Chris Cleave: Writing a letter to bin Laden

Chris Cleave, whose début novel Incendiary (Chatto, 7th July, tpb, £12.99, 0701179058) has been sold to 15 foreign publishers and is to be made into a film with Channel 4 backing, is no stranger to trying to make the world a better place. An Oxford graduate (he got a First in Experimental Psychology), he spent the mid-1990s travelling around Europe with a rave sound system giving free parties: "It was amazing to see 2,000 people who've never met each other before dancing in a field. People came from all over the place and you'd get talking to people you'd never otherwise meet, and realise how much you all had in common. It was inspiring."

Later, when he worked for the Daily Telegraph website, Cleave became so incensed by some of the readers' letters on subjects such as homosexuality that he took to writing back to them: "I was saying, 'Not only am I not going to publish your letter on the website, but you should be ashamed of yourself.' I shouldn't have done it--my choice was either to work for the paper and do what they wanted, or to leave. But at the time I was going, 'Yeah, this is me changing the system from the inside.'" A frank talk with editor Charles Moore led to him leaving the newspaper: "I actually think he treated me really fairly."

Then early last year Cleave was living in Paris, with his French wife and baby son, struggling to write a first novel set in Brooklyn, when, against the background of all the violence in Iraq, the Madrid bombings took place. "I was so sickened that I stopped writing the novel I was on and began Incendiary." Narrated by a working-class East End woman, Incendiary describes a massive terrorist bomb going off at the new Arsenal Football Club stadium--a bomb which kills the narrator's beloved husband and young son, just as she happens to be having illicit, comforting sex with her well-heeled neighbour Jasper, a Telegraph journalist. The novel takes the form of an open letter from her to Osama bin Laden, in which she explores her heartbreak in the long aftermath of the bombing, and the strange, slightly twisted relationship she then develops with Jasper and his spoiled fashion journalist girlfriend Petra. Warm and very human, the narrator's voice is a great strength of the novel.

Cleave says he genuinely did write the book as the equivalent of "a private letter" to bin Laden. "That's the only way you can write back to the man. He doesn't have a postal address. I just feel we have a right to reply. I wanted to write something very personal, a very simple human story about a victim."

His narrator is, he says, "an amalgam of a lot of people I know. I really love her, I love people who battle and survive and just never give up, these women with limitless strength. She does seem like a weird character for me to take on because she's really different from who I am, but I feel it's lazy to talk about people just like me. I spent a lot of time in London listening to people, in bars and on the tops of buses, and they were talking about the rights and wrongs of the war in Iraq--they were really engaged. Her voice is their voices, I was trying to boil down the whole of London into one person."

The narrator's anguish at the loss of her small son is particularly affecting. Cleave says it was fuelled by his own emotions as a new father. "When you love someone you expose yourself to losing them, and what happens to the narrator is what can happen to any of us. I couldn't have written this book if it hadn't been for my son being born. I just couldn't believe this barbarous and terrifying world we were bringing him into. He's so sweet and gentle--he gives tea parties for his teddy bears. You feel this amazing need to protect them and an absolute horror of what could happen to them."

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