Incendiary

A distraught woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden after her four-year-old son and her husband are killed in a massive suicide bomb attack at a football match in London. In an emotionally raw voice alive with grief, compassion and startling humour, she tries to convince Osama to abandon his terror campaign by revealing to him the desperate sadness and the broken heart of a working-class life blown apart. But the bombing is only the beginning. While security measures transform London into a virtual occupied territory, the narrator too finds herself under siege. At first she gains strength by fighting back, taking a civilian job with the police to aid the anti-terror effort. But when she becomes involved with an upper-class couple, she is drawn into the psychological maelstrom of guilt, ambition and cynicism that erodes her faith in the society she's working to defend. And when a new bomb threat sends the city into a deadly panic, she is pushed to acts of unfathomable desperation-perhaps her only chance for survival.

Wow. That is probably how I would sum up my experience with this novel, which I read in about five hours flat having just finished To Kill A Mockingbird.

I read Chris Cleave's second novel The Other Hand (also titled Little Bee) last summer, and have been keen to read his debut since. Cleave clearly doesn't mind dealing with tough subjects; whilst The Other Hand explored immigration and foreign politics, Incendiary deals with terrorism and class warfare, to name only a couple. So whilst it is in no way a 'light' read it's brilliantly paced, which means that you can make your way through the book quickly, but still have chance to pause and think about the issues that Cleave has presented.

The novel is told in letters to Osama Bin Laden written by the unnamed (I think) narrator, a working class woman living in London. The narrative is therefore void of much grammar, due to the fact that the woman doesn't necessarily have the best grasp of the English language. The lead character is also not the nicest woman in the world either; she's obsessive and she has affairs to remove her anxiety about her husband, yet Cleave still manages to make her compelling and keep you interested in her story. The same is true of Jasper Black and Petra Sutherland, the aforementioned middle class couple; she has an affair with Jasper (she's having sex with him when the bomb explodes that kills her husband & son) and Petra becomes involved when she is desperate not to let him go. Both are journalists for the Telegraph (a Conservative UK paper), and both are pretty slimy. Yet still, they are interesting characters faced with some hard choices.

The novel is a fascinating look into 'what might be' if there was to be a massive terror attack on London; it was published only a few days before the 7/7 bombings. Fortunately, the government didn't react in quite the way that Cleave's does; which is to introduce curfews and barrage balloons over London. Whilst the novel does lose it's way a little in the last few pages; it gets a bit overwrought and there are some slightly unbelievable events that that take place; in general Cleave's exploration of people's reactions after a horrific event is fascinating; especially his reasoning on Islamophobia and post-traumatic stress which the main character definitely suffers from-to the point that she actually 'sees' her son.

I highly recommend reading this, and not watching the 2008 film which is entirely different from this. Cleave has a brilliant ability to deal with big topics in a compelling way; and to also create female characters that are really believable.