly coincidence.

The narrator of the novel is a working-class English woman and is written in the form of a letter beginning `Dear Osama'. Her husband and son were at the stadium and have been killed: all three remain nameless in this story. The attack takes place at a soccer match between Arsenal and Chelsea where eleven suicide bombers infiltrate the game: six wearing fragmentation bombs and five wearing incendiary bombs. And just the day before, the husband, who was a member of the bomb-disposal squad, had decided to find a safer job.
Her world collapses: she happens to be watching the game on television with a journalist from the Sunday Telegraph whom she persuades to drive her to the scene. She is injured and while recovering in hospital she is reunited with her son's cuddly toy - Mr Rabbit.

`Mr Rabbit survived' she writes to Osama. `I still have him. His green ears are black with blood and one of his paws is missing.'

The mother leaves hospital and continues on in her own private hell, supplemented or perhaps exacerbated by an extraordinary relationship with two journalists, and then a policeman. Her continued letter to Osama provides a description of how and why her life has changed while at the same time trying to understand - trying to personalise - the man she believes is behind the attack that has devastated her life, and changed London into a near apocalyptic shell of its former self.

It's a quick read: the momentum of events made it very hard for me to put the novel down. At the same time, while I admire the writing and could understand the despair and occasional alienation experienced by the narrator, I was never comfortable in the story. The details in the story were frequently horrific, often mundane and sometimes funny. There are no heroes in this story, just survivors.

This is the kind of novel with its own potential to haunt: cataclysmic events can never be comfortable, especially when fact and fiction collide.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

London is reeling from the latest suicide bomb attack launched by terrorists. The Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal football club, has been blown to smithereens during the last game of the season on May Day. Within hours the surrounding streets of the city are closed, bridges across the Thames heavily policed and all traffic along the river terminated in case of additional attacks.
Over the next few weeks the death toll grows to over one thousand as England mourns her dead. Prince William tours the ward at Guy's Hospital where many of the survivors of the bombing are hospitalized while top, government officials hide behind their advance knowledge of the attack.
"Incendiary" is narrated as a letter to Obama by a widow of a police officer, killed at the game that he took their four-year old son to. As she grieves she writes a letter advising Bin Laden of all he is responsible for. The story told with the grim humor of the British working class often delights in it's madness and alternatively brings tears as she bravely tackles her new world, alone and with some degree of insanity.
The awfulness of the story and its proximity of London often reminded me, in its wonderful deliberate descriptive passages, of Chris Obani's novella "Becoming Abigail". When she describes the aftermath of the blast, the tower of smoke arising from the rubble as "angry and urgent like it was late for something" we feel the heat and smell the fumes. Her poignant description of her child as "boy is a good smell it is a cross between angels and tigers" you can understand the fierce love she has for her son.
Cleave's debut novel leaves one spell-bound as he takes us along for the mad dash on to Lambeth Bridge and tramples us over the edge into the river and immerses us in his break-through thriller.
Incendiary: A Novel