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.
