Tuesday 21 August 2018

Losing one's religion : "The Incendiaries" by R.O. Kwon









R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries, a gripping debut novel about love, faith and their loss



The setting:  Edwards College, in the fictional town of Noxhurst on the River Hudson, in an unspecified year some time after 2001.  The main characters:  John Leal, once a prisoner at a North Korean gulag, now the charismatic leader of a Christian cult of hand-picked followers; Phoebe, a lapsed Korean-American piano prodigy and a student with a penchant for party-going who, unexpectedly, falls under Leal’s spell; Will Kendall, her boyfriend, who has enrolled at Edwards from Bible college after losing his strongly-held Evangelical faith.
  
The novel turns the narrative on its head, presenting us at the very start with the most momentous episode in the story, a terrorist attack in which Phoebe is clearly implicated.  We’re told that “Buildings fell. People died.”  Will, shocked, tries to understand what could have led to all this.  

This spare, concise novel can be stingy with narrative details and, as plots go, there’s little else of great import apart from what the blurbs and the above brief summary reveal.    To be honest, the underlying themes of “The Incendiaries” are not exactly new, either.   The “student on the fringe” who doubles as narrator is a recurring trope in college fiction, as is the “crush on the popular girl” – think of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”, or “The Virgins” by Pamela Erens.  Even the central image of the “God-shaped hole”, which Will repeats through the narrative as a symbol of his loss of faith, is not exactly original – attributed to Salman Rushdie, it’s an evocative metaphor which has since been regularly quoted and misquoted.

Yet, the praise for this debut is justified.  Indeed, I felt that Kwon has deftly managed to assemble a bunch of commonplaces and turn them into a gripping, thought-provoking book which is also, palpably, “hers”.
  
Take its deceptively simple structure.  The novel is split into forty short chapters, in which the narrative voice alternates between Will, Phoebe and Leal, making the book compulsively readable.  Soon, however, we realise that, in fact, there is but one narrator – Will – who, in an exercise of imaginative empathy, tries to give voice to the other characters.   This might explain why the chapters on the enigmatic Leal are the shortest.  Phoebe’s are partly based on a private journal which Will gets his hands on and are, as a result, longer and more detailed. But can we really trust Phoebe’s narrative as mediated through her lover?  

Will, in fact, is the classic unreliable narrator.  He has a love-hate relationship with the faith he has lost.  He still thirsts for it, and yet is ashamed of his evangelising years and, by association, of his upbringing and his past.  Will has no compunction about lying as a means to reinventing himself.  He admits at one stage I wish I hadn’t lied to you Phoebe, but with anyone else, if the option came up, I’d do it again.  If Will takes pains to hide his past, can we be sure about his portrait of Phoebe?  Are his motives as honourable as he makes them out to be?  These are just a few the many questions which Kwon tantalisingly raises whilst leaving to us to try and address. 

More challengingly, the novel asks questions which go beyond mere narrative.  Leal’s group "Jejah" is first presented as just another Christian religious gathering and only later is it explicitly described as a “cult”.   Will, wary of religion and pained at his loss of faith, does not really distinguish between ‘mainstream’ religious movements and ‘cults’ – his anger seems to be equally directed against both.  But the novel, at the same time, does imply that there is a difference between the two, albeit one which can, at times, be tenuous indeed.  Significantly, in “The Incendiaries”, there seems to be an underlying comparison between love and religion/faith, with the extremism of cults finding a parallel in the excessive possessiveness which can taint first loves.   The final chapters even suggest that Phoebe might be a personification of the faith Will has lost – a reading which would add a symbolical layer to the novel.   

Kwon has stated that she was raised as a Roman Catholic and that, like Will, she is still, despite herself, grieving for the beliefs she has since abandoned – perhaps giving credence to Cordelia’s (rueful?) statement in “Brideshead Revisited” that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic”.  The Incendiaries can, in fact, be read as a meditation on faith – its comforts and its challenges, its fruits and its dangers, its allure and its loss.  At the heart of this novel is a cult with a warped expression of religion.  Yet I have no qualms about considering “The Incendiaries” a religious novel.      Nor about recommending this intelligent debut to fellow readers, whether believers, non-believers or in-between.  

Published July 31st 2018 by Riverhead Books

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I'm choosing three tracks to go with this novel.  First on - Salve Mea by Faithless.  To me, this track (and others in Faithless's oeuvre) express a sort of existential yearning, a cry for the sacred in the secular, urban jungle that is the modern world. 





Doubt and the search for answers has rarely been as hauntingly expressed as in Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question".  This performance is by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra. 









Finally, a text by St Augustine that the once-Catholic R.O. Kwon might be familiar with, here set to music and sung by Juri Camisasca on an album produced by multi-talented Italian musician/film director/artist Franco Battiato.  The track mixes the contours of Gregorian chant with subtle electronica:  Arcano Enigma 






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