 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Incendiary
By Chris Cleave
Chatto & Windus $27.95
 Chris
Cleave's debut novel, featuring the terrorist bombing of an Arsenal v Chelsea
soccer match with the resultant loss of several hundred lives and a London rendered
chaotic, caused a stir when released in England recently. Then came the train
and bus bombings of July 7 and a kneejerk call for its withdrawal, or at least
the cancellation of advertising, until life could return to normal.
Cleave, living in Paris with his wife and baby son, had a different book in
the works when 'jihadists' killed 191 people in the Madrid subway bombing. Instead
he turned to the grisly subject of terrorism and the result is this powerful,
insightful and sometimes hilarious 'letter' to Osama bin Laden by a working class
mother whose husband - ironically, a bomb disposal worker - and four year old
son have died in the attack.
At the time the frustrated housewife was watching the match on TV and having
sex on the couch with a neighbour from one of the area's few gentrified houses.
In a fit of guilt and concern, she rushes to the scene of the horror, only to
be injured in the mass panic.
Later she writes, in her uneducated but endearingly honest style, 'I don't
know if you've ever walked with a crutch through the gangs of kids down Bethnal
Green Road on your way from the tube station at 11.30 on a week night Osama. I
should hope so. I mean we're the kind of people you're bombing so I would of hoped
you'd of chosen us personally.'
In an attempt to drown her sorrows, she drops into a local pub, observing,
'My husband used to like the place. My husband thought a pub ought to be busy
and loud. You probably think a pub ought to be fire bombed and turned into a mosque
Osama well that's the difference between my husband and you. I bet he could drink
you under the table.'
Not long before terrorists attacked the London transport system, Cleave's narrator
contemplates the unborn child of Jasper, the man she had been with on the couch
during the bombing, musing, 'It didn't know London yet but you could tell it was
already nervous. It heard its mum's heart beating and each beat made it flinch
like a nail bomb going off in the distance... It was an incendiary child and when
it dreamed it dreamed of sparks.'
This book, like its author, is one to watch.
- Books available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore
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