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Lauren Houle (Login adurand)
Forum Owner
Posted Apr 1, 2007 9:07 PM
I truly enjoyed reading Chris Cleave’s Incendiary. I read it pretty much straight through in one sitting, as I could not put it down. (Also, besides the four seasons, there weren’t really “chapters” so it was hard to find a good stopping place!)
Interestingly enough, the main character is a bundle of nerves stay-at-home mom who cleans incessantly and seems to have a form of OCD. However, she isn’t at all the perfect wife or mother. One thing that was disconcerting throughout the novel was the woman’s stoic detachment from her husband and son. Even after they were killed, she goes to look for them and then is quite depressed in the hospital but after eight weeks or so she seems to kind of get over it and move on with life. She doesn’t have that motherly or spousal devotion. She has her husband and her boy, and her life is fine, but she occasionally leaves her 4-year-old son at home while she goes down to the pub and sometimes she cheats on her husband. Towards the end of the novel, my image of her got confused abruptly when she started mentioning her son again and hallucinating his presence, but she never really did say much about her husband.
A line on page 21 brought back a memory of Oskar Schell in Foer’s “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”. “It sounds silly Osama but sometimes I’m pleased your people blew them both up together. If my boy had survived he would of missed his father. It would of made him so sad.” In my mind I envisioned a link between these two fictional families who both had been victimized by terrorist attacks. How would the stories have been different, for example if Oskar had been killed along with his father? Or if in Incendiary, “her boy” had survived the attack?
I thought it was an interesting profession that Cleave gave the husband in Incendiary- being in “bomb disposal”, and then being killed by a bombing. Even more ironic was the husband’s line on page 23, “Sometimes I wish we just let the bombs explode”, during a conversation about the loud music from the flat upstairs.
The scene around page 143 to 149 (when Petra comes over the woman’s flat to confront her about Jasper) actually reminded me of a scene from the movie Unfaithful, between Richard Gere and Olivier Martinez. Richard Gere comes over to confront his wife’s lover (Martinez) and they drink vodka straight and he asks what the adulterers do together and then Gere bashes the guy’s head in. (They were similar minus the whole murder part.) Instead of murdering her, the site of Mr. Rabbit calms Petra down and brings her back to her senses, allowing her to delve out fashion advice and take on the widow as her new makeover project. This was a point in the novel when I did find myself saying, what the heck? Especially later on when Petra insists that the narrator move in with her and Jasper. That was just weird.
Right after that last part I described, however, when I was kind of wondering where the book was going, I thought the twist was pretty creative. The fact that Terence told her how he knew that “May Day” was going to happen- it made me think about theories that have emerged alleging that the Bush administration allowed 9/11 to happen so that they could use it to initiate a war against al-Qaeda or whoever else they could possibly string to the attacks. (It was a little different because at least in the book they said it was to prevent the terrorists from knowing that there was a mole in their organization, and therefore it was, in a way, to prevent an attack that would have been much more devastating.)
It’s a very scary thought.
I did think this book was all over the place but I didn’t really mind it. It kept me interested and kept me reading. (I think my post is all over the place too, but I am just getting some initial thoughts out there to start the conversation.)
I do agree with some reviews I read that class seems to become a prevalent topic of the book rather than terrorism. I supposed we will have that debate again this week- is this a 9/11 book or not? Hahaha.
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