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Hamilton Spectator, June 23, 2001:
In the primary rainforests of Borneo and Papua New Guinea, light seldom penetrates. The world exists in a perpetual twilight, a gloom, that can weigh on the spirits of those unaccustomed to the conditions. Yet to the nomadic Penan who call the deep rainforest home, bright sunshine is equally dismaying. They avoid it on their infrequent forays out of the jungle, and walk in the shadows.
The men and women who populate the seven stories in Kingdom Of Monkeys are drawn to the darkness. The darkness of the jungle, or the darkness of the spirit. Not always willingly, or knowingly, but the darkness is always there.
In the first tale, "Seven Years With Wallace," we are shown the great naturalist, co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, through the eyes of his Dyak servant Ali. After eight years in the jungles of Borneo and Sumatra, Papua and the Philippines, seven with the boy Ali in tow, Wallace is eager to return to England to begin the great work of cataloguing the thousands of specimens collected during his travels. After seven years away from his own people, Ali has almost forgotten the language of his birth, and the few Dyaks he meets seem strange and uncomfortable.
Wallace has talked to him constantly of England, and Ali dreams of going there. It is only in Singapore, on the night before he boards his ship for England, that Wallace informs Ali that he will be going to England without him, leaving the boy to make his own way home to Borneo with the few pounds Wallace has paid him in the pockets of his brand-new pair of pants.
In "Pak Arafim The Pharmacist," a dying old man is haunted by a past he can barely remember, and then only in disconnected flashes. Did he once have a wife and daughter? Had he really smuggled guns for the Dutch, and worked against his own people? All he knows for sure now is that he must reach his old friend Pak Arafim, who will give him medicine for the pain that gnaws at his side and fills his chest with cinders.
The dark richness of Schroeder's stories and characters invite comparison with the works of Conrad, Maugham and Forster. These are tales of people teetering on the edge, or beginning the long slide downward. Westerners who are drawn to the exotic beauty of the East, and discover too late the danger. Equally vivid and believable are Schroeder's portrayals of the Easterners, the local people of Indonesia, Borneo, Thailand and the Philippines, going about their daily business or trying to cope with these strange visitors to their lands.
Born in Victoria, B.C., Adam Lewis Schroeder has travelled extensively in Southeast Asia, the setting for six of the stories in Kingdom Of Monkeys (the seventh is set in Prague). He has the ability to see below the surface presented to most foreigners, and the even rarer gift of being able to paint those depths in vivid word pictures that bring these strange, exotic and sometimes frightening worlds alive in the reader's mind.
--Moira L. MacKinnon
Vancouver Sun, May 19, 2001:
Think heat. Think palm trees stretching toward cerulean skies. Think padi fields and bamboo canopies, mosquito bites and taro pancakes. Dogs are sneering, monkeys talking, and the woman in the aisle with chocolate on her teeth needs help reaching her luggage.
In his first collection of short stories, Kingdom of Monkeys, Adam Lewis Schroeder handles the surreal and the pedestrian with the skill and insight of a gifted storyteller. The characters, from various cultures and ages, from 1862 to the late 20th century, move through exotic backdrops from Prague to the Philippines. But despite their distance, his places become our places.
...Thankfully, he doesn't rely on the foreign backdrops to provide the stories' core appeal, a common trap in the literary travel genre. The most evocative stories are those that incorporate what he picked up with keen eyes and ears.
Surprisingly, the stories that are the least modern are the most vivid and engaging. In the opening story, "Seven Years with Wallace," a British specimen collector has stopped off in Singapore before returning home to London. For the previous seven years, he has shared a respectful friendship, unique for its time, with Ali, his young Dayak assistant from Borneo.
Singapore in 1862 is inundated with the displaced and is "rife with voices, like a forest full of birds. Arabs shouted and held bangles out to Wallace; Japanese held up writing-paper and string; Malays sang as they sat gutting fish; Mohammedan women pushed past in tawny burkas, haggling with the vendors, baskets under their arms; excited Chinese children held the hands of their mothers, who yelled for their own mothers, shuffling behind; a Hokkien shopkeeper stood in a doorway, shouting angrily at the neighbouring merchant."
Ali watches the colourful bustle in an unsuccessful search for another Dayak. Both he and Wallace are inwardly conflicted as they are pulled to and from their origins and each other.
Unlike Ali and Wallace, the protagonist's conflict in the second story, "Balinese," is not an inward struggle with his origins, but rather with how his origins ultimately affect his freedom. Potgeiter is a Dutch artist living in a village in Bali during the Second World War. Over the years, he has assimilated with the villagers, yet in the end he is betrayed by a Balinese friend.
The character development is gradual and successful. When Potgeiter is captured by the Japanese on the day of his marriage to a woman from the village, he shouts, "I'm not Dutch! I'm from the village!" His desperation feels real.
Like "Balinese," "Pak Arafim the Pharmacist" has the antiquated tone of a story to be passed on to others as both warning and entertainment. We follow the dying Amin on his final trip through the jungle to see his old friend and conspirator, Pak Arafim. Along the way, Amin confronts past demons in the forms of menacing and mocking monkeys, lizards and dogs. His pain and grief escalate, then gradually dissolve into a hushed and satisfying ending, as happens in most of the stories in the collection.
Schroeder's ability elsewhere to create authentic characters and engaging plots makes the few less successful stories in the collection disappointing. Amid deftly told stories, they are startlingly out of place.
The story "Many Many Elephants" rides on the breathless, manic narrator without the benefit of a sturdy plot, and ends on a strangely comical note. In "Distance," the Hollywood movie star working in Prague is too stereotypically arrogant and self-centered to be taken seriously. The characters he meets in his quest to identify with his with his maybe Jewish name launch into monlogues that end up feeling like self-conscious history lessons from the writer and not the character. Still, the reader forgives all that when Schroeder suddenly delivers a lovely, distinctive image of flower petals caught in a rabbi's beard.
Kingdom of Monkeys comes with clarity and vision from a writer of substantial talent. What stays with the reader are the characters' struggles and the foreign terrain, both seeming uniquely familiar and lodging a place in the memory as true.
--Kiera Miller
Maclean's, May 14, 2001:
...these tales of North American travellers in Asia emerge from the coming generation's new sensibility -- an intriguing blend of irony so cool it verges on nihilism and a shy hope in the individual's ability to blunder through.
--John Bemrose
Flare, May 2001:
From Raincoast Fiction comes Vancouver's newest "it" boy, Adam Lewis Schroeder, and his first collection of short stories, Kingdom of Monkeys. Spanning the globe, the stories offer speedy glimpses into the lives of his well-defined characters. Schroeder weaves his anthology together with the common theme of colonialism, which not only crosses borders but time lines. Schroeder may be accused of being a card-carrying minimalist, as there are no lengthy descriptions about the fine greenery and sultry weather. But this is actually commendable in these times of airy-fairy run-on fiction.
--Charlotte Engel
The Georgia Straight , April 12, 2001:
Like a coelacanth surfacing for the first time in 100 million years or the mokolo-mbele stirring in its Ugandan swamp, Adam Lewis Schroeder's first collection of short fiction is a kind of living fossil, an echo of a former era. Kingdom of Monkeys harks back to Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway and a thousand lesser adventurer-scribes, writers who could plunge themselves into any port in the world and come back with a tale, writers who did not worry about cultural appropriation or the corrosize effect of the male gaze. Miracle of miracles, Schroeder writes about the inner workings of an aged Indonesian nationalist, a luckless Thai tour guide, and the 19th-century biologist Alfred Russel Wallace's male servant without apologizing for his position of privilege as a white, educated, Canadian voyeur. Even more remarkably, he refrains from either condescending to or mythologizing his nonwhite characters, an honour he extends to the white, educated, Canadian voyeurs who also appear as figures in his tales. It's a delicate and risky balancing act Schroeder is attempting, and at the end of this collection he steps off the wire with his limbs--and his reputation--intact.
There's just one misstep here, and it occurs in the only story not set in Southeast Asia. "Distance" takes place in the Czech Republic and features an unbelievable automobile accident and an equally phantasmal movie star; it parodies Hollywood and American rootlessness and is not nearly as engaging as the dream that inspired it, which, according to the author, involved Prague, John Travolta, and tiny robot dinosaurs. (Now there's a screenplay!)
Kingdom of Monkeys (which will be in stores in the last week in April) would have been a far more satisfying and coherent collection had Schroeder avoided Europe altogether, for he seems far more at home in Thailand, Indonesia and the Phillipines. What makes these undeniably exotic tales work, though, is that he's not writing about Thais, Indonesians or Filipinos, not dissecting tourists and missionaries. Instead, he's writing about Ali and Pak Amin and Mr. Tong (and Melissa and Hal and Barney)--humans with human dimensions and frailties. Stay-at-home readers in their armchairs might not recognize the terrain Schroeder's characters traverse, but they'll feel the tug on their hearts.
--Alexander Varty
Quill & Quire , February 2001:
In the film Apocalypse Now -- which functions as a backdrop to one of the stories in this collection -- the jungle starts to pick off the increasingly delirious Yanks as they journey upriver, turning the voyage into a lush nightmare. As the bodies pile up, the crew's mantra becomes "don't get off the boat." With this group of seven short narratives set in tropical locales, Adam Lewis Schroeder not only gets off the boat, but takes readers along with him for the ride.
What he finds outside the boat is not simply a sense of how unknowable and alien the "natives" and landscapes are, but a conviction that for travellers and inhabitants alike, life doesn't resolve itself into neat stories. Kingdom of Monkeys shows fragments of lives lived in hot, heady climates, like snapshots scattered across The Beach .
The stories are vignettes told by (and about) the transient crowd, from the turn of the last century to the present: the distracted Chiang Mai hotel porter whose paranoia escalates into a knife fight; the would-be painter whose idyll in the Dutch East Indies ends with the invasion of the Japanese; the Vancouver backpackers who encounter a little violence not covered in their student travel handbooks.
Schroeder has a light, lucid touch; he resists the two pitfalls of the travel-lit genre, namely heavy-handed condemnation of Western consumerism and its evil twin, goggle-eyed promotion of Eastern mysticism. Schroeder is young-he understands that nature vs. culture baggage belongs to another generation; in his world, we all wear the same logoed T-shirts, and we all have the same need to get somewhere.
Just how West and East mix it up is superbly conveyed in the standout story, "Beautiful Feet," which follows a family of evangelical Canadians in the badlands of Lintek, outside Manila-where echoes of Conrad and Coppola don't augur well for their Christian view of things. Altogether, the only misstep here is the book's title, which is a little too safe. Kingdom of Monkeys sounds like another name for Disney's Jungle Boat Cruise; this book is a more sinister ride than that.
--Adair Brouwer
Schroeder’s work is almost uncanny in its evocation of time and place. These are expertly crafted stories, by turns sinister and uproarious, graced with the dead-on absurdity inherent to their theme: the hapless Westerner about to have his-or-her every preconception shattered.
--Lynn Coady, author of Play the Monster Blind
While reading this collection I was at times reminded of an early generation of writers, those who followed their country’s colonial conquests in search of raw material, local colour, and exotic locales. To his credit, Adam Schroeder is aware of that past, and he addresses it head on with his remarkable first entry, “Seven Years With Wallace,” a story as rich in tableaux as any David Lean epic—yet, at the same time, a story conscious of our increasingly complicated present: from identity politics to the pre-shrunken T-shirt that is globalization.In the stories that follow, Schroeder comes up the years with each thoughtful and well-wrought tale, before ending off with his excellent “Beautiful Feet.” And the prose is such a bonus: lyricism without the toothache, expansive without forsaking its elastic snap. A promising writer. An amazing debut.
--Michael Turner, author of The Pornographer's Poem