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.
In response to the end of your post, Lauren, I was not at all intrigued or fascinated by this book. Though the book was very well written and it seems like it would take a lot of focus and concentration to write in such a manner, the entire focus of the book seemed off. I understand that the novel is attempting to capture the anger and rage of those who lost family members in a terrorist incident, but this question seems to re-appear throughout most of our recent texts, unless you are a survived victim or lost someone to a terrorist encounter, how can you even pretend to understand what they felt? It seems logical that one would be able to interview the family members of the victims or the survived victims themselves, but a first-hand account of the encounter is the only one that can be considered accurate or non-fiction. I hate to reignite the debate we had last Wednesday but I feel that the fiction books are not nearly as important or informative. I commend the book for the style it was written in, but the overemphatic use of rage as a central theme seemed unnatural to me.
It seems to me that you're making a colossally important point here - and I appreciate the gracious way you have put it.
You write that "unless you are a survived victim or lost someone to a terrorist encounter, how can you even pretend to understand what they felt?".
It's absolutely the most central question you could pose about my novel, or anyone else's for that matter. Certainly it's a question any fiction writer needs to have an answer to before taking on terrorism as a theme. My answer is that first of all there two basic things a writer needs to get right: to be respectful to the real casualties and survivors, and to accept that one is not speaking on their behalf.
Given that those two criteria are met, one can move on to the question of whether a writer of fiction can contribute anything constructive to the debate around terrorism that could not have been achieved through non-fiction. My answer is yes, and for three reasons.
First, the real survivors are not necessarily inclined to write at length about their experiences. They're not necessarily good at it either. They deserve our support, our understanding, and our attention. Do they deserve three hundred pages worth of our reading time? Only in rare cases. I was lucky enough last weekend to meet one of those rare cases, Professor John Tulloch, who was badly injured in the Edgware Road bombing in London on 7th July 2005. Professor Tulloch is an extraordinary man who has written a book ("One Day in July: Experiencing 7/7") of great power and insight about his personal experience of a terrorist attack. He is both a survivor and a first-class communicator, and this is an extremely rare combination. I think Professor Tulloch would be the first to agree that his survivor status gives him a unique perspective on terrorism, rather than a monopoly on its representation in writing.
I would suggest that only good writing deserves good reading time, regardless of its provenance. I think if a writer feels that they can effectively communicate something of what is lost and gained by the human heart in a time of terror, then they should not be deterred by any misplaced notions of reverence from having a go.
Second, I would argue that fiction performs a valuable office of intermediation between the theme of terrorism and the survivor of real terrorist actions. The effect is to shift the emphasis from the personal to the universal in such a way that the reader can imagine the effect of terrorism on their own life, or can debate and disagree with a point the writer makes much more readily than they might disagree with a real survivor. If someone who has had her family killed tells you she is full of rage, then you just have to accept that. If a fiction writer presents you with a character who has had her family killed and who is full of rage, you are permitted, and even duty-bound, to question whether there might be an overemphasis on rage. You can explore rage, and decide for yourself whether rage is an appropriate or helpful response in this character's situation. In this way fiction lets the issues around terrorism be debated in a safe environment, once-removed from the world of real, fragile lives.
Thirdly, finally, and perhaps more esoterically, I suggest that there is a level of personal truth that both fiction and non-fiction can achieve. This is the truth that resonates with the reader when they look at a character's actions and think, yes, that is what I would have done, or yes, that is how I would have felt. Sometimes it is empathy, rather than strict accuracy, that a reader is looking for.
Of course I fully agree that empathy on its own is insufficient, and anyone who builds their world view entirely on the basis of what they read in fiction will be a strange character indeed - who someone should probably write a book about in fact...
Sean,
Not really sure what you meant by your post when you addressed the end of mine. I didn't really argue that the book was focused at all, in fact I did state that it was "all over the place". Maybe I did enjoy the book and you did not, is what you meant.
I don't feel that Cleave was necessarily pretending to understand what family members of victims felt.... but this is a fictional book and it must be acknowledged as fiction.
"In response to the end of your post, Lauren, I was not at all intrigued or fascinated by this book. Though the book was very well written and it seems like it would take a lot of focus and concentration to write in such a manner, the entire focus of the book seemed off. I understand that the novel is attempting to capture the anger and rage of those who lost family members in a terrorist incident, but this question seems to re-appear throughout most of our recent texts, unless you are a survived victim or lost someone to a terrorist encounter, how can you even pretend to understand what they felt? It seems logical that one would be able to interview the family members of the victims or the survived victims themselves, but a first-hand account of the encounter is the only one that can be considered accurate or non-fiction. I hate to reignite the debate we had last Wednesday but I feel that the fiction books are not nearly as important or informative. I commend the book for the style it was written in, but the overemphatic use of rage as a central theme seemed unnatural to me."
There is a famous quote, I can't remember it exactly, but to paraphrase: you can't set out to write good guys and bad guys, black and white, to make convincing characters you must let them be a little of both. Cleave plays with this idea a good deal in his novel. None of the characters are morally "clean," which makes them interesting. A cheating wife should not be sympathetic, but in this novel, she is not only someone you can understand, but someone I found myself rooting for in the end (I defy someone to tell me they didn't want her to torch Petra!). I even felt bad for Jasper when he embarked on his ill-thought out attempt at redemption and that is saying a lot for a character who does the things he tries.
These characters give way to a wonderful level of moral ambiguity that runs throughout the novel. But at the same time, there is a distinct air of cynicism as well. I mean, England essentially becomes an Orwellian police state after the attack. So I have some questions for you all to consider: Would the novel have been the same if the police head had not known about the bombing before hand? Would the novel hold the same interest if our narrator had been the perfect mother and wife? Or what if Petra hadn't folded and actually ran the story? Would these have fundamentally changed the story?
However, it must also be noted that this novel has somewhat of an unreliable narrator. This woman has serious issues, not the least of which is the Post Traumatic Stress causing her to see things. Could some of the more outlandish events in this novel have been imagined? (The "28 Days Later" man on the bridge or soaking Petra in gasoline?) Perhaps that is why the police had not come for her by the end. Am I thinking too far into this?
I have to say that I really enjoyed this novel and, much like Lauren, finished it in a single sitting (with breaks for lunch and dinner, of course). I will post more as I keep sorting through my thoughts on the novel. However, I do have a few questions for the author:
A)What was it that the two football fans were fighting over?
B)The Balloons...Can you explain where you got the idea for them and if they are indeed based in fact?
C)Why did you choose to fabricate a terrorist attack as opposed to setting the novel on 9-11?
D)Why did you choose to only have your narrator write to Osama instead of including the other letters to the PM and others she said she would?
Great post. I agree with you of course concerning the morality of characters. I often wonder why the popular convention requires the human psyche to be tenderised and hammered into two dimensions. It seems like a sensible thing to do with a steak, but not with a character. I was reading a crime thriller the other day, out of professional curiosity, and the emptiness of the protagonists was truly something to behold. It was all square-jawed guys with names like Jack Justice, gunning down lowlifes who were obviously evil due to their inferior height and muscle tone. Some of the baddies were - gasp - not even Christians.
The thing is, gunning down baddies like that is like shooting fish in a barrel. Where's the challenge? I mean, unless you as a protagonist are coming to grips with the darker questions in your own soul, how does the story make you a hero?
But of course the other thing is, that particular two-dimensional thriller sold TEN MILLION copies. So what's going on here? Are you and I the small beginnings of a new and more enlightened age? Or are we precisely the sick and twisted freaks who just don't understand Christian decency? At least if it's the latter, we may trust that Jack Justice will be calling before too long to put us out of our misery.
The next point you raise concerns the narrator's unreliability, and again I think it's a good one. What you're homing in on there is the reason why I write fiction in the first person. Even reliably-narrated stories get a delightful edge of malleability when they're told in the first person. It seems to give the reader license to interpret the text, and to lay claim to it with their own imaginative powers. By contrast I find third person narration really boring, and rather patronising to me as the reader. I'm like, oh right, so that's EXACTLY how it happened, is it? You're quite sure? Okay, so why do you need me here?
Finally you pose four direct questions, which I will attempt to answer as follows:
A)What was it that the two football fans were fighting over?
I left it to your imagination, Andrew - that's why it's still gnawing away at you now. Sorry!
B)The Balloons...Can you explain where you got the idea for them and if they are indeed based in fact?
During the Second World War, London was indeed protected by a shield of barrage balloons which would have prevented bombers from flying low to discharge their payloads. I feel that it might have had more of a psychological than a practical function. After all, the German airforce seemed content to bomb London from a great height. I wanted to update the idea of a shield that did more for morale than security, because I think the idea is emblematic of the kind of politics that arises from the 'War on Terror'. I put victims' faces on the balloons because I think it is just the sort of mawkish gesture my country is capable of in times of national stress, and yet at the same time I found it enormously moving. For a Londoner, the barrage balloon has a tremendous iconic and nostalgic power, and invokes a spirit of national resistance that has lain dormant for decades, but which we all feel might still be alive beneath the surface.
C)Why did you choose to fabricate a terrorist attack as opposed to setting the novel on 9-11?
I am British, and there is no way I could have laid claim to 9-11 specifically as my theme. However, being British gives me a certain take on the events of 9-11, so if I feel that I have something useful to say about it, I can best do that by imagining a British analogue. In any case I am not the sort of writer who focuses on any particular terrorist incident. For me what is interesting is the CLIMATE of terror, and the lens this offers us to view the human psyche under stress.
D)Why did you choose to only have your narrator write to Osama instead of including the other letters to the PM and others she said she would?
That's a really good question. I thought about that myself. I think the answer is that plenty of other people are addressing our Western leaders through direct polemic, through the democratic process, and in comedy, satire and the arts. There is a huge, liberal, anti-war, anti-totalitarian movement already doing that job. The thing people aren't really doing yet is engaging in dialogue with the other side, so I decided I would imagine what a small beginning of that process might read like. That still strikes me as a potentially useful thing to do, if we are truly interested in creating conditions of peace.
Thanks for this. I liked your post and I'm pleased you enjoyed the book.
I'm interested in one phrase that you use early on. You say of the Young Mother "She doesn’t have that motherly or spousal devotion." I like that because you've picked up on the heart of what I wanted to examine in the novel.
There is an archetypal role for a wife in which sexual fidelity is pretty high on the list of "must-haves". There is a further common assumption that motherhood is the primary role for a woman - to the extent that all other aspects of her life become subordinate. I wanted to go beyond these assumptions of womanhood because they were starting to seem insufficient to me. I think it's important, in life and in literature, to give men and women their freedom. Then, if a character keeps returning to you (you the lover or you the writer), then it will be out of love and not out of a sense of guilt, duty or compulsion. The trick in life surely is for us to dare each other on, not hold one another back. So I wanted to describe a woman whose love for her husband, though immense, was decoupled from sexual exclusivity, and whose love for her child, whilst all-consuming, was insufficient to explain her as a person.
It strikes me that this is actually a brave and honest way for the young narrator to live. Had things turned out more happily in her story, we might have viewed her various infidelities more benignly - perhaps as a set of issues that, in the modern parlance, she "needed to work through". But when instead her marriage and her motherhood are abruptly ended by the bombings, catching her in flagrante delicto, we are invited to view her actions through a different lens. Now that there is no chance for her to prove her devotion to husband and child over the long haul, her infidelities suddenly come to define her. If not in our minds, then certainly in hers. The real venom in the narrator's torment is the judgement she passes on herself. The real interest in the novel is whether she will emerge from her inferno as a loving person, or as a woman branded by bitterness and regret.
Later on in your post, you float the idea that perhaps my novel is more about class than it is about terrorism. I think that's very perceptive. Actually I would push the point further and suggest that the novel is an examination of one young woman's love (self-love, marital love, maternal love, and sexual love) and that the themes of class and terrorism are subordinate to this end.
Is this a 9/11 book? I don't know. Is this a 9/11 world? I think our struggle to love one another is eternal. Each generation has a different backdrop to the epic, but the true drama is within the individual human psyche, and it will always find a stage.
Finally - and in a very amiable way - you note that my novel is "all over the place". I think you're right. Structurally it's really quite messy, isn't it? Indeed there are certain plot twists and perhaps entire characters that could be expunged to the overall benefit of the novel. What can I say? Forgive me. I'm still young and I'm learning on the job. Recently I have been lucky enough to work with Sharon Maguire, who wrote the screenplay for the forthcoming screen adaptation of 'Incendiary'. It was fun and also humbling to watch the way she went right to the heart of the novel, took what was good, and stripped out what was superfluous. Next she wrote a whole new pair of characters into the screenplay, and took the story to a higher level. The result is that her screenplay is much better than the novel. It is interesting to note how, unlike my narrator, my story has been given a second chance.
Also, I forgot to thank you Chris Cleave for participating.
You helped us understand your intentions while responding in a very open-minded way to our interpretations of the book.
I am looking forward to the movie!
One line I was really taken with from “Incendiary” is on page 108: “—Car salesmen promise Jasper, said Petra. Estate agents promise. Men in my life are supposed to fucking deliver.”
Here Petra makes a significant point – terrorists do not make empty promises or false threats. Their existence and success is totally premised on delivering. And Petra thrives after this delivery as she is promoted at the newspaper. The terrorists have done for her what she nor Jasper could do – enabled her to become a journalistic success. She is less concerned by the “terror” than she is by “spectacle” that she is able to constantly write about.
Another great line is on page 52: “So maybe it was 16 days after May Day or maybe it was only 8 when the death toll finally reached 1,000. I think the whole country was secretly hoping it would get there.”
For me, this was an allusion to the themes of games and chance that we talked about when reading Baudrillard. It almost reminded me of a video game and 1,000 points was the amount you needed to save the princess – or something.
Question for Chris Cleave:
Reading the novel, I found myself wondering: How/ Was it challenging to fabricate the grand and specific details of such a terrorist event? Did you even consider writing a novel specifically about the events of 9/11 and then decide on a fictional event? Did you take any inspiration from texts such as “1984”?
I have to be honest- getting into Incendiary was difficult for me. I’m no stickler for grammar, but that was a high hurdle to leap over when I was reading. I completely understand that the narrator was not going to speak “posh” or as she put it, “I’m not thick or anything just don’t ask me where the commas go” (100). However, once I overcame that aspect, I found myself immersed in an interesting and quite frightening novel.
I was surprised by the recurrent theme of class struggle that I found in Incendiary. It was an interesting theme in a book that is supposed to be a letter to Osama bin Laden. The widow spends much of her time in the first half of the story describing the differences between herself and Jasper. She calls Jasper and his ilk the “sneering toffs” (12). Then there is the awkward weekend with Petra. However, England does have a different perspective regarding class, on account of its feudal system, monarchy, etc. Monty Python even touched on class issues.
I was interested in the descriptions of the heavy hand of government after the May Day attacks in Incendiary. I thought it was brilliant how Cleave introduced the “barrage balloons” but how they were named shortly after that. “Of course they weren’t called barrage balloons any more. They were called the Shield of Hope” (116). If there is something that the government has enacted to fight an “other” or a shell of something previous, it always seems to acquire a name. Ground Zero and the color coded threat levels, and the Department of Homeland Security are examples of this phenomenon.
Also, as a bit of an aside, while I was reading Incendiary, all I could think of was V for Vendetta. I was not thinking about Guy Fawkes, but about governments changing into dictatorial regimes because they instilled fear into the populace (à la 1984). For example, in Incendiary, all Muslim workers were banned from working due to a “security risk” (64) and they started to restrict civil liberties such as taking away the Japanese tourists’ cameras and imposing a curfew. I thought that this image of a Western country post-terrorist attack is important to think about. Do we just let our freedoms go after attacks? What does this mean for us in the future?
Questions:
Do you feel that the government clamped down on British civil liberties after the attacks of July 7th such as they did in Incendiary?
Is Petra’s character based on some of the cutthroat people you have met in the newspaper business?
If 9/11 hadn’t occurred, I doubt I would have read Incendiary. I wonder if 9/11 hadn’t occurred , would you have written it? I’m fascinated by your main character. Did you create her in response to Osama’s charge of infidels and the western slide into a moral-less abyss? As a mother of two and grandmother of three, Mr. Rabbit was an emotional trigger for me. Nearly every child has some kind of security blanket—be it bedding or stuffed animal...something that brings comfort and security. I wondered, then, if you intended Mr. Rabbit to be simply symbolic of a loss of a child, or did you also intend it also to be symbolic of our innocence and naiveté, which somehow survives the bombing? Maybe you intended it to be ... a sacrificial lamb? ... Looking forward to seeing the movie and reading your next book.
I'm sure I wouldn't have written "Incendiary" if the 9/11 attacks hadn't happened. The book was a simple response to 9/11, rather than a premonition of 7/7, as some commentators have tried to position it. I'm not that smart and I'm not that prophetic.
In answer to your question about infidels, I wrote about the young mother because I didn't think she fitted into anyone's moral code. She would probably be reviled by both Islamic and Western morality, and yet I find her to be a highly moral person. One would have to go beyond any of the arguments I have so far heard to explain why her family deserve to be bombed, or why families in the Middle East deserve to be bombed in retribution.
It is an irony of the 'War on Terror' that terrorist aggressors consider ordinary working people to be responsible for the foreign policies of the countries they inhabit. It is a further irony that Western governments are prepared to use working class people as soldiers, or as justifications for military action once they become civilian victims, but are prepared to do very little for them while they are alive and well in peacetime.
In answer to your question about Mr Rabbit, I think I know exactly what you mean. My own children have similar comforters and I find them to be an absolutely heartbreaking symbol of all that is beautiful, peaceful, and desperately fragile.
Thanks for your post. I'm hard at work on the next book... but it's taking longer than I thought!
Thanks for your kind post. I'm pleased you liked the Shield of Hope - that was a high point for me too!
You mention the agrammatical style of the novel, and I wanted to respond to that. First of all, I should say that I didn't invent the technique of not using punctuation. I learned it from the wonderful "True History of the Kelly Gang" by Peter Carey, and I don't know where he got it from. All I did was to apply the technique to an East London setting, where I think it works well. I was amazed at how effective the trick was in allowing me to step outside my own personality in order to write the character. I don't think most people - including me - use grammatical sentences in their speech, and so the free-flowing nature of sentences without commas and clauses felt authentic. It was certainly fun to write like that.
You ask two direct questions, and here are my answers:
- Do you feel that the government clamped down on British civil liberties after the attacks of July 7th such as they did in Incendiary?
Clearly the extreme martial powers invoked in my novel did not come into play following 7th July 2005, although certainly there are sections of my narrative that have found echoes in reality. My novel predicted a hardening of attitudes towards Muslims (for example when nurse Mina is suspended from duty because of her religion), and I think it is true - and deeply regrettable - that the Muslim community has come under general suspicion since 7/7. To give one concrete example, on 20th September 2006 the British Home Secretary, John Reid, gave a speech to British Muslims in which he instructed Muslim parents to keep a close eye on their children and to act if they suspected their children were being radicalised by extremists. This of course is outrageous behaviour by a serving Home Secretary. At best it is deeply patronising, and at worst it plays to the gallery of fools who imagine that the 7th July bombers are somehow representative of a homogenous British Muslim community.
As to a general clamping down on civil liberties, I haven't detected that. As of now (4th April 2007) our parliament has been quite robust in resisting the excesses of the current Government as it tried, for example, to extend the time during which terrorist suspects could be held without charge. And in terms of freedom of speech, one can still say and write whatever one likes in Britain. When writing provocative material, one is likely to encounter commercial resistance rather than governmental censorship. One claim that is frequently made is that Britain is becoming a "surveillance society" - at the time of writing, for example, there are an estimated 4 million CCTV cameras in Britain - and while this is perhaps true and worrying, I would suggest that the rationale commonly given for the increase in surveillance is as much to do with everyday crime prevention as it is with terrorism.
- Is Petra’s character based on some of the cutthroat people you have met in the newspaper business?
Actually most of the newspaper folk I know are rather nice people. They are mostly quite principled, and if they occasionally show poor judgement it is usually because they have to meet a deadline to submit copy about a subject they honestly don't know that much about. The system forces them to pretend that they know more than they do, but they are not evil people. I don't really know where Petra comes from. Hell, perhaps...
I like what you're saying about Petra. Actually I think you're making the point more neatly than I managed in the novel. You could probably take your point further and explore what delivery means, both for the terrorists and for those who are tasked with defending us against them. On a primary level, terrorists have to deliver atrocities and the security services have to deliver proof that atrocities have been prevented. The former is probably easier than the latter, especially if one has sources to protect. On a secondary level, terrorists have to deliver a climate of fear and suspicion, while security services have to deliver an atmosphere of safety. Again, the former is probably easier. (Zola is brilliant when he writes about the anarchist terror!) How can you measure which side is really delivering? (It's a genuine question).
Now to what you say about Baudrillard. You've got me really interested here because I'd never interpreted this part of the novel as Baudrillardian, but now you mention it I can really see it. I agree with your point, and I also agree with a lot of what Baudrillard says about games and "soft war". But this makes me nervous, and I think I need to make clear for the record that I don't buy the whole of the Baudrillard package tour of terror. I start to have real problems with the Baudrillard school when they get into the masochism thing - the idea that we collectively will terrorist destruction upon ourselves. I think that is a very seductive and extremely dangerous idea, and while I am pleased that it exists as a hypothesis, I hope I dedicate my writing to the production of beautiful and powerful counterexamples.
Finally to your questions. I think I already answered the question regarding why I didn't write specifically about 9/11, in my response to Andrew McKay's post. But I would love to answer your question about '1984'. The truth is that all of us writing at the moment owe a huge debt to Orwell and stand deeply in his shadow. I will cheerfully admit that I couldn't have written 'Incendiary' without '1984'. I will go further and say that 'Incendiary' is not worth a single comma of Orwell's book. '1984' is a massive, massive novel. It has so much to say about the last century and the current one.
Orwell was the real thing. As you know he volunteered in the Spanish Civil War, even though it was not his fight, because he believed the cause was more important than his life. Interestingly, joining battle in defence of one's foreign brothers is something we only tend to think of the enemy doing these days.
Still, what do I know? Maybe the world has always been like this. After all, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Another two lines that I am really interested in are from pages 55 and 98.
"It took a few weeks before it wasn't just May Day on the radio. Then some of the normal programmes came back but even the normal programmes weren't normal anymore" (Cleave 55).
Much of the research I have done about post-9/11 culture mentions the disruption to our television programming in the days following the attacks. In class, we have discussed movies that were postponed &c., but popular fictional television show (such as "The West Wing") also aired episodes dealing with the event somehow. "The West Wing" aired an episode written quickly after 9/11 where students visit the White House and receive a lesson on U.S./Middle East relations. I think that Cleave's text does a great job of portraying, not only television shows, but a country, and then just a person, that simply cannot go back to "normal".
"I wish I could put the whole world in alphabetical order Osama there would be Deserts and Forests and Oceans between you and my boy" (Cleave 98).
I think this quote parallels the idea of a "surprise attack". After 9/11, there was an obsession with order -- we want to be able to categorize everything -- people, most especially. This idea that organization implies a physical and spatial distance between people and things is very intriguing. And I also thought it was a really beautiful line.
Hi Chris,
There is a quote that I took from an interview or something that you said about Incendiary and I wanted to know what you meant (see below), but I also had some questions:
1. Which perverse Anglo American response do you mean in the quote below?
2. What horror was done in your name in regards to Iraq and elsewhere?
3. If we don’t retaliate to events such as 9/11 what should we do try to talk it out with al Qaeda ?
"In March 2004 I was still dazed from the twin shocks of the 11th September 2001 attack and the perverse Anglo-American response to it. Sickened by the images of horrors done in my name in Iraq and elsewhere, frightened by the shameless Orwellian manipulation of the public debate, I found myself mute before a growing global catastrophe....."
I hope you can let me know just what you meant by this?
Thanks Chris
This message has been edited by adurand on Apr 3, 2007 8:28 PM
Yes, that is a quotation from an article I wrote in 2004 about my motivations for writing "Incendiary". The article was published in several newspapers in early 2005.
Thanks for your questions, which are good and direct and which I will answer as best I can:
- 1. Which perverse Anglo American response do you mean in the quote below?
I was referring to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I called it a perverse response, in the sense that to my mind the invasion could not under any circumstances have been expected to provide a solution to the set of global problems of which the 9/11 attacks were a symptom. I wrote that in 2004, and each year that has since elapsed has left me more convinced of the strength of that position.
There was a time immediately after the 9/11 attacks when the US had the sympathy and support of pretty much the whole world, including a great proportion of the Muslim world. I think the French newspaper 'Le Monde' summed up this mood when it ran a front page headline on 12th Sept 2001 which translates as "We Are All Americans Now". At this point the US had an extraordinary opportunity to create an international coalition with nations that were deeply sympathetic to its agony, and anxious to come to the aid of their friend.
If the 'War on Terror' really is a war for hearts and minds then it is won or lost on the battlefield of the world's opinion-formers, and this therefore was surely the moment for a US charm offensive. Dignity, honour, and targeted, proportionate military action would have sufficed to win the day. Instead, the US opted for unprecedented military aggression against a relatively defenceless power which few even back then claimed to have any connection with the Al Qaeda movement.
I'm ashamed to say that my own government colluded on all levels, from the fabrication of WMD 'evidence' right through to the provision of troops.
I understand that emotions in the US were running high, but that isn't even a defence for common criminals and it shouldn't be a defence for the elected representatives of the greatest superpower on earth. To the rest of the world, invading Iraq did not look like a proportionate or logical response. It looked like a man who had just had a bad day at the office storming home to beat up his wife and kids. It was just desperately ugly. It was probably the quickest way, short of bombing Mecca, to alienate allies and recruit new enemies. That's why I called the response 'perverse'.
All of this takes nothing away from the bravery and commitment of the fighting men and women who were called upon to participate in the invasion. My argument is not with them, but with their political representatives.
- 2. What horror was done in your name in regards to Iraq and elsewhere?
I was referring to the torture of Iraqi detainees by Americans at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison facility - see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_abuse
Since by the spring of 2004 no one was claiming that Iraq had WMD or links to Al Qaeda, the only remaining justification for the invasion of Iraq was the liberation of its people from tyranny. It therefore struck me that to be torturing the people we had liberated was at best an ambiguous gift to them.
- 3. If we don’t retaliate to events such as 9/11 what should we do try to talk it out with al Qaeda ?
I can't think of an example in history where military force alone has been successful against a terrorist enemy. Negotiation has sometimes worked. Isolation has sometimes worked. In the end terrorists can only survive if they are supported by a widespread popular movement, and I would suggest that it is this popular power base that can helpfully be eroded by gestures of solidarity and friendship rather than acts of war.
Chris, you have asked some good and honest questions and I have tried to answer them honestly. I am just one person, though, and this is just one opinion. I don't speak on behalf of anybody, and time may well prove me wrong in the future just as it has proved me right so far. I would like to know what you think too.
First, thank you very much again for participating to the seminar.
1 - The publication date of your novel was July 7, 2005 initially, that is the day terrorist bombs exploded in London's underground. Your publisher had bought adds that would run in the underground with a headline like "What if it really happened?". Your publisher decided to change the date and to withdraw posters for the novel from its stores. Could you please share with us what that experience was like both as the novelist who just wrote Incendiary and as a British man living in London? Something similar happened when French novelist Michel Houellebecq published Platform in August 2001, a novel where Islamist extremists bomb a tourist resort. After 9/11, Houellebecq's novel was withdrawn from the Goncourt Prize preliminary list (the Goncourt is the most prestigious literary prize in France).
2 - I noticed and mentioned in class last week that two of the novels we are reading in the seminar use kids as narrators (Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World which we will discuss the week of April 15-18 with the participation of Beigbeder on this forum) and although Incendiary's narrator is an adult, her young son was one of the victims. Would you say that using kids as narrators and/or main characters in these kinds of novels help in reaching a certain level of emotion that is necessary? Any other reasons? Is this something you thought about for a long time when you wrote the novel? For instance, you could have decided that her husband would be the only victim in her family.
3 - This question is more from soccer (well here in America "football" means something else as you know) fan to soccer fan. I can see that you would use soccer and the rivalry between two of the best known teams from London (Arsenal and Chelsea) to touch at the center of popular culture, and in England (even more than in France, my country), it is soccer (here in America, the same novel would take place during the Super Bowl for example). You do use real names of players in the novel, especially from the Arsenal side: Thierry Henry, Robin Van Persie... And you do use a real stadium, the Emirates stadium which was just inaugurated this season. Why did you decide on real names and stadium as opposed to pseudonyms? Did you need to ask for permission? Did you get any feedback from Arsenal or Chelsea or Emirates Stadium players/management about your novel?
Alain-Philippe, thank you for inviting me to participate. Until this forum it has been a long time since anyone asked me a difficult question, and your participants have really tested to see if my brain is still working. Thanks to all of them. I hope they are finding this process as interesting as I am.
I have tried to answer your questions below.
"1 - The publication date of your novel was July 7, 2005 initially, that is the day terrorist bombs exploded in London's underground. Your publisher had bought adds that would run in the underground with a headline like "What if it really happened?". Your publisher decided to change the date and to withdraw posters for the novel from its stores. Could you please share with us what that experience was like both as the novelist who just wrote Incendiary and as a British man living in London? Something similar happened when French novelist Michel Houellebecq published Platform in August 2001, a novel where Islamist extremists bomb a tourist resort. After 9/11, Houellebecq's novel was withdrawn from the Goncourt Prize preliminary list (the Goncourt is the most prestigious literary prize in France)."
I have written already in this forum (in my response to Sean Pike's post) about the useful role that fiction can play in intermediating between real terrorist acts and the debate about terrorism. The essence of my argument is that it is sometimes easier to debate the issues when they are abstracted into fiction, because one only risks hurting the writer, rather than the real casualties of terrorism. Writers are sufficiently thick-skinned to take the criticism. That's why fiction is socially useful. But the dark side of this situation is that people sometimes forget who the real terrorists are. Thus, following a terrorist atrocity, it is common practice for publishers, journalists and TV executives to run away screaming from the very material that might be most helpful for the public to have access to at that moment.
This, of course, is hysterical insanity. It was a scandal for Houellebecq to have been de-listed from the Goncourt for the crime of having written a prescient novel. And for my book to be removed from the book stores and to have its publicity cancelled was sad and pathetic. These are just two among countless examples of writers and artists being punished as proxies for the terrorists. It's undeniably easier to take a work of fiction off the shelves than it is to solve the problem of terrorism, but that doesn't make it a sane response. This type of conflation of fiction and reality is seen in the hate mail that television networks regularly receive addressed to the villainous characters in soap operas. In that context it is funny, but when it is the TV executives themselves who make the same intellectual error, it's hard to see the funny side.
An argument that publishers and TV schedulers often deploy is that it is in 'bad taste' to promote fiction which deals with the raw wounds of terrorism. They claim that public morality will be scandalized, or that people simply don't want to be reminded about terrorism. Strangely their argument applies only to works of fiction, and not to the newspapers and TV news programmes that constantly revisit every angle of terrorism for months following every attack, in response to an insatiable public appetite for analysis.
I would argue that the de-facto censorship of artists in a time of terror amounts to no more than a kind of sympathetic magic, in which the destruction of the artist symbolizes the victory over the terrorist. If you can't defeat evil, at least you can find a witch and burn them.
Of course the artistic climate improves with distance from the terrorist event. In July 2005 my book was reviled, but two years later it is being made into a feature film. As a writer you just have to be patient and keep on working. At least I only had to wait two years. For some writers, the damage done to their careers - in the name of protecting some misguided notion of public morality - is permanent.
"2 - I noticed and mentioned in class last week that two of the novels we are reading in the seminar use kids as narrators (Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World which we will discuss the week of April 15-18 with the participation of Beigbeder on this forum) and although Incendiary's narrator is an adult, her young son was one of the victims. Would you say that using kids as narrators and/or main characters in these kinds of novels help in reaching a certain level of emotion that is necessary? Any other reasons? Is this something you thought about for a long time when you wrote the novel? For instance, you could have decided that her husband would be the only victim in her family."
Interesting observation. I suppose the prevalence of child protagonists in all these stories is no coincidence. Children are innocent. There is no earthly reason to blow them up, and every reason to be heartbroken at their suffering. I think it's an easy way for the writer and the reader to begin exploring the effects of terrorism in an environment where the terrorist act is automatically deplored. I suppose it's rather an unsubtle trick.
Much more difficult is to explore themes of terrorism using adult characters, and perhaps unloveable characters at that, and this is what Jay MacInerney has done in possibly my favourite 9/11 novel so far, "The Good Life". His characters are moral bankrupts adrift in a decadent New York for which the 9/11 attacks are something of a wake-up call. It's a courageous and brilliant novel. It's interesting - in the light of my earlier comments concerning the artistic climate following a terrorist attack - to examine the timeline of release of the post-9/11 novels and films. Immediately after 9/11, pretty much the only kind of novel you could get away with was something beautiful and sweet, like "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close". Then as the event became more distant the analysis could become less sentimental, allowing a book like MacInerney's to be published, or a film like "United 93" to be released, or Baudrillard to say some of the things he did without being strung up from the nearest lamp post.
"3 - This question is more from soccer (well here in America "football" means something else as you know) fan to soccer fan. I can see that you would use soccer and the rivalry between two of the best known teams from London (Arsenal and Chelsea) to touch at the center of popular culture, and in England (even more than in France, my country), it is soccer (here in America, the same novel would take place during the Super Bowl for example). You do use real names of players in the novel, especially from the Arsenal side: Thierry Henry, Robin Van Persie... And you do use a real stadium, the Emirates stadium which was just inaugurated this season. Why did you decide on real names and stadium as opposed to pseudonyms? Did you need to ask for permission? Did you get any feedback from Arsenal or Chelsea or Emirates Stadium players/management about your novel?"
You correctly identify why I needed to use football (sorry, I can't bring myself to say the s-word). But I ran into a morally difficult decision, because I decided early on that I would use real-world buildings, people, and places in my novel. My idea was to "embed" the fiction in a recognisable reality. Thus Prince William is Prince William, the London Eye is the London Eye, and so on. This created a hyper-real atmosphere that would have been punctured if I'd used made-up footbal teams. That's why I used the real Chelsea and Arsenal. I did this only after considerable reflection and consultation with publishers, lawyers and security experts, and only because there had already been a huge and long-running story in the UK media about an alleged Al Qaeda plot to blow up Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium during a Premiership game. It was essential that I did not suggest a terrorist scenario which was not already hugely in the public domain.
I did not ask for permission, because I don't need permission to write. What is important is that a writer should never use their imagination to suggest ideas that have not already occurred to the terrorists.
I haven't heard anything about my book from any professional football-related organisation, and as far as I am aware there were no concerns about it. If Arsenal Football Club, for example, had told me they were worried, I would of course have addressed their concerns immediately.
I wanted to start by saying that I enjoyed this novel immensely. The characters, as Andrew pointed out, are real and human, with human flaws that made me as a reader empathize with their plight (and yes, I did want to torch Petra). Real people aren't perfect, so why should fictional characters be?
The part of the book that I most enjoyed, however, was the style in which it was written. Primarily, I thought that it was a very effective way of telling this woman's story. Rather than a more standard narrative composed of "And then she did this, and then she did that", the stream-of-consciousness style gives the reader immediate and complete access to this woman's innermost identity. The reader knows how she thinks, how she reacts, how her mind works, and this allows the reader to almost establish a real relationship with the protagonist, which I love.
As a question for the author, what made you choose to write in this format?
This message has been edited by adurand on Apr 3, 2007 9:22 PM
I can truly say that I really enjoyed Chris Cleave's Incendiary. Incendiary dealt with the idea of loss, but in a different way than the other books we have discussed. Even though the book dealt with the terror attack that occurred at the London soccer game, it truly dealt with a lot more than that, but touched the idea of what terrorism does to individuals as well as society. While reading the book I felt a sense of sorrow throughout and really felt for the mother who tried her hardest to just have a little bit of hope after suffering a great loss.
I think I found Incendiary to be so interesting and touching because the narrator was just a working-class woman who lost her son and husband on a day that appeared normal at first. I find it interesting to hear a story from the "ordinary" person, and that is what I have mentioned in class that there are so many stories from people that experienced 9/11 that have never been heard, and it's very important for their stories to be shared. One thing that is very interesting about terrorism is that it does not target one particular class and just targets society, when we know that especially in the United States, class tends to be a very important part of society. I think it was excellent that Chris Cleave covered both class and terrorism while writing the book. I also felt it was at times scary how real Incendiary felt but also felt that the structure could have been better. Even though I really enjoyed the book the farther I began to get a little bored with it and it almost seemed as if it was dragging on. But to say the least I really enjoyed the book and think it's worth reading.
This message has been edited by adurand on Apr 3, 2007 9:53 PM
First of all, many thanks to Chris Cleave for joining us here. I was very disappointed that the author of our last novel didn't participate, and your comments so far have been a joy to read.
I must admit before I write my comments that I have not yet finished the book - in fact, I'm only maybe a third of the way through it. I'm not far past the graphic description of the terrorist attack, and before reading the posts on this forum, I had doubts as to whether I was going to finish it at all, as I'm incredibly sensitive about gore and was getting quite nauseous reading those descriptions. After reading what I've read here, I'll definitely have to finish it before class.
I have several friends who live in England, one of whom is a young woman who lives in a very rough part of Nottingham. When I started reading this book, all I could think of was her. The main character’s personality reminds me of my friend, as does her grammar and slang. There were a few differences (for example, the woman in the book actually spells out “isn’t it” instead of just writing “innit”), and I’m sure our narrator would have a bit of a different accent than my friend, but by and large, there were more similarities than differences. My friend is also conspicuously imperfect, with many emotional issues and abnormal relationships. While I haven’t yet met her in person, we have had many telephone and webcam conversations in addition to our online chats, and know each other very well.
In fact, these two people, the fictional character and my friend, have so very much in common that it was becoming uncomfortable and a little disturbing to read. I can imagine my friend, who is very devoted to her family despite their abnormal relationships, forcing her way into the football stadium as well, suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome, the whole nine yards. It’s not a pleasant image for me.
Nevertheless, I like the style in which the book is written. It is something entirely different, and that is my very favorite type of something. As much as I can be, at times, a bit of a stickler for proper grammar and punctuation, the realness of this character is really compelling. As others have said, her imperfections make her believable, as human beings are never the caricatures so often found in literature.
The unreliability of the narrator makes me think of American Psycho, where in the end, we are not sure at all that anything that has happened was real. Again, this is a deviation from the literary norm – we are taught to expect that the narrator is telling the truth. I enjoy first person narration when it is used in this way.
Finally, I would like to thank Chris Cleave specifically for his comments on the purpose of this book. In our last class we had a long discussion on what qualifies as “9/11 Literature” and what the real purpose of the novel was. It was my feeling that the novel (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) was more about human nature, dealing with grief, and our response to tragedy and loss than it was about 9/11 – that event certainly played a big role in the story, but I got the feeling that it was really focused on the other issues. Naturally, many of my classmates disagreed, as such determinations are entirely subjective. Unfortunately, the author was not available to offer his thoughts on it. I do think that this novel is very relevant to our 9/11 class, but I have gotten the feeling thus far that the main theme is more about humanity and emotions in various different ways. I have to admit to a little bit of schadenfreude at reading that the author agrees with me!
So this is what you get from literature majors: long, wordy posts! And I’ve only read a third of the book! I’ll stop now and try to save some space for my classmates. I truly look forward to finishing the book, and thanks to Chris Cleave not only for his participation, but for being so bold as to write something as strikingly different as this.
(As a totally unrelated side note, despite being American, I often refer to “soccer” as football, much to the confusion to those around me. It just seems to make sense to me that the game you play with your “feet” be called “football”…!)
I was afraid I wasn’t going to have this book done on time and was so excited when I was able to breeze through with the help of ‘on the level’ vernacular, assessable characters and the awesome thematic that drive the novel. While I did believe the narrator’s despair and humanity, this feeling was challenged by her mental illness and actions such as using her husband and son’s untimely death to secure a job at Tesco. The narrator becomes reliant on her loss to propel her into action; where does one go from here?
On page 229 the scene where she explains that when she is too tired to write (to Osama about her loss) she curls up on her sofa and watches the TV with pictures of her kid taped to it because she can no longer afford any distractions… I thought this interestingly paralleled the discussions we’ve had about MySpace memorials and our attraction/need to relieve pain and grief through channels of entertainment (television, internet). Her production/movement throughout the novel is stagnant, aside from her crippling OCD, she chooses to stock shelves, a repetitive action that calls for mindless detachment from monotony, freeing her to be the zombie that she gravitates to; she clearly has taken a repetitive, useless stance on life when she equates Petra’s vein in her neck to a broken record. (111) Her letter to Osama attempts to cling to any sort of pride she can muster, but her pain seems to take on a more concrete and devastating effect than that of any positive feeling she can sustain.
Five pages into this book I was hit over the head by a somewhat basic but incredibly powerful comparison “ …you could listen as hard as you liked and still not know if you were hearing love or murder.” (5) I thought this quote was immensely pertinent to the entire piece as I was unsure while reading the novel whether I was reading a confession of love or murder. I’ve always been intrigued by how similar love and hate can be….
Also, I don’t want to start but I remember hearing something said in class a few weeks ago, a quote from “As Good As It Gets” when Melvin is asked how he writes from a woman’s perspective he replies : “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.” I’m no feminist but I was extremely put off by this quote (mostly because a professor had used it to explicate a similar notion the week prior to it being brought up and was dead serious). I was wondering what everyone thought about Chris Cleave’s portrayal of a woman narrator??
This message has been edited by adurand on Apr 4, 2007 2:03 PM