Incendiary device

Despite the fortuitous date of its publication and the familiar voice of its narrator, Incendiary suffers from the demands its plot entails and the logistics of capturing an entire city slowly lapsing into chaos.

Incendiary
Chris Cleaves
Chatto & Windus
€10

Chris Cleave's first novel, Incendiary, is cursed with relevance – it's about an Islamic terrorist attack on London. By fluke and unhappy accident, the British edition of the book was published on Thursday 7 July, the day of the bombings on the London Underground and on a bus. Thus Incendiary achieved instant notoriety in England: Cleave was interviewed on the radio; his thoughts on the terror attacks were printed in newspapers; the book itself made headlines. But uncanny timing, of course, is no guarantee of a decent novel – coincidence proves nothing but itself.

Cleave's narrator is a working-class East End woman grieving over the deaths of her husband and young son in a terrorist attack at a soccer match, and the book takes the form of rambling letters to Osama bin Laden. It 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." This is an audacious, provocative voice – a bold attempt at impersonation and ventriloquism. Chris Cleave is not, needless to say, a grieving working-class East End woman: he is in fact an Oxford-educated former journalist for the Daily Telegraph, and he lives in Paris.

His narrator writes in a loosely punctuated, generally recognisable East End manner, and at times breaks into wild uppercase ranting in order to draw attention to her grief: "That's my whole point you see... Osama I just want you to give it a rest. AM I ALONE?" This tone is often convincing, even if, at times, the author's own voice isn't entirely submerged into his character's. Witness the poetic whimsy when she describes the smell of her son's room – the smell of boy – as "a cross between angels and tigers". Or when she imagines the end of the world as a time when "the sun and the stars burned out like cheap light bulbs".

Contrary to its own contrivances, Incendiary is best when Cleave forgets all about his framing device and his narrator and writes, in simple, vivid journalistic style, about the imagined aftermath of the terrorist attack: the use of barrage balloons over London, the horrors of a city curfew and the suspension of civil liberties for Muslims. He has a clear and disturbing vision of the psychological effects of an attack on a city population; he describes, for example, an enormous increase both in home improvements – "staying just busy enough so they can't feel nervous" – and in violent and transgressive sexual acts: "It was like we all became animals again"

Occasionally, powered by this bleak vision of social breakdown, the book is reminiscent of the great urban and suburban derangements of J G Ballard. An episode in which Cleave's narrator goes shopping in an upmarket women's fashion store and begins to suffer hallucinations and flashbacks is worthy of the dark master himself: "I was trying to smother the flames but all the clothes caught fire instead. It all went up in flames the Katherine Hamnett and Armani and Diane von Furstenberg it all looked the same when it was burning."

At other times, overwhelmed by the considerable demands of its plot and by the logistics of describing a city slowly sliding into chaos, the book reminds you of a made-for-TV disaster movie, or some joint British-American-produced cop show, in which hatchet-faced policemen, whose wives don't understand them, hold the front lines and declaim things like, as one policeman does here: "I like you... I like your spirit. I want people on my team who have a reason to care about the work. I want people I can trust. There's a lot of highly sensitive information floating around this place." Cleave has perhaps too acute an ear for such B-movie dialogue.

As befits good genre fiction, Cleave's characters are sustained and driven and informed by the plot, which dictates and governs all. At times the novel seems also to want to be taken seriously as a book about class, and about love and loss and betrayal, but the relentless thrust of the story wrenches these ambitions out of shape. Cleave's rather charmless narrator, unbelievably, has an affair with a yuppie journalist named Jasper and becomes drawn into a web of intrigue with Jasper's upper-class girlfriend. Even more unbelievably, the narrator ends up finding employment with the Metropolitan Police, where she then utterly, utterly unbelievably makes an unusual discovery about the bombings. In the end the book blockbusts and burns out. Incendiary arrives amid tragedy: it will doubtless end up in Hollywood.

IAN SANSOM
Ian Sansom is the author of The Impartial Recorder, a novel.

© New York Times