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A review by tasmanian_bibliophile
Incendiary by Chris Cleave
3.0
‘Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop.’
This story, of a suicide bomb impact at a London soccer stadium, was released to British bookstores on 7 Jul 2005. On the same day, terrorist bombs killed more than 50 people during London’s morning rush hour. What an eerily grisly coincidence.
The narrator of the novel is a working-class English woman and is written in the form of a letter beginning ‘Dear Osama’. Her husband and son were at the stadium and have been killed: all three remain nameless in this story. The attack takes place at a soccer match between Arsenal and Chelsea where eleven suicide bombers infiltrate the game: six wearing fragmentation bombs and five wearing incendiary bombs. And just the day before, the husband, who was a member of the bomb-disposal squad, had decided to find a safer job.
Her world collapses: she happens to be watching the game on television with a journalist from the Sunday Telegraph whom she persuades to drive her to the scene. She is injured and while recovering in hospital she is reunited with her son’s cuddly toy – Mr Rabbit.
‘Mr Rabbit survived’ she writes to Osama. ‘I still have him. His green ears are black with blood and one of his paws is missing.’
The mother leaves hospital and continues on in her own private hell, supplemented or perhaps exacerbated by an extraordinary relationship with two journalists, and then a policeman. Her continued letter to Osama provides a description of how and why her life has changed while at the same time trying to understand – trying to personalise – the man she believes is behind the attack that has devastated her life, and changed London into a near apocalyptic shell of its former self.
It’s a quick read: the momentum of events made it very hard for me to put the novel down. At the same time, while I admire the writing and could understand the despair and occasional alienation experienced by the narrator, I was never comfortable in the story. The details in the story were frequently horrific, often mundane and sometimes funny. There are no heroes in this story, just survivors.
This is the kind of novel with its own potential to haunt: cataclysmic events can never be comfortable, especially when fact and fiction collide.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
This story, of a suicide bomb impact at a London soccer stadium, was released to British bookstores on 7 Jul 2005. On the same day, terrorist bombs killed more than 50 people during London’s morning rush hour. What an eerily grisly coincidence.
The narrator of the novel is a working-class English woman and is written in the form of a letter beginning ‘Dear Osama’. Her husband and son were at the stadium and have been killed: all three remain nameless in this story. The attack takes place at a soccer match between Arsenal and Chelsea where eleven suicide bombers infiltrate the game: six wearing fragmentation bombs and five wearing incendiary bombs. And just the day before, the husband, who was a member of the bomb-disposal squad, had decided to find a safer job.
Her world collapses: she happens to be watching the game on television with a journalist from the Sunday Telegraph whom she persuades to drive her to the scene. She is injured and while recovering in hospital she is reunited with her son’s cuddly toy – Mr Rabbit.
‘Mr Rabbit survived’ she writes to Osama. ‘I still have him. His green ears are black with blood and one of his paws is missing.’
The mother leaves hospital and continues on in her own private hell, supplemented or perhaps exacerbated by an extraordinary relationship with two journalists, and then a policeman. Her continued letter to Osama provides a description of how and why her life has changed while at the same time trying to understand – trying to personalise – the man she believes is behind the attack that has devastated her life, and changed London into a near apocalyptic shell of its former self.
It’s a quick read: the momentum of events made it very hard for me to put the novel down. At the same time, while I admire the writing and could understand the despair and occasional alienation experienced by the narrator, I was never comfortable in the story. The details in the story were frequently horrific, often mundane and sometimes funny. There are no heroes in this story, just survivors.
This is the kind of novel with its own potential to haunt: cataclysmic events can never be comfortable, especially when fact and fiction collide.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith