Incendiary (Cleave) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
How are we left at the end of this gruesome and grueling saga? Strangely light-headed, as if we have lived through happenings in another world, a world brought brutally to life by current events. This is Chris Cleave's first novel. My imagination can't stretch to where he could go from here.
Brigitte Weeks - Washington Post


An al-Qaeda bomb attack on a London soccer match provides the tragicomic donnee of former Daily Telegraph journalist Cleave's impressive multilayered debut: a novel-length letter from an enraged mother to Osama bin Laden. Living hand to mouth in London's East End, the unnamed mother's life is shattered when her policeman husband (part of a bomb disposal unit) and four-year-old son are killed in the stadium stands. Complicating matters: our narrator witnesses the event on TV, while in the throes of passion with her lover, journalist Jasper Black. The full story of that day comes out piecemeal, among rants and ruminations, complete with the widow's shell-shocked sifting of the stadium's human carnage. London goes on high terror alert; the narrator downs Valium and gin and clutches her son's stuffed rabbit. After a suicide attempt, she finds solace with married police superintendent Terrence Butcher and in volunteer work. When the bomb scares escalate, actions by Jasper and his girlfriend Petra become the widow's undoing. The whole is nicely done, as the protagonist's headlong sentences mimic intelligent illiteracy with accuracy, and her despairingly acidic responses to events-and media versions of them-ring true. But the working-class London slang permeates the book to a distracting degree.
Publishers Weekly


Cleave's auspicious debut takes the form of a woman's letter to Osama bin Laden. A suicide bombing at a London sporting event leaves the city gripped by fear: 1000 are dead and many more irrevocably damaged by the experience. The author of the letter is a working-class woman whose husband and young son were killed in the blast. Afterward, haunted by visions of her son and other bombing victims, she teeters on the edge of reality, vacillating between hope and desperation. The narrator, whose name we never learn, goes on to develop a perverse relationship with an upper-class couple and take a job in the police department to help fight the war against terrorism. Graphic depictions of violence and gore accompany humorous reflections on life and class differences-an odd combination that makes for strangely compelling reading. —Sarah Conrad Weisman, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY 
Library Journal


A grieving widow and mother composes a letter to Osama Bin Laden. At points, Cleave's oddly elegant debut novel about the soul-corroding effects of modern terrorism seems like something George Orwell might have written during the Blitz, had he been a little less concerned with the niceties of punctuation. Cleave opens with a high-wire burst of stream-of-consciousness grief on the part of a youngish but now careworn woman whose husband and son have been killed in a horrific suicide attack on the Arsenal football stadium: "I saw the video you made Osama where you said the West was decadent. Maybe you mean the West End? We aren't all like that. London is a smiling liar his front teeth are very nice but you can smell his back teeth rotten and stinking." Sinking into her mourning, she attempts to comfort herself with the thought that at least her son died in the company of his beloved father. It is not enough; sadness gives way to denial, and denial gives way to fury as the bereaved of London begin to suspect that the government knew something about the impending carnage and did nothing to stop it. Our narrator falls in with a fiercely ambitious columnist and an investigative journalist, with whom she had a brief, formless affair before the attack. Working as a civilian in an antiterrorist police unit at Scotland Yard, and urged on by her confidants, she discovers bits and pieces of information that, just in time for a new attack, collectively do much to slip the tether off whatever small mooring she has left in the world: "It is Christmas Eve Osama and this morning I decided you were right after all.... Some people are cruel and selfish and the world would be better off without them." Who knows what? Whom can we trust? Like David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, Cleave's provocative debut will make readers a little uneasy—and that's okay.
Kirkus Reviews