Narrator’s grief overpowering in Chris Cleave’s ‘Incendiary’

In a coincidence so extraordinary that conspiracy theorists must think it isn’t one at all, Chris Cleave’s novel about a terrorist attack in London was published in England on July 7, the date of the first bombing of that city’s Underground.

At least one retail chain took down advertising posters for the book, which featured barrage balloons over a blood-red Thames River. The shell-shocked British media granted Cleave, a first-time novelist, instant pundit status.

So how does “Incendiary” bear up under all that attention? Pretty well.

Cleave tells the story of a horrific al-Qaida attack in London. Suicide bombers blow up the stands at a soccer match, killing more than 1,000 people.

Among those killed are the husband and 4-year-old son of the unnamed narrator, a youngish, working-class homemaker. She is having sex with a stranger in her flat, one eye on the televised game, when the stands disappear in smoke and flame.

She runs to find her family and is badly injured in the panic. She wakes up in the hospital to a new world. She has no husband or son. Muslims are banned from sensitive jobs.

Barrage balloons bob above London for the first time since the Blitz during World War II. In a macabre, modern touch, the authorities call them the Shield of Hope and paint faces of the victims on them so that the dead gaze down upon the living.

The only people the narrator has left are the man she was having sex with at the time of the attack and his jealous girlfriend, both journalists. Together, they form an unhealthy triangle. The ghostly presence of the dead boy, seen only by his mother, makes it an even worse foursome.

The narrator, widow of a police officer, volunteers at Scotland Yard and is hired as a secretary to a top police commander, with whom she begins an affair. When she learns from him a brutal secret about the attack, her grief-fueled descent into madness accelerates.

The book is in the form of a letter from the narrator to Osama bin Laden. Such a precious device would sink a lot of novels, but Cleave does not overuse it. A grateful reader can go for pages without being reminded of it.

Cleave does a fine job of writing in the voice of a street-smart but uneducated young woman and makes the widow believable and likable. She is, however, the only fully realized character in the novel. The yuppie reporters are paper-thin stereotypes meant to contrast to the genuine narrator. The love triangle strains credulity and bogs down the narrative.

The author’s description of the attacks falls short of what we’ve all seen on our televisions, but so would almost anyone’s.

Despite the summer publication, this is not a beach read. There is no salvation for anyone here. The sense of grief is overpowering. Even when the widow summons the mercy to refrain from killing someone who betrayed her, she does not forget her loss or regain her peace of mind.

There will be other novels related to the London attacks. “Incendiary” probably will not be the best of them, but it might be the rawest.