Going astray abroad

These days we are all sophisticates, or so we like to think. Thanks to the media and the internet we can become worldly without leaving home. What’s more, if we stay at home our theoretical broad-mindedness is never put to the test; we can express hip views and appear open to cultural differences whilst remaining comfortable by the fireside. So, asks Matthew Kneale, what happens to that kind of shallow sophistication when it finds itself on foreign ground? What happens to a smug moral code removed from its context?

In these 12 short stories Kneale demonstrates the convenient elasticity of moral values. A middle-class English family, trying to be adventurous, travels to a remote corner of China and falls victim not to foreignness but to its own prejudice, with shocking consequences. A dull American discovers that in a trackless corner of central Asia he can be the man of a girl’s dreams, rather than the featureless failure he is at home. After taking the local beauty home as his bride, ‘freeing’ her from her background, he imprisons her in his. In ‘Sunlight’ an English couple attempt to buy themselves a picturesque life in Tuscany, but become more gravely entangled in local colour than they might have expected.

Several of the stories have a sinister footnote. A businessman (on a decidedly dubious work trip) suffers a car crash in a foreign city and becomes involved in political protest; a soldier spends an evening in his local pub before leaving for Iraq; a young suicide bomber veers in confused helplessness to his destination; a mathematician finds that domestic tragedy — illness and infidelity — distract him from work, where he is busy perfecting a pilotless, bomb-dropping aircraft.

Kneale does not have to send his characters too far afield before they start to falter.