Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sad, terrifying, funny and completely gripping, 26 Jul 2005
Even without the dreadful coincidence lent by its publication day and the London atrocities occurring together, Incendiary is a truly powerful book.Using jauntily naive language from a female central character Cleaver has written a book that is both laugh-out-loud funny, deeply unsettling and terribly sad. The book takes the form of a long letter to Osama Bin Laden written by a woman whose "chaps" -- her policeman husband and four year old son -- were incinerated in a terrorist attack on a London football stadium. The letter recounts her experiences after the deaths and her descent into the madness brought about by her grief. Without her chaps she has no real reason to live -- and certainly no reason to remain sane in a world going steadily mad all by itself. The terrifying, sad story is woven around with a descant of humour, some sharp one-liners, bitingly accurate perceptions and gripping story-telling. Using the device of an uneducated but very intelligent woman as his narrator allows Cleave to write some wonderful descriptions of people that use simile and metaphor to great effect, producing really great writing that delights with its accuracy and perceptiveness. Very, very clever; very very good.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mesmerising, 9 Feb 2006
By A Customer
Incendiary is one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read. Daring, provocative and sometimes heartbreaking, Cleave's narrator had me gripped from beginning to end. Cleverly told and often uproariously funny, this multi-layered story reveals itself as an impassioned denouncement of terrorism, and a warning that our emotional responses to terrorism risk destroying our own way of life. Like the issue of terrorism itself, this is a complex and divisive book, and people will either love it or hate it. Some people won't get it at all. Read it, and decide for yourself. You won't be wasting your time. I was up till the small hours reading Incendiary - it's that compelling.
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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Prophetic, 13 Jul 2005
With terrible and inadvertent presage it is a shocking, almost unbelievable, coincidence that this book was officially launched on 7 July 2005. Since I had ordered the book in advance, it was also the day I received the book from Amazon. There it was lying on my desk in London as news came through about the London bombings.The book (as it has to be) is brutal from page one. The images are brutal, the language is brutal, the honesty is brutal. The opening third builds to an almost apocalyptic climax. And the smart part is that in the middle of the chaos is the salt-of-the-earth stoic East End voice, impressing with almost myopic matter-of-factness. And then the book switches focus. Still being smart, it becomes an almost parody on the different lives of the Londoner. Situations and personalities don't harm the book, or its ambitions, by their ridiculous nature, they just, more obviously, make its point. There are many good reasons to read the book. Cleave is clever. The book: a contemporary pantomime. But it is also, in a small, unfortunate and unanticipated way, a part of history.
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