Readers Place

Chris Cleave interview/review

WHY I WROTE INCENDIARY by Chris Cleave, London, December 2004

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 30 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 though 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.

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.