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mccardey (Australia) (2008/06/11):
From cover: "Part thriller, part satire, part memorial to a dead child, Incendiary is a brutal and tender story that ultimately offers hope for our troubled world."
chris (Japan) (2013/03/23):
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."
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