Incendiary

This novel is excellent. It is a compelling read that keeps you engaged from the first to the last page. I strongly recommend it but it is unique in many ways. The novel is written as one long letter to Osama bin Laden by a woman who has lost her policeman husband and 4 year old son to a terrorist bombing in London. She is a victim of international terrorism. However the strength of this exceptional book is to reveal that she is also the victim of her husband's masculine dominance and emotional distance, she is the victim of classism which permeates so many life choices, she is the victim of the paternalism of government which thinks it knows what is best for its citizens, and she is the victim of the strange bedfellows of oligarchy that direct society. Yet, the novel's great strength is to show that despite the powers that suppress and victimize the heroine of this novel, she is realistically resilient, capable of making the best out of the worst situations, open to discovery of the hidden gifts in life, and capable of forgiving. As a working class attractive young women, the heroine experienced a childhood of depravity and poverty yet is determined to give her son something better. Her husband works on the police bomb squad and is a bomb himself since he is emotionally suppressed and non-communicative with his wife, leaving her in a state of anxiety that she finds can be relieved by sexual trysts with men she meets in local pubs. She meets a smooth operator in Jasper Black, a newspaper editorial writer, who develops an obsession with her despite having an upper-class educated beautiful girlfriend, Petra, who is just as much a sexual freak as he is. Our heroine is repeatedly victimized by these two and yet she has emotional power over them due to her healing, calming, understanding inner strength. In an effort to contribute to the fight against terrorism, she approaches Terrance Butcher, her supervisor's supervisor in the police department and the head of anti-terrorism efforts. Again we see her victimized and again we see her resolve and resiliency. The book is full of dark black humor, satire, and a jaundiced perspective on human nature. This is balanced however with his un-named heroine, who gradually grieves, forgives and moves on with life. It is as if Cleave is saying that this core of human nature is our hope in a time of crass commercialism and status and international conflict. She became a symbol for London and for all humanity in personifying the ability to rebuild. Cleave gives us several references to the great fire in London and to the bombings during World War II. He reinforces this theme of rebuilding lives and ctities with his final lines where she says: "Come to be Osama. Come to me and we will blow the world back together WITH INCREDIBLE NOISE AND FURY."

An East End [of London] woman decides to write a letter to Osama bin Laden after a team of his suicide bombers wreck her life by indiscriminately blowing up the crowd at a football match, killing both her husband and her four-and-a-quarter year-old son, along with over a thousand other football fans. The letter is written, mainly in the authentic language of an East End gal, but with snippets of people from other worlds. The grammar and punctuation is appaling, but it is totally in context. She relates, to Osama, all of the events and all of her feelings from immediately before the atrocity to many months afterwards. There is a lot of humour interspersed throughout the tragedy. One of the funniest passages that I have read recently will not spoil your enjoyment of this book. It didn't smell posh in Harvey Nichols it smelled of all the different perfumes in the world very strong and mixed up together. It felt like having your throat scraped. I took my boy into John Lewis once and it smelled just like that in the perfume section. Yuk Mummy he said. It smells nice and nasty all at once. It smells of angels feet. Hilarious! I can understand why some people do not like this style of writing and cannot get into the book at all. This is a book that you will either love or hate. It is either one star or five stars plus plus. I cannot tell what it will be like for you, but I would recommend that you give it a chance. For me, it was one of the best books that I read in 2009.

This gutsy book intertwines a worst case scenario of terrorism, and a frustrated woman who has a deep insight of interpersonal relationships. She happens to become personally involved with the world of terrorism. The tradjedy of losing her husband dosent take a back seat to the horrific results of terrorism in the U.K., rather they run neck and neck in this daringly original story.

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 murd

The suicide attack killed a thousand attending the football game at Arsenal Stadium, but to the wife and mother of two victims, it is personal. Her grief has aged her and the video Osama made lauding those who killed the innocent upsets her further. The nameless widow decides to write a letter to Osama as her mourning gives her little comfort. Still her loss goes through the stages until she becomes angry that the government anticipated the attack, but did nothing to stop it. As her anger grows, she becomes a civilian working at Scotland Yard's antiterrorist unit where she learns a new strike is imminent, but it appears once again officialdom will do nothing. As she continues hermessage to Osama she believes now he is right that some people deserve to die as they are selfish but not everyone for instance why her innocent son. She now trusts no one especially not her government, the media, or her neighbor; Christmas Eve has arrived with no hope or cheer for anyone. Yes Osama you are right. This is a deep thought provoking and haunting tale that will leave the audience stunned by the impact on the living by a terrorist act. The nameless protagonist comes across as an every-person whether they are a civilian victim in Iraq, the WTC, Madrid, or London. This talented author cleaves one through the soul of the audience that even when there are sprinkles of humor they turn the plot even more provocative. Not for the faint of heart, INCENDIARY is a powerful indictment of humanity. Harriet Klausner