Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance
By Matthew Kneale
Published by Picador, 2006
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

The knife-edge of complicity

Truth in 12 fictional stories about guilt, paranoia and helplessness in a post-colonial world

The Nation
The problem most people have with short stories, I suspect, is that they’re usually bad – ill-thought-out and half-baked – and if they are good, they’re over too quickly to be properly satisfying.
Briton Matthew Kneale, whose father writes for film and television and whose mother writes children’s books, has no such problem. A knack for storytelling brevity must run in the family, for the offspring can’t seem to produce a book without at least being nominated for some prestigious prize.
“Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance”, released in 2004 but new to Picador, has 12 stories in 280 pages, and it’s compelling from beginning to end, each tale a restrained meditation on man’s inhumanity to man, and each a disconcerting jab in the conscience.
Ordinary people are introduced, assigned mundane characteristics that any of us would feel comfortable wearing, and then shown to be somehow complicit in propagating the have-and-have-not tragedies of this world, often despite their better nature. Theirs are the “small crimes” of the title, and although these are usually sins of omission rather than commission, the guilt is pervasive and no less oppressive.
Kneale is not an elegant writer. I’d just finished Julian Barnes’ latest, and found myself fidgety reading Kneale’s comparatively plodding prose, but his simplicity helps underline the complacency that afflicts us all when good intentions fail to produce helpful actions or, in fact, do harm.
The stories travel the globe like a nonplussed tourist, but always stumble upon dire circumstances: a British family holidaying deep in China who inadvertently cause the death of a villager; a Bolivian farmer who clings to coca cultivation despite state-inflicted hardship; a First World arms dealer in some Third World backwater who shrugs off the sudden catharsis that might have stopped him selling killing machines.
Even in familiar territory, other stories edgily attest, the world’s troubles stalk our streets, as with the young writer terrified by a shadowy, hooded figure who seems to be following him through his London neighbourhood with evil intent. It comes as little surprise in the end that there is no threat at all, but Kneale has so effectively illuminated the thought process involved that one is left shuddering at the sheer power of paranoia.
The fear that Matthew Kneale amplifies is the one that, more today than ever before, grips Western nations: fear of retribution from the parts of the world they so long pinned beneath their thumb and – yes, admit it – robbed at gunpoint.
His 2001 Whitbread Award-winning historical novel “English Passengers” dealt with Britain’s responsibility for exterminating aboriginal Tasmanians in the 19th century. In “Small Crimes”, colonialism of a far more modern cast is explored, right down to the ageing Brit who “rescues” a young maiden from her deadening non-existence in China, then can’t deal with the awful responsibility of keeping her “exotic beauty” caged in his homeland.
Not all of the tales pan out. In “Sunshine”, a pair of Brits who impulsively buy a cottage in the Italian countryside (where Kneale lives, by the way) are battered by the power shifts in their own relationship rather than any untoward dealings with the locals, and the overriding focus of the book seems lost. “Seasons”, though engaging, seems to be a mere sniff at a boy going off to war.
The 12 pieces are linked in print by a clever design device: Each begins with an illustration that corresponds with the title, and in quantities in reverse order to the chapter numbers. Thus the first, “Stone”, has a drawing of 11 pebbles, while No 5, “Pills”, has six little piles of aspirin tablets.
The motif resonates more loudly the farther you go. Story 11, “Numbers” – about a family shredded by the imminent demise of a loved one who is not uniformly loved – has a single bullet as its opening note. Then, ahead of the final story, there is nothing, just a white page for “White”.
The white in question is indeed the white of nothingness that, according to some beliefs, obliterates all at the cessation of life, and here Kneale commands a rapt audience with a tale of a young Palestinian, strapped into a harness of explosives, setting out on his ultimate journey.
“It was odd, but the one thing that had never occurred to him when he imagined this day was that he might feel lonely.”
Eighteen pages that inhale sweaty nervousness and exhale resigned calm. There is a mission to be accomplished for God, yet there is also the memory of an Israeli girl’s affections. “How could this be happening?” There is the assuredness of divine convictions and yet doubt over human frailty. “I can make you white right now.” There is, for young Yunis, and for all of us, a choice to be made.
The moral ambiguities Kneale exposes can be excruciating, and the reader’s discomfort isn’t eased at all by the sensitive introspection with which he dissects every suggestion of normalcy. Nor does he provide any cushion of self-righteousness in which one might muffle one’s cries of shame.