When reality meets fiction

Fiction: In terms of column inches Chris Cleave's debut novel, Incendiary, got the sort of media attention that first-time writers dream of - but for all the wrong reasons. In Cleave's novel, suicide bombers blow up Arsenal's football stadium killing 1,000 people. To compound the bad timing, Incendiary was published on July 7th, the day of the terrorist attack on London.

In an appropriately sensitive move and one that was widely reported on, retail chain Waterstones withdrew its advertising campaign for the novel, and the book, with its cover depicting London in flames, was taken out of its windows. Since then the author, a former Daily Telegraph journalist, has started an open forum website, presumably to keep the publicity momentum going.

What has turned out to be a grimly prescient story is revealed through an open letter to Osama bin Laden written by a young woman whose husband and four-year-old boy died in the terrorist attack on the stadium. Her letter charts her year of searing grief after the attack and her slow slide into isolation and a chaotic form of madness. "I know you'd stop the bombs in a second if I could make you see my son with all your heart for just one moment. I know you would stop making boy shaped holes in the world." After the attack, Muslims are persecuted, the city fortifies itself as if under siege, there's a nervy state of red alert and Elton John has a number one hit with a song of remembrance, England's Heart is Bleeding.

The woman, who lives in a run-down East End tower block, begins an obsessive and destructive relationship with Jasper Black, a Sunday Telegraph journalist who lives with his self-centred lifestyle editor girlfriend, Petra, across the road in a newly gentrified terrace. Later she starts an affair with a police chief while all the while she is haunted by increasingly disturbed visions of her boy, his face slowly melting through the heat of the bomb's flames.

Cleave's graphic description of the day of the bomb is powerful and her love for her son tugs at the heartstrings but what is less authentic is the voice of the central character, the letter-writing woman. "You'll have to bear with me," she writes to Osama on page one, "I'm not a big writer", and by times she's a foul mouthed trackie-wearing tower block mother. But as the book goes on, she starts to sound like a rather witty and urbane contestant on a Radio 4 quiz show. When a bridge is closed due to a bomb scare she remarks: "Maybe they thought it would demoralise your Clapham cell, Osama, if they had to go via the M25 to bomb Chelsea". It's as if Cleave can't quite stop his own voice from breaking through.

She doesn't have a name, neither does her husband or child and it's a literary affectation that somehow makes them seem less real - this despite the book's relentless gritty realism. The catastrophic terrorist attack at the start gives Cleave the rather massive problem of how to end the book and he gives it a thriller-type twist that probably worked better when the idea of a suicide bomber attacking London belonged in a work of fiction.

Bernice Harrison is an Irish Times journalist

Incendiary By Chris Cleave, Chatto & Windus, pp245. £10.99