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the complete review - fiction

Incendiary

by
Chris Cleave

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

C- : ineffectual, muddled

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus whatsoever

  From the Reviews:

• "As a man writing in a woman's voice, Cleave isn't completely successful but he is masterful in wringing eloquence out of simple lives. It's a thought-provoking story that doesn't pretend to have answers. It works on so many visceral levels, but perhaps this is the main point" - Jeff Glorfeld, The Age
  
  
• "Incendiary soon becomes a fire-and-brimstone satire. Cleave shows us example after example of hypocrisy and iniquity in the metropolis. You soon realise that his project is to expose and extract the city's decay. (...) All this is mediated through the narrator's voice, which Cleave has tuned to a pitch-perfect degree." - Alastair Sooke, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Mr Cleave has also managed two particular, and rather old-fashioned literary achievements: a distinctive narrative voice and a captivating heroine. (...) Fiction can be a highly effective way of depicting terror. Not because terror is a better subject than others for novels (...) but because fine writing -- and Incendiary is a very fine example -- is such an eloquent human instrument." - The Economist
  
  
• "(H)e has cooked up a cockeyed plot (.....) Like other ambitious volumes in the rising tower of post-9/11 novels, Incendiary struggles to both chronicle a personal ordeal and make a grandiose statement about the world today, and succeeds at neither." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "Cleave maintains this fragile persona with engaging consistency throughout. Incendiary is written in faltering, faux-naïf prose that is sometimes richly sardonic (...) and often disarmingly poignant (.....) Most importantly, writing from a non-literary perspective enables Cleave consistently to find words in situations for which no words may commonly be found" - Alfred Hickling, The Guardian
  
  
• "(S)o timely it stings. (...) It's a wild journey, and a queasy one, and will make quite a film, with those barrage balloons flying high over the blood-filled Thames. I would choose Hieronymus Bosch to direct. But through no fault of Cleave's, Incendiary is hard to read in the wake of what actually happened, as opposed to what a novelist has imagined." - Liz Jensen, The Independent
  
  
• "He has produced something between a warning and a satire of a selfish and self-indulgent society isolated from the suffering world outside and finally paying the price when noses pressed for so long against the window give way to bombs able to shatter it." - Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Das tönt moralistisch und ist es auch; aber immerhin verpackt Cleave diese Botschaft in eine mit Brio und Biss erzählte Geschichte, die spannend zu lesen ist und dabei zeigt, dass auch hinter der viel beschworenen Front zwischen westlicher und islamischer Welt noch längst nicht alle Kämpfe ausgefochten sind." - Angela Schader, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "(I)f 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." - Stefan Beck, New Criterion
  
  
• "Incendiary 's claim on the imagination, its literary power, if it can be said to have any, is its narrator's voice. (...) It is only the narrator's voice that pulls the reader through this improbable and tiresomely knowing novel in a hurry. (...) For all the toughness of Cleave's language, his self-congratulatory vernacular, Incendiary is sunk in bathos. The vast majority of the novel is a weird cross between Monty Python and Irvine Welsh. This is because Cleave cannot let go of what he really wants to write about, which is not terrorism but class. " - Lorraine Adams, The New Republic
  
  
• "Unfortunately for a novel with such a dynamic plot, Incendiary has two main faults. The first is weak characterisation. (...) The other problem concerns narrative control. After the attack, which is memorably described, Cleave’s adherence to the epistolary format comes to seem forced. (...) He is a talented writer, but his too-slender grip on character and structure makes Incendiary a novel whose quality falls short of its ambition." - Simon Baker, New Statesman
  
  
• "For 59 pages, Chris Cleave’s Incendiary is a tour de force. (...) The plotting turns crazy. The narrator’s feeling for husband and son are simply props in a series of scenes written for a bad actress. And the woman becomes an ever stranger, unreconciled source of remedial English (...) when her alleged underprivileged status is milked for pity and spurious social commentary, all done in a kind of jazzy self-loathing that is heady and very typical of London media now, but which can lead nowhere. So it’s like Conrad as a comic book." - David Thomson, The New York Observer
  
  
• "Incendiary isn't as ludicrous a performance as Olivia Joules -- it actually aspires to satire, whereas Ms. Fielding's book just reads like some high-concept story gone horrendously awry -- but in some respects, its more serious aspirations make it the more egregious book" - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
  
  
• "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 (.....) 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. (...) In the end the book blockbusts and burns out." - Ian Sansom, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "What makes Incendiary such a poignant and compelling novel is its narrator (...) This Everywoman voice (...) is utterly believable and mesmerizing. (...) Incendiary works not only as a furiously taut evocation of grieving, unhinged mother love but as a sly political cautionary tale. Either way, it's well worth reading." - Dan Cryer, Newsday
  
  
• "(A)rguably the strangest epistolary novel ever written. (...) (Y)here's nothing opportunistic or dishonest about it. This is a haunting work of art." - Malcolm Jones, Newsweek
  
  
• "Within the first three pages, however, it's clear that Cleave has no idea who this woman is. (...) (I)t reads like the worst kind of 'issues and tissues' teen fiction, both glib and sentimental." - Hephzibah Anderson, The Observer
  
  
• "Incendiary is far from a perfect novel. The conceit of writing to bin Laden grows thin. Petal's journey (...) reads a bit too much like a Hollywood screenplay, and the secondary characters primarily serve to move the page-turning plot. But Cleave's prose style, richly elastic and pumping, rescues the novel from being overly formulaic." - Tamara Straus, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Chris Cleave triangulates the relationship between government, terrorism and the media with a confidence verging on reckless. His fast and loose handling of the big issues of our time is eye-catching, occasionally tasteless and highly readable throughout. (...) The eloquence of Cleave's heroine is equal to the atrocity which claims her family. She is by turns funny, sad, flawed, sympathetic, both damaged and indomitable, and triumphantly convincing." - Lawrence Norfolk, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Chris Cleave’s debut is two different novels jammed together: a thrillerish yarn about a British 9/11, and a tale of manipulative toffs exploiting an innocent. Fusing them proves impossible, and the device of the Bin Laden letter comes across as a futile gimmick." - John Dugdale, Sunday Times
  
  
• "If the narrator stretches our credulity, the other two main characters -- Jasper and Petra -- barely break the bounds of stereotype. (...) It may have been Cleave's intention to portray a decadent Western society as a legitimate target for satire, if not for terrorism, but the result is an emotional void at the core of the novel. Because there are no characters worth caring about, we fail to identify the world of the novel as our own." - Mike Brett, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "(A) mesmerizing tour de force: ragged, breathless, full of raw emotion, the blackest of humor and relentless action. (...) The power of this novel lies in its extraordinary momentum, which sweeps us along a concatenation of events that follow the bombing." - Brigitte Weeks, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Incendiary is (nominally) an epistolary novel, a woman living in London who has lost her husband and young son to a "9-11"-type terrorist attack telling her story in a letter addressed to Osama bin Laden -- recounting, venting, explaining, looking for catharsis and an end to the horror. The one-sentence description sounds interesting enough -- and was presumably enough to get Cleave a book contract. Unfortunately, the resulting novel does not live up to the premise.
       Divided into four parts -- one for each of the four seasons -- the letter-writer is a housewife (of working-class background) whose policeman-husband worked in bomb disposal. One Saturday he took their young son to a Premiership match -- Arsenal v. Chelsea -- and they and about a thousand other people got themselves blown to bits in a terrorist attack that came to be known as 'May Day'.
       Not surprisingly, she is deeply affected by the deaths -- and one way she (eventually) finds to deal with it is to write to Osama. And there's modest promise in Cleave's beginning, as he has her rage and reason, writing, for example, about the bounty on Osama's head:

I don't want 25 million dollars Osama I just want you to give it a rest. AM I ALONE ? I want to be the last mother in the world who ever has to write you a letter like this. Who ever has to write to you Osama about her dead boy.

The labels weren't any help either. The brands were called things like PHILOSOPHY and THEORY and IMITATION OF CHRIST. They didn't sound like clothes they sounded like the things I'd failed my GCSEs because of.)

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Links:

• Simon & Schuster

• The Age
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• BookPage
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Kirkus Reviews
• New Statesman
• The New York Times
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Observer
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Program
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch
• The Washington Post

• Official site

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       British author Chris Cleave was born in 1973.

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© 2005-2021 the complete review

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