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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Massively Disappointing, 22 Aug 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.
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