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Incendiary
by Chris Cleave
The journalist's unfortunately timely debut novel traces the aftermath of an al-Qaeda suicide bomb attack in London.
Knopf, 256 pages
08/02/2005
$22.95
ISBN: 0307262820
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Washington Post Brigitte Weeks
The power of this novel lies in its extraordinary momentum, which sweeps us along a concatenation of events that follow the bombing.
Daily Telegraph Lawrence Norfolk
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 Economist
Fiction can be a highly effective way of depicting terror. Not because terror is a better subject than others for novels, though today it has a certain topicality, but because fine writing--and "Incendiary" is a very fine example--is such an eloquent human instrument.
The Guardian Alfred Hickling
Beneath the blatant attention-grabbing, the book has moments in which one's attention is quite deservedly grabbed.
Kirkus Reviews
At points, Cleave's oddly elegant debut novel about the soul-corroding effects of modern terrorism seems like something George Orwell might have written during the Blitz, had he been a little less concerned with the niceties of punctuation.
San Francisco Chronicle Tamara Strauss
Cleave's prose style, richly elastic and pumping, rescues the novel from being overly formulaic. He is at his best when describing the chaos brought on London; the bombing scenes are visual fireballs.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Andrew Pyper
It is a hellish canvas that depicts the 21st-century battlefield far better than the television news clips or the sterile casualty numbers of headlines.
Library Journal Sarah Conrad Weisman
Graphic depictions of violence and gore accompany humorous reflections on life and class differences -- an odd combination that makes for strangely compelling reading. [1 July 2005, p. 65]
Los Angeles Times Richard Eder
Cleave's young East Ender with her raunchy, witty and defiantly human voice -- blurred gradually by pain -- is the saving narrator of his book. [28 August 2005]
The New York Times Book Review Ian Sansom
At times [Incendiary] seems... 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.
New York Observer David Thomson
Mr. Cleave... has a phenomenal talent for melodrama, a dishy, vicious sense of humor... and a sprinter’s force as a writer. He’s also so shamelessly manipulative that you know he’s doing the nasty to you even while you read.
Publishers Weekly
The whole is nicely done, as the protagonist's headlong sentences mimic intelligent illiteracy with accuracy, and her despairingly acidic responses to events -- and media versions of them -- ring true. But the working-class London slang permeates the book to a distracting degree.
Wall Street Journal Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg
Mr. Cleave, born in 1973, is a former journalist with a sense of satire and, obviously, a strong suspicion that, in a climate of terrorism, a dangerous social reaction will set in, harming the innocent. But his novel is not all didacticism and warning.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Mike Brett
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.
Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
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.
The Independent Liz Jensen
Cleave's story eschews global politics in favour of the down-and-dirty story of Cleave's unnamed, relentlessly Cockney female narrator, whose heady mix of gallows humour, tabloid-inspired categorisations and sexual recklessness make for disturbing, macabre and often wildly tasteless reading.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
This cry of pain -- which is rendered in genuinely heartfelt, heartbreaking terms -- quickly gives way, however, to a long, chatty, sometimes hysterical reminiscence about the narrator's life, in which she treats Osama as a sort of psychiatrist-cum-father confessor.
The Observer Hephzibah Anderson
As it is, it reads like the worst kind of 'issues and tissues' teen fiction, both glib and sentimental.
 The average user rating for this book is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
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