Incendiary door Chris Cleave

In my book report i will tell something about the book incendiary. Incendiary is written by Chris Cleave. Incendiary is Chris Cleave’s first novel. He wrote it in Paris and it was published on july 7th. by sceptre. the book has 338 pages.

The book is named Incendiary, and i think thats a really good title. There are used a lot of incendiaries in the book, so by using this title, Chris Cleave shows an important part of the book, but it´s still is a mystery what will happen in the book. This title made me curious, i really wanted to read the book. I dont think there could have been a better title for this book. Incendiaries are often used in the book, and the incendiaries change the life of the main character. So it´s pretty logical to choose this title.

I dont really know why Chris Cleave chose this theme. I know he likes writing shocking stories, one of his other books i’ve read ( the other hand) is also very shocking. The main theme in this book is terrorism, i’m actually really wondering why he decided to write about that. I think he was really impressed by 9/11 and the assaults in the metro of London. The book makes clear that Chris Cleave is really wondering how somebody could commit an assault. I think that´s one of the reasons he wanted to write about it. Death is another theme in the book, and not only in this book, in the other hand, death is also an important part of the book. I don´t know what made him write about death, but I think he was impressed by the death, and wanted to describe what the death can do with a person. Besides the sad themes terrorism and death, there is also a lot of love in the book, I dont think love needs any explanation, almost everybody knows how important love is, the other themes won´t be so shocking if there was no love in the book and if there were no emotions.

Most of the characters in the book don´t have a name. The main character, as far as i know she doesn´t have a name, is a typical mother. She really loves her child and wants to do everything to protect him. She really loves her husband, but she cheated with Jasper Black. She doesn´t know why, but she has sex with Jasper, and keeps seeing him. She actually doesn´t want to cheat, because she loves her husband, but she can´t stop doing it. she doesn´t really care what she´s wearing, if her clothes are comfortable, it´s ok for her. When her child dies, she becomes crazy, starts to see things that aren´t there, and talks to her child though it is dead. Her child is also nameless, but she often calls it ´my boy´, and when she talks about her husband and her boy togehter, she calls them ´her chaps´. Her boy dies early in the book, so most things you learn about him, you learn from the descriptions of his mother. To me he seems a really nice and cute boy. He was four years and three months old when he died. he had a toy, called mister rabbit, he always took mister rabbit with him. he really loved soccer, he always went to soccer matches with his dad. He actually isn´t a really special boy. All the characters in this book are not really particular, but that isn´t really necessary, the book is not about who the characters are, but about the drama that changes the lifes of the characters. The fact they are really normal makes it even more sad because some innocent average people are the victims of a terrible assault. One of the other ´chaps´, her husband, also isn´t really special, there actually isn´t much I can tell about him, he is just a dad, a dad that loves his boy and goes to soccer matches with him. He had a dangerous job, he worked in bomb disposal. His wife was always very nervous when he had to clear a bomb. So her husband decided to stop with this job and find a safer job. He would immediately on Monday. It´s pretty ironic that he works in bomb disposal and dies because of an assault, and not because of a bomb that he had to clear and exploded before he was ready. Besides the family, there is also another importan person in the book, Jasper Black. Jasper Black is a columnist for a newspaper. He already has a girlfriend, but as i´ve already told, he has sex with the main character ( it´s hard to describe these things because lots of characters don´t have a name, but i mean the mother of the young boy). Jasper Black doesn´t like soccer, but his husband wants him to to go a soccer match. On the day of the match, he sees the main character again, and she invites him to come with her and watch the match at her place. Jasper is a kind man, but it seems he never shows his emotions, and he really cares about his money. He really wants to help the main character after the death of her ´chaps´.

I will give a short summary of the book now. The book is a letter to Osama Bin Laden. The main character writes the letter to Osama after the assaults, because she hopes it would impress Osama, and make him think about what he has done to her. When her ´chaps´go to a soccer match and Jasper is with her, there happens something really terrible, some people from Osama Bin Laden blow up the stadium with incendiaries. She watches the game with Jasper, and suddenly the whole stadium is in fire. She tries to go to the stadium with Jasper to find her ´chaps´. When she enters the stadium, a few hours after the assault, she becomes unconscious. After a few days later she wakes up in a hospital, and she totally forgot what has happened. In the hospital she hears her ´chaps´died, and there wasn´t much left from them, only their teeth were still there. Jasper comes to visit her in the hospital. First she is really mad at him, and wishes he was in the stadium when the assault happened, but when Jasper gives her Mister Rabbit, he found Mister Rabbit in the stadium. Mister Rabbit is the favourite toy of her boy, she is really happy he did that for her. The book describes her life after the assault, that day is called May Day, because it happened on a day in may. Later in the book, when she was in the London eye with her new boss (also the old boss of her husband), she finds out the coppers already knew about may day before it happened, and decided not to do anything, because then Osama would know they had spies, and they were afraid something more terrible would happen. As you can understand, it was shocking to hear for her. She was really mad at her boss, and her boss didn´t understand her, he thought she would understand it. but ofcourse she didn´t. the end of the book is a little bit strange. She told jasper what she heard from her boss, and his wife (Petra) wanted to write a story about it in the newspaper. All these things go wrong, and they had to run away because the government was looking after them. Jasper was so mad at the government for not doing anything, that he wanted to treat the government by saying he was going to blow up the house of parliament, but when he stood on the square with a suitcase, that pretended to be dynamite, he was shooted by a policemen and he died. after that there is a lot of panic, and a lot of people die. Jasper is dead, but his wife is still alive, and just before the book ends, the main character wants to kill petra, she wants to burn Petra to death, but eventually, when she had thrown petrol over Petra, she decided to let her go. In the last few pages of the book, she asks Osama to come to London and marry her.

Review
I think it’s a really shocking book. I liked it, I really wanted to keep reading, it was a typical page-turner, but it’s a pity the main characters don’t have names. I dont really know why, but I think ‘the other hand’ was better, maybe that’s just because i’ve read that one first. I’ve also some short reviews on internet, this is what they say:

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 '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

Chris Cleave was born in London in 1973, and he grew up in Cameroon and Buckinhamshire. He has studied psychology. Rigth now, he lives in the UK with his wife and three children. He has written 2 books ( incendiary and the other hand) and a few short stories. He has also been a columnist in the newspaper ‘the Guardian’. I don’t know if he still writes for ‘the Guardian’. Unfortunately there wasn’t much about Chris Cleave on the internet.