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
***
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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