Incendiary

Terror Fiction

A working-class woman narrates Chris Cleave's epistolary novel. Suicide bombers have killed her husband, their four-year-old son, and a thousand others during a soccer match at a London stadium. She writes to Osama bin Laden, thinking that if she can make him see her son "with all your heart for just one moment," his attacks will stop. The letter, and the novel, begins:

Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop. Well I wouldn't know about that I mean rock 'n' roll didn't stop when Elvis died on the khazi it just got worse. Next thing you know there was Sonny & Cher and Dexys Midnight Runners. I'll come to them later. My point is it's easier to start these things than to finish them. I suppose you thought of that did you?

There's a reward of 25 million dollars on your head but don't lose sleep on my account Osama. I have no information leading to your arrest or capture. I have no information full effing stop. I'm what you'd call an infidel and my husband called working-class. There is a difference you know. But just supposing I did clap eyes on you. Supposing I saw you driving a Nissan Primera down towards Shoreditch and grassed you to the old bill. Well. I wouldn't know how to spend 25 million dollars. It's not as if I've got anyone to spend it on since you blew up my husband and my boy.

That's my whole point you see. I don't want 25 million dollars Osama I just want you to give it a rest. AM I ALONE? I want to be the last mother in the world who ever has to write you a letter like this. Who ever has to write to you Osama about her dead boy.

The publication date of Incendiary in Britain was July 7th, the very day on which suicide bombers killed fifty-six people on a London bus and three subway trains. On the same day Chatto & Windus, the novel's British publisher, and Waterstone's, the English bookstore chain, withdrew Incendiary's advertising. Throughout the London Underground, posters promoting the novel were already in place. Like the book's cover, they depicted a burning London with the Thames turned red and above it a barrage balloon bearing a picture of a schoolboy. In some posters, there are quite a number of these blimps dotting the skyline. The surreal zeppelins communicate a satirical pseudo-future. No one could mistake the scene for reality. As for terrorism, it's hard to see any.

The same might be said of the novel. To be sure, dear reader has been replaced by Osama, Osama, Osama. Yet Incendiary's claim on the imagination, its literary power, if it can be said to have any, is its narrator's voice. The book is ungrammatical, poorly punctuated, tasteless, and hyperactively honest. Its roughness is supposed to vouch for its authenticity, I suppose. Its cultural references are from television and the tabloids. The narrator's husband, a "copper" for Scotland Yard's bomb disposal unit, is "a QUIET HERO." The narrator, who confesses at once her tendency to sleep around, is "a DIRTY LOVE CHEAT." And from this highly affected voice -- for all these badges of authenticity do finally leave an impression of artifice -- comes a mode of introspection that is fantastically misinformed and sometimes morbidly fascinating.

Sex is not a beautiful and perfect thing for me Osama it is a condition caused by nerves. Ever since I was a young girl I get so anxious. It only needs a little thing to get me started. Your Twin Towers attack or just 2 blokes arguing over a cab fare it's all the same.... I just need something very soft and secret and warm to make me forget it for a bit ... It was one of my mum's boyfriends who showed me but I won't write his name or he'll get in trouble. I suppose he was a SICK CHILD PREDATOR but I still remember how lovely it felt.... I'm not proud I know it's not an excuse and I've tried so hard to change but I can't.

When her husband is out on a dangerous job one night and she has exhausted her usual obsessive-compulsive coping strategies, such as alphabetizing the contents of her freezer, she leaves her son alone to get a drink at the pub. There she meets three Hugo Boss-wearing, Starbucks-patronizing men, or "SNEERING TOFFS." She remarks that many such toffs "have these little excited eyes like they've got a chinchilla up their bum like Hugh Grant in. Well. All his films."

One toff, Jaspar Black, a columnist for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, has "nice eyes," and looks "almost human." Black has moved to her East London neighborhood, which is now "An Upcoming Bohemian Melting Pot With Excellent Transport Links." Hence, she explains to the Saudi "EVIL MONSTER," owners of "flats in dirty brick tower blocks that smell of chip fat," such as herself and her Vauxhall Astra-owning husband, are forever boxed in by the Aston Martin owners who live in their "Georgian Gems With Extensive Potential." Despite their socio-economic differences, the narrator and Jaspar manage sex together after the pub closes. A few days later, with her husband and son at the fateful soccer match, she runs into Jaspar on the street. They go back to her flat. While sharing intercourse on the couch, with the soccer game on the television, the explosion goes off -- yes, just as they do.

It is only the narrator's voice that pulls the reader through this improbable and tiresomely knowing novel in a hurry. It is the sort of voice that certain kinds of critics like to describe as a tour de force; a focus-pulling performance. You realize how awful this voice and what it's telling you are, but it has got you, as the narrator would put it, by the "pubes."

From ad copy to sonnet, every piece of writing can be said to have a voice. These days literary voice is usually considered best when it is idiosyncratic, even eccentric, and thus, recognizable. Voice, in the novel, is now a variety of branding. It is often presumed to be innate; we talk about a writer "finding his voice." But more often than not, voice is contrived, and calls attention mainly to itself. It functions in a novel the way melody sometimes does in pop music: when a tune is catchy, the rest of the song matters less. In fiction, a distinctive voice can ameliorate -- or disguise -- troubles in character and plot.

Voice certainly functions this way in Incendiary. Its best passages are lit with the narrator's incapacity for piety.

London is a city built on the wreckage of itself Osama. It's had more comebacks than The Evil Dead. It's been flattened by storms and flooded out and rotted with plague. Londoners just took a deep breath and put the kettle on. Then the whole thing burned down. Every last stick of it. I remember my mum took me to the Monument to the Great Fire. London burned WITH INCREDIBLE NOISE AND FURY is what the monument has written on it. People thought it was the end of the world. But the Londoners got up the next day and the world hadn't ended so they rebuilt the city in 3 years stronger and taller. Even Hitler couldn't finish us though he set the whole of the East End on fire. Bethnal Green was like hell my grandma said. Just one endless sea of flames. But we got through it. We built on the rubble.

This is welcome, certainly, after the odd and peculiarly fey narrator of Jonathan Safran Foer's recent novel, a precocious tambourine-playing nine-year-old who has lost his father in the World Trade Tower attacks.

In Incendiary, the narrator's voice is most persuasive in solitude -- sleepless in her hospital bed, and, in the most affecting portion of the novel, discharged from the hospital walking the streets of London on her way home.

My body was mostly healed. I was carrying Mr. Rabbit and 2 bottles of valium in an Asda carrier bag. It was not warm and not cold. There was no wind and the sky was very low and grey but it wasn't raining. It was like they'd completely run out of weather. I was wearing my white Adidas trackie bottoms. White Pumas. Red Nike T-shirt with the big white tick. I could have been anyone. It was a great comfort.

After getting off a bus, she sees a woman with a boy in a newsstand across the street.

I went straight across the road with my crutch. A cab nearly killed me. The cabbie screeched his brakes and he called me a stupid slapper. I couldn't of cared less. I went in the newsagent's and I saw my boy straight away. He had his back to me. He was on his own looking up at the drinks fridge. The woman was at the counter buying ciggies. I went straight up to my boy. I dropped my crutch and the carrier bag. I turned my boy round I kissed his face. I picked him up and I gave him a huge hug and I buried my face in his neck.

-- Oh my boy my brave boy my lovely boy.

The boy is not her boy. His mother is upset. He is kicking and screaming. The narrator apologizes and limps away. Thereafter in the novel, the narrator sees her son with increasing frequency, sometimes in flames, sometimes disfigured, sometimes carrying his stuffed rabbit. She eventually descends into the permanent delusion that he is alive and that she is taking care of him in her flat.

For all the toughness of Cleave's language, his self-congratulatory vernacular, Incendiary is sunk in bathos. The vast majority of the novel is a weird cross between Monty Python and Irvine Welsh. This is because Cleave cannot let go of what he really wants to write about, which is not terrorism, but class. The strange accomplishment of this urgent novel about the human consequences of jihadist terrorism is to make jihadist terrorism seem less urgent. For Cleave is more indignant about, more exercised by, something else. His talent for hammerhead satire ends up making terrorism feel copied and pasted into a novel about class. Worse, set against the subject of terrorism, the amount of energy Cleave expends in indicting his sneering toffs feels rather like the repeated flattening of a feather with a mallet during an earthquake.

This is jarringly evident in the scenes just after the explosion. As Jaspar yanks on his clothes in front of the television that has just broadcast the carnage, his first thought is getting back to the newspaper. "It'll be all hands to the pump this is huge," says he. The narrator, "standing there all skin and pubes and tears," is hysterically determined to find her son and husband. It's empty careerism for him, uncalculating family love for her. She begs him to drive her to the stadium to find her son and husband. As realism has no purchase in this allegedly hard-boiled book, Cleave efficiently gets the narrator past the ambulances, firemen, police, fire, and smoke and into the stadium. She climbs through the mucilage of blood, puke, body clots, and corpses. But what does she find at the end of this journey? A fan wearing an Arsenal shirt fighting with a fan in a Chelsea shirt, "big lads with bellies.... YOBS THAT GIVE FOOTBALL A BAD NAME."

The one in the Arsenal shirt was burned very bad you could see the bone showing through his arm. The one in the Chelsea shirt had mostly lost an ear it was hanging off the side of his head upside down. The Arsenal man hit the Chelsea man in the face with his fist and he grabbed a big lump of something the Chelsea one had been carrying. The Chelsea one fell but he stood up again and he kicked the Arsenal man in the privates. Kicked him so hard he dropped the lump again and the Chelsea man grabbed it. Can't you see he's Arsenal you wanker? the Arsenal man shouted. He's one of ours. No shouted the Chelsea man I know who this is we paid 4 million for him last year. Bollocks you did the Arsenal man shouted and he hit the Chelsea man in the stomach and grabbed for the lump but he missed and it rolled across the turf towards me.

When she sees that the lump is the head of a soccer player, she passes out, perhaps because Cleave cannot or does not wish to push his imagination past this dismemberment burlesque. It is a puerile turn. And this sort of thing happens often in Incendiary, sometimes alongside some of its strongest passages, such as the hospital scenes and the narrator's walk across London.

Cleave cannot resist an opportunity for send-up, for a vulgar Swiftianism. He even places the novel's most emotional moment in the middle of one. One day Prince William is scheduled to visit the narrator's hospital ward. The windows have been washed, high-tech medical equipment wheeled in, the narrator made right with lipstick and mascara. Suddenly, a woman in a tweed suit pulls the privacy curtain around the narrator's bed and tells her that her son and husband's dental records have confirmed their deaths. The woman leaves, Prince William approaches the narrator's bed, and the cameras draw close as she pukes on his shoes. "I felt so bad. The smell of my puke was rising from the floor. He smiled at me but you could still see him thinking I am the prince of puke and one day I will be king of it."

Cleave decides to focus the novel's latter half on the narrator's relationship with Jaspar and his live-in girlfriend, Petra Sutherland, a fashion columnist. Every episode drives home the same moral. The narrator is poor and ignorant but honest and loving; in sum, real. They are rich and educated, but dishonest and loveless; in sum, phony. And so, when the narrator finally opens the door to her flat for the first time since the day her son and husband died, what greets her are the sounds of Jaspar and Petra having sex in her living room. Petra is in pink stilettos on her hands and knees, playing at being the narrator, calling Jaspar a "posh bugger," while he takes her from behind, whacks her ass red, and calls her "a dirty working class slut."

The narrator politely waits for them to climax on her sofa before saying hello. When Petra and the narrator finally get a look at each other, they see they could be twins. "It was her eyes that made me gasp," the narrator says. "They were my eyes it was as simple as that." Petra occupies scene after scene. Jaspar stalks the narrator. Petra accuses the narrator of stealing Jaspar. Petra realizes Jaspar raped the narrator. Petra apologizes with a shopping spree for the narrator at Harvey Nichols. The narrator moves in with Petra and Jaspar. She dresses like and starts to talk like her. Jaspar mistakes her for Petra.

Incendiary is Cleave's first published novel. He was at work on another when the Madrid bombings occurred. "I was so sickened that I stopped writing the novel I was on and began Incendiary," he said in an interview. He described the abandoned manuscript as a comedy set in 1980s Brooklyn about an undertaker and his wife, a pornographer. Incendiary would be different. "I wanted to write something very personal, a very simple human story about a victim."

Cleave has made his living as a rave party organizer in Europe, a sailor on the Mediterranean, a bartender in Melbourne, and an online staffer at lastminute.com and The Daily Telegraph, Jaspar and Petra's employer. At some point in his travels, he returned to London and found not so much the aftershocks of Madrid or the war on terror but something he had not seen before: "the scorn with which the middle class now hold the working class. People are called 'chavs' and 'pikeys,' which is a way of saying working class," as he told The Telegraph. "Why is it suddenly acceptable for middle-class people to go, 'Oh, they're so chavvy?' It really, really offends me. I realize that my life is a hundred times easier just by being born into the middle classes. I can do things like be a writer. There's this incredibly judgmental culture that seems to have arrived recently. There are now these websites called 'chavscum,' with pictures of working-class people."

Incendiary's narrator, before she describes anything about her boy, advises Osama bin Laden to look up these websites. It is only the novel's second page and she is asking him to put down the Kalashnikov and Google chav, pikey, ned, and townie. Indeed, these websites, with their cameraphone photos of the lower classes accompanied by hate-rich commentary, are vitriolic in a way that only British ridicule can be. They are certainly more disturbing than the posters for Incendiary that the book's promoters took down on July 7. They are only slightly more depressing than the fact that the manuscript of Incendiary captivated fifteen publishers worldwide and landed a film deal.

Still, none of this cultural foible means much beside the fifty-six dead in London, and thousands upon thousands dead in Madrid, New York, Washington, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The artistic impoverishment that produces novels such as this one is not the worst affliction that we now suffer. Thinking like Cleave doesn't kill anybody. It merely allows the pornographer of his morbid imagination to come cleverly to life.

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