Chris Cleave Incendiary.
Knopf, 256 pages, $22.95
On July 7, the day the tube bombings killed fifty-six people, British booksellers released Chris Cleave’s Incendiary, a novel about a catastrophic suicide attack on Arsenal’s new stadium in north London. (It begins: “Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop.”) Cleave told the Guardian that the timing was “macabre,” the Telegraph that it was a “sorrowful coincidence,” and the readers of his website that “the response of Marie Fatayi-Williams to the loss of her son on 7th July is more important than anything I have written.”
Stateside, we call this damage control. Cleave’s narrator, a young working-class girl, might call it a load of bollocks. On 7/7, the refrain was London Can Take It. Are we now to believe that London can take bombs but not macabre coincidences? Moreover, must we applaud Cleave’s sentiments, while he lampoons others’ as crass fakery? Now for the million-quid question: Why should he have to apologize or explain at all, when what was worth writing on July 6 was, surely, no less valuable on July 7?
After Incendiary’s May 1 stadium attack, London’s skies are filled with barrage balloons bearing the victims’ faces. Elton John writes a song called “England’s Heart is Bleeding.” These jabs at America’s ubiquitous “fallen heroes” memorials, yellow ribbons, and boot-in-your-ass country ballads are facile, but they do raise a point—though not the one Cleave intends. No, they underscore the fact that many objections to the way we react to terror are purely aesthetic. But let’s not forget: We can’t all write a caustic novel or (when that novel might offend and sales might flag) an apologetic and self-justifying op-ed.
Here is another reason to be suspicious of Cleave. His nameless narrator, whose husband and son are killed on May Day, speaks in the rabid voice of council-flat authenticity, pouring her purifying, badly punctuated ire on both Osama and the West. His other principal, Jasper Black, is the coked-up, vacuous Telegraph writer who’s in bed with the narrator at the moment she sees the fatal explosion on television. At first, the reader thinks Jasper is a postmodern device, a self-critical surrogate for the author, who was a Telegraph writer. Then it becomes clear: this character is, as the narrator quips when she meets him, “Hugh Grant in. Well. All his films.” And, lo and behold, the book already has been optioned for the movies.
So, on the one hand, if a cable news anchor wears a flag lapel pin and it boosts ratings, it’s a national embarrassment. On the other hand, if a writer channels a poor terror widow and it sells his movie rights, it’s art. This might be a cynical complaint were Incendiary not loaded like a bomb-bay with “selling points.” It has graphic sex and, better still, graphic violence:
The arm hit the ground hand first. It tumbled end over end for a bit and then it stuck into the turf. There must of been a spike of bone or something sticking out of the arm and the spike jammed in the ground. It looked like some chippie was trying to climb out of the earth.
And that’s one of the tamer bits. I’ll be surprised, too, if the camera doesn’t linger long and lovingly on Mr. Rabbit, a blood-stained stuffed animal that makes the rounds herein like a gruesome Easter Bunny. And get ready to snicker along with the audience at a scene in which Prince William, making a photo-op visit to a hospital ward, gets the narrator’s vomit all over his shoes. (Perhaps Wills will consent to a self-effacing cameo, à la John McCain in the recent Wedding Crashers? One can only hope.)
The point, of course, is that if one is going to sneer at over-the-top displays of patriotism or hero-worship, one had better avoid over-the-top displays altogether. That goes double when such displays look and smell like marketing.
Yet Cleave knows that he can’t succeed with mere sex and violence, so his book serves up a helping of Love Conquers All. Never mind that Tom Clancy is perhaps the only living author who could write about terrorism without giving this drivel its due—does it work at all?
The book is, as its opening line suggests, addressed to Osama bin Laden. The narrator believes, or pretends she believes, that she can show him “what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind.” It is an interesting conceit, and occasionally it results in moving passages—but mostly it results in gags:
They were the kind of women that wouldn’t be seen dead without their Prada handbag and Chanel sunglasses. You’re a bit of a Knightsbridge girl yourself at heart Osama. We never see you without your AK47 and matching bullet belt I suppose Allah is big on accessories.
Nervous laughter is one thing. “If we stop joking, the terrorists win” is one thing. Page after page of soot-black comedy from a supposedly bereaved mother is another. One never escapes the fact that this “mother” is an Oxford-educated journalist, a dab hand at working-class ventriloquism who is clear-ly enjoying himself. But sounding like a character isn’t the same thing as understanding her, and so Cleave strains our credulity when he asks us to believe that a woman who didn’t love her family enough to be a faithful wife could summon the superhuman love to forgive her family’s murderers.
While love is busy conquering the hate in our narrator’s heart, the British government is busy doing ugly things like imposing a curfew and profiling Muslims. In Cleave’s Telegraph op-ed, he allowed that “The emergency services were superb. The Met was exemplary.” In Cleave’s book, his narrator learns from a lover on the police force that THEY KNEW about the May Day plot in advance and did nothing.
“The truth is braver than fiction,” said Cleave’s op-ed. No kidding—especially if the fiction in question is a porridge of paranoia, lurid fantasy, and cultural self-loathing. Chris Cleave should not have had to explain his book in the wake of 7/7. But he did have to, because, alas, he had written the wrong book. It bore no resemblance to reality. Real Britons were not, as real Americans had not been, wild animals who reacted to their fear with panic and violence. They were civilized. One hopes they remain that way, in the face of real terrorists—who understand all too well the “shape of the hole” a child can leave behind.
