Attn: bin Laden.(Incendiary)(Book Review)

Chris Cleave Incendiary. Knopf, 256 pages, $22.95

On July 7, the day the tube bombings killed fifty-six people, British booksellers released Chris Cleave's Incendiary, a novel about a catastrophic suicide attack on Arsenal's new stadium in north London. (It begins: "Dear Osama they want you dead or alive so the terror will stop.") Cleave told the Guardian that the timing was "macabre," the Telegraph that it was a "sorrowful coincidence," and the readers of his website that "the response of Marie Fatayi-Williams to the loss of her son on 7th July is more important than anything I have written."

Stateside, we call this damage control. Cleave's narrator, a young working-class girl, might call it a load of bollocks. On 7/7, the refrain was London Can Take It. Are we now to believe that London can take bombs but not macabre coincidences? Moreover, must we applaud Cleave's sentiments, while he lampoons others' as crass fakery? Now for the million-quid question: Why should he have to apologize or explain at all, when what was worth writing on July 6 was, surely, no less valuable on July 7?

After Incendiary's May 1 stadium attack, London's skies are filled with barrage balloons bearing the victims' faces. Elton John writes a song called "England's Heart is Bleeding." These jabs at America's ubiquitous "fallen heroes" memorials, yellow ribbons, and boot-in-your-ass country ballads are facile, but they do raise a point--though not the one Cleave intends. No, they underscore the fact that many objections to the way we react to terror are purely aesthetic. But let's not forget: We can't all write a caustic novel or (when that novel might offend and sales might flag) an apologetic and self-justifying op-ed.

Here is another reason to be suspicious of Cleave. His nameless narrator, whose husband and son are killed on May Day, speaks in the rabid voice of council-flat authenticity, pouring her purifying, badly punctuated ire on both Osama and the West. His other principal, Jasper Black, is the coked-up, vacuous Telegraph writer who's in bed with the narrator at the moment she sees the fatal explosion on television. At first, the reader thinks Jasper is a postmodern device, a self-critical surrogate for the author, who was a Telegraph writer. Then it becomes clear: this character is, as the narrator quips when she meets him, "Hugh Grant in. Well. All his films." And, 10 and behold, the book already has been optioned for the movies.

So, on the one hand, if a cable news anchor wears a flag lapel pin and it boosts ratings, it's a national embarrassment. On the other hand, if a writer channels a poor terror widow and it sells his movie rights, it's art. This might be a cynical complaint were Incendiary not loaded like a bomb-bay with "selling points." It has graphic sex and, better still, graphic violence:

 
   The arm hit the ground hand first. It tumbled 
   end over end for a bit and then it stuck into the 
   turf. There must of been a spike of bone or 
   something sticking out of the arm and the spike 
   jammed in the ground. It looked like some 
   chippie was trying to climb out of the earth.