Books like Incendiary

There are several major elements to Incendiary, the wonderful book Chris Cleave wrote well before he became known for Little Bee. First a tough, working-class, London mom loses her bomb-squad husband and four-year-old son when terrorists bomb a packed soccer stadium, suffering injuries herself in attempting to find them immediately after the event. The unnamed narrator has to decide whether life is worth living. Her grief, and PTSD is manifest in hallucinations. She sees her dead son with increasing frequency and clarity as the story progresses. Chris Cleave - from The TelegraphHer life is complicated. She sees a well-to-do, but very confused and conflicted journalist who is smitten with her, then later a high-ranking cop with whom she works. She suffers an identity crisis, allowing herself to be re-shaped by others, trying on personae in attempting to figure out who she is after the trauma.Second, Cleave wrote this novel in a six-week marathon after the 2004 Madrid bombings, but before the 2005 bombings in London. Part of what he presents is his vision of how the UK might respond if faced with a major terrorist attack. We can look back from 2011 to see what he might have missed and what he got right. It’s an ugly war and there’s no honour in it. But we will win because we have to. It’s a war we win by ditching our principles. By interning people who are high risk. By listening to private phone calls. The narrator offers counterpoints with sympathy for the Muslims she knows, hard-working people like herself, a danger to no one. Third is Cleave’s portrayal of class in Britain. The book is filled with the tension of working-class people in almost alien worlds alongside their own. Examples abound Tessa comes with rather a lot of baggage. Breeding. Family money. The people who have it aren’t like you and me. They’ll be polite enough to you. But try to get too close and they’ll put back the distance. Try to step inside their circle and they’ll close ranks. Us and them are not the same species. Don’t make the same mistake I made. Don’t ever get involved with the upper classes.While Cleave shines a bright light on class differences, he takes pains not to idealize anyone. London, post attack, puts up barrage balloons around the city, familiar from World War II, useful for forcing incoming aircraft to higher altitudes, their steel cables a disincentive to low-level flight. The balloons in this story bear the images of people lost in what is called the May Day attack. They hadn’t chosen very nice people for the balloons round Hyde Park anyway. The faces were mostly fat blokes who looked like they could tuck the pints away. They were the sort of blokes who’d call each other by nicknames like oi Baz and oi Todger, and you could imagine them pinching your bum at a New Year’s Eve party. Saying How about it darling? It was funny seeing those dead fat blokes 500 feet up in the air saving us from kamikazes. It might have been the first decent thing they’d done in their lives most of them.There is a shortage of punctuation in the novel. It enhances Cleave’s characterization of his narrator as a less than well-educated person. He even notes it, with a nod and a wink, when she is looking at a job possibility with the police. You might need to type up incident reports from time to time. They read like SUSPECT WAS APPREHENDED AT 0630 WIELDING A SHARPENED SPOON. That stuff needs commas like Covent Garden needs a gardener. Anyway we’re not writing literature here. We’re trying to stop people bombing people.The story takes place over the course of a year, with book sections for each of the seasons, as the narrator comes through a full cycle of change to arrive where she does at the end. The format is of a sort of epistolary novel. The narrator does not actually write letters to Osama bin Laden, but speaks as if she were, addressing him throughout her tale, decrying his actions, particularly sharing her pain at the loss of her son.This is a very engaging story. I was hooked from the first, and read it quite fast. I truly felt for this wounded mother. How would I feel if my mate and one or all of my children had been taken away so harshly? There are times in the book when one would be well-advised to keep the Kleenex handy. And there are others when Cleave gives us reason to laugh out loud. I have one significant gripe with the book. I thought Cleave went way too far with his ending. It seemed forced to me. But that aside, the journey, which makes up the bulk here, is very well worth the time. =============================EXTRA STUFFLinks to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages