Review | The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon
From the news (“Trump again turns his fire on Robert Mueller”) to Shakespeare (“These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder), the passions of anger and joy alike are often described as dangerous, all-consuming flames. In her debut novel The Incendiaries, R.O. Kwon takes this image and crafts a darkly incandescent story of what happens when we grasp for meaning in our lives, capturing the devastating consequences of obsessive desires gone extreme.
The novel begins, literally, with a bang: bombs explode and destroy several buildings — an act of violence by Jejah, a religious cult tied to North Korea. In the opening chapter, Will, the book’s narrator and one of its main characters, speculates what had happened, not having been part of the group and so not made privy to their plan. This creates an interesting set-up, where we are saddled with a likely unreliable narrator with limited knowledge of the events in question, and who instead attempts to retroactively present his understanding of what happened.
Though other chapters are also told from the perspectives of Phoebe, the glamourous Korean-American girl who Will falls in love with, and John Leal, Jejah’s charismatic leader, it quickly becomes obvious that Will is still the master puppeteer, further shaking his reliability as a narrator. In some moments, it’s deceptively easy to think that Phoebe is directly narrating from her own point-of-view, thanks to the clever (but also, at times, frustrating) lack of quotation marks that would typically signify when a character is being quoted by the narrator. By ventriloquizing Phoebe’s voice, Will robs her of her voice and, by doing so, tries to possess her — an issue especially relevant today.
The Incendiaries, after all, is a book about passions and overwhelming desires. All three main characters are desperate to lose themselves in something, whether it is love, art or religion, in order to fill a void in their lives. But when these desires cross over into the realm of obsession, their disastrous consequences come to light. Will, who — like Ms. Kwon herself — loses his faith in God, soon finds himself in the dark tangle of lust, jealousy and love, ultimately pushing the girl he loves so much away. Phoebe grasps at music, and then religion, throwing herself into these obsessions to forget her past, while John Leal plays with obsessive faith to lead a group of young people to blindly commit violent acts.
Given the fairly hefty plot, it isn’t too surprising that the characters aren’t totally likable. But they’re real, and Ms. Kwon depicts them in all their humanness, flaws and all. With her evocative prose, she sparks insight into how we deal with loss and how easy it is to become subsumed by something — purely human struggles that aren’t too removed from readers’ own lives. It was especially interesting to see how Will and Phoebe changed over the course of the novel, our understandings and opinions of each also continuously shifting as we learn more about these complex and utterly believable characters.
Like a burst of flame, The Incendiaries is short yet packs a punch. But, like the hazy aftermath of an explosion, Ms. Kwon leaves clouds of ambiguity throughout and at the end of her novel, which may be thought-provoking to some, and perplexing or frustrating to others. Maybe this is her way of recreating what she and her characters have gone through: the confusing, seductive, and life-altering search for meaning in our lives.
Rating: 4/5
