|
|
||
‘Ambitious and original’ TLS
‘A talented writer’ New Statesman
‘An angry and humorous vision’ Observer
'The eloquence of Cleave's heroine is equal to the atrocity which
claims her family. She is by turns funny, sad, flawed, sympathetic, both
damaged and indomitable, and triumphantly convincing'
Daily Telegraph
Why Chris wrote Incendiary:
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. So I did what I do best,
which was to pretend none of it was happening. I was writing a novel set
in 1980s Brooklyn, and the more I disappeared into its escapist world,
the less I had to think about the one in which I was living.
My son Louis was six months old and I was falling in love with him. I
never believed it was possible to love someone so infinitely. I became
terrified that he was growing up in a world descending into cruelty and
barbarism. A lot of new parents have told me they feel the same fear.
To cope, I tried to block out the insane events taking place in the world
outside our flat. But they kept getting through my defences. It wasn’t
the big, obvious brutalities that got to me. To learn that thirty people
had died in a car bomb, for example, provoked no strong reaction. Instead
it was the small, domestic ephemera of the growing tragedy that touched
me. To see a pile of mangled bodies left me unmoved, but seeing a photo
of a child’s sandal abandoned on the floor of a bombed-out building
reduced me to tears. Such images made me understand that all of the people
destroyed and traumatised by the jihadists and by our armies were loved
by their own families as much as I loved my son.
On the 11th March 2004, my son stood up on his own for the first time
and jihadists killed 191 people in Madrid. It went on and on like that
all that week. Each day something beautiful happened in my flat while
something terrible happened outside. It was this constant dissonance that
began to affect me and stopped me from being able to feel good about my
day-to-day life. I found I could no longer stay silent.
I wrote the first draft of Incendiary in six weeks. I hardly slept, and
when I did I had nightmares which were indistinguishable from the next
day’s news. In April the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke, and in
May Abu Musab al-Zarqawi released the first beheading tape of Nick Berg.
I felt while I was writing that our own minds were the battleground on
which the world struggle was being fought. I felt I would be psychologically
broken unless I could write characters who not only lived through the
horror into which our world is plunging, but who had depths of love and
humour that were equal to it. My story is an examination of love: what
the narrator of Incendiary feels for her son is what I feel for mine.
My question is whether love is strong enough to defeat horror, or whether
in the end the best we can hope for is some miserable truce. I never found
the answer, which is why it was a difficult and frightening book to write.
The battle lines drawn in Incendiary-between East and West, between East
End and West End, between men and women, between faithfulness and infidelity,
between mothers and career women, between working class and middle class-have
no real existence. They are only lines we allow to be drawn in our own
minds. Whenever we, as loving humans, allow these lines to be established
there will be violence and, as the narrator of Incendiary believes, all
the violence in the world is connected. That is why it is possible to
write the whole global narrative into her intimate tragedy.
It doesn’t blame our leaders or their shadowy antagonists for the world’s current descent. This tragedy is ours: we made it, we own it, and we can stop it
I think the book is truthful because it isn’t political. It looks
directly at our deepest fears, and places the responsibility for them
in our own hands. It doesn’t blame our leaders or their shadowy antagonists
for the world’s current descent. This tragedy is ours: we made it,
we own it, and we can stop it. We propagate it when we allow our politicians
to act cynically in our name, and when we allow them to own the language
of the debate.
Incendiary is an attempt to win back the language and start a more honest
debate. I would like a lot of people to read it, then I want to listen
to what they say. I think if I keep listening then I can keep writing
stories that people find relevant and useful.
