Customer Reviews

Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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Kneale captures average people with the dark sides of their souls exposed, caught in atavistic moments of primal impulse, stripped of everyday deceits and civilized behavior. Or maybe it is the inherent adaptability of human nature, that frail connection we all enjoy, our little secrets whispered in the dark. In any case, Kneale attacks these stories with impeccable charm, surrounding his characters with the world of mediocrity, lives lived down the middle of the road, until tearing off in a jagged pattern, control thrown to the wind.

With each story, the tension of the collection ratchets higher as cultures clash, softly, in small explosions, to the inevitable outcome. The author makes subtle, significant observations, driving them home with fearless precision. This is a moral book of fictional tales, richly layered humanity at its best and worst, a collage of missed opportunities. The titles are singular: "Stone", "Powder", "Weight", "Metal", "Sunlight" and the shocking "White". There is a particular message in each small gem, a couple buying a villa while challenging each other's boundaries, a vacationing English family, smug in their pretensions until faced with the brutality of survival, an upwardly-mobile couple who believe evil can be controlled in small doses.

There are no geographic or emotional boundaries, the human exploits covering the planet, from London to South America and the Middle East to your own back yard. The stories are remarkable, revelatory, making one think that the author has spent a great deal of time staring into people's souls, the haves and the have-not's, the greedy, the impoverished, the petty urgencies of acquisition that lap at the heels of civilization. Stripped of pretensions, there is such a hunger for connection, for quiet in an unquiet time that it is painful to realize how quickly we sell our souls on the common market.

I have read many novels that I could not put aside until I had finished, but this is the first book of stories that has so captured my imagination and so brilliantly portrayed the heartbreak of a world gone mad with greed, exploitation and abandonment that I am absolutely enthralled. I highly recommend this extraordinary collection, an experience not to be missed. Luan Gaines/2005.

I loved, loved, loved Kneale's novel English Passengers and was utterly disappointed by this trite collection of short stories. Using the story of the settlement of Tasmania, English Passengers was a tightly controlled broadside against colonial racism, injustice, and cultural imperialism, allowing the anger to flow through the characters' voices in a way that worked organically. Here, although the theme is very similar, the modern situations feel contrived and artificial, each story a carefully constructed attempt to push the reader's buttons and raise awareness. Crisscrossing the world and ranging in length from under ten pages to almost forty, they feel less like stories than lessons one is supposed to learn.

In "Stone" an English family goes on vacation to China due to their insecure need to keep up with the Joneses. Totally out of their element and off-track, when the wife loses a valuable piece of jewelry a cross-cultural misunderstanding predictable results in a terrible tragedy. Keeping up with the neighbors is more explicitly the theme of "Powder", in which a nebbish London lawyer stumbles onto bag of cocaine and cell phone. He starts dealing the stuff in order to fulfill material dreams, and the entire family spins into corruption they can't escape. Cocaine is also the catalyst in "Leaves", a short sketch which follows a Columbian family whose meager crop farm is destroyed by anti-coca spraying. Of course the law of unintended consequences takes effect as they move elsewhere to pursue farming of a different sort.

"Weight" once again takes the reader to China, where a Texas oil worker meets a beautiful Chinese woman. He manages to stumble through the cross-cultural pitfalls of marriage, but when they return to Houston, jealousy predictably rears its ugly head. The very short "Pills" follows an Ethiopian villager making an arduous trek to intercept two Western travelers to get medicine for her child. "Metal" remains in Africa, where and English businessman on a trip gets in a car accident and then swept up in anti-government riot. He helps his driver and local shanty dwellers help him escape the riot. This experience of human connection gets him all touchy-feely and he vows to quit his job and do something more meaningful with his life. A day later he reconsiders, and the oh-so-ironic punchline is that he's an arms salesman selling military helicopters.

The brief "Taste" has a wealthy and unfulfilled London peeress tracking down her Hispanic maid to accuse her of stealing small candied chestnuts and fire her, only to have the woman's warm apartment thaw her soul. In "Sound" a hipster London music writer buys flat in dodgy backstreet and gets paranoid about a black guy he keeps seeing. Each thinks the other is dangerous, but their confrontation has a rather unexpected result. It's a particularly sermonizing piece that reads like something a teenager would have done for some racial sensitivity writing contest. "Sunlight" is about a rich Englishwoman and her poor writer boyfriend who buy house in Italy on a romantic whim. Naturally the restoration goes badly, cross-cultural insults ensure, but the outcome is a bit more unexpected than the other stories.

"Seasons" is a brief story that doesn't quite fit the pattern of the rest of the collection. It's simply about a group of old school friends meeting in pub before one heads off to Iraq. In "Numbers" an American military aviation engineer's precisely ordered life starts to derail when his wife's brother starts dying and she gets depressed. He's unable to understand and deal with the messier part of life, and his family life starts to fall apart until she bounces back. It's also somewhat different from the rest of the book and is a little more interesting for it. The final story is "White" a very well-imagined glimpse into the mind of a Palestinian suicide bomber crippled by doubt and fear as he recalls his brother's call from Canada telling him of the possibilities of a new life there. It's protagonist is much less certain and directed than others in the collection, and thus it feels more open and real.

Ultimately, the book is about the baser sides of the human soul. The one that let us harm our fellow man through selfishness, greed, arrogance, or simple laziness or unwillingness to try and connect with others. This aim is certainly noble, but Kneale's attempt to bring home some of the human cost of globalization is simply far too calculated to have much impact. Which is a shame, because the prose is quite good, and he's good at sketching characters and situations in a minimum of space. And he's certainly good at creating a sense of time and place, from London to Africa to China to strip-mall Houston. But on the whole the collection is a failure because none of it seems real.

I don't usually read short stories, so I was a bit disappointed when I heard this was the format of the followup to the fabulous English Passengers. I shouldnt have been, since my bias against short stories is probably silly: collections by Julian Barnes, Ha Jin, not to mention Dubliners are easily among my best lifetime reads ever.

Anyway, I found Small Crimes captivating. In nearly every story, I was left with some strong type of feeling or other, ranging from deep pity to disgust. Knealle's trip into the minds of the muslim bomber, of the overweight guy who marries the beautiful girl, of the nerdy scientist who can't relate to his wife as her brother dies... are as perfectly descrided as the multiple geographic surroundings. And the simple language makes for easy reading, without loss in depth of theme. I look forward to Kneale's next book, whether novel or short story.

Read this book! It will not disappoint. Thought provoking and entertaining. Memorable. One of the best books I've read.

Having read English Passengers I was impatient to get my hands on this one, and it didn't disappoint. Whilst it's not as weighty a tome as English Passengers, it shares a common theme of trespass. The stories of people who go where they shouldn't (either figuratively or physically) zip by and the book was over too quickly.

...but this isn't. The stories are solidly written but driven by a feeble theme relating to the injustice and and lack of understanding the first world has for the third. It may be OK for some poncey Oxford dinner parties but most of us want a little more insight and entertainment. The characters are mostly odious posh poms who the reader has a vested interest in seeing die from page one. It's almost as emetic as watching Bob 'pretentous wanker' Geldorf talking about Africa.