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by Harriet Sarnoff Schiff
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by Bil Keane
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by Edgar Rice Burroughs
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(Larger Image)
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Criminals
by Margot Livesey
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (1997-02-01)
ISBN: 0140262776
EAN: 9780140262773
Dewy Decimal #: 813
Paperback: 288 pages
SKU: mon0000018793
Condition: Good
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Mollie's brother finds an infant abandoned at the bus station and brings it to Mollie, a troubled woman who takes hold of the child as her own, until the cunning boyfriend of a woman missing her baby sees a place for profit and begins to make his moves. Reprint. NYT.
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Amazon.com Review
Criminals is a tweaked gothic. Instead of a dark castle, there is an average Scottish farmhouse, Mill of Fortune. There is nothing supernatural, and the love story is all in one character's mind, nearly losing him his livelihood. Ewan is less a knight-at-arms than a London businessman, and his sister is the madwoman. Mollie, however, is not in the attic, but very much up and about after her novelist-lover has left her. Ewan knows he must check on her and heads for Scotland. During a bus layover, he hears a small whimper and is amazed to find a baby in a bathroom stall. Hearing his bus about to leave, he grabs the bundle and ends up taking it with him. Unfortunately, Mollie's reaction is not one he had hoped for: instead of calling the police, she lays siege, and their criminal career begins. Margot Livesey is clearly interested in exploring one question: How much do you really know about your family? For six chapters, the narration goes back and forth between brother and sister, but the seventh is a surprise--devoted to the man who left the baby on the filthy floor. Kenneth's thought processes are sinister and idiotic, giving him a great deal of comic energy. Having followed Ewan to Mill of Fortune, he is determined to bilk him out of as much money as possible. "Ideas, he thought, I am an ideas man." As Kenneth does his brutal best and Ewan is caught up in insider-trading complications, Mollie--still hanging onto the child--grows increasingly paranoid: "She heard something. Had Ewan spoken? Had the table? She examined each in turn. The sleek wood had grown oddly smug and duplicitous ..." Livesey is an expert practitioner of the fiction of threat, the novel of isolation and misery in which the family is a nest of sorrows.
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Customer Reviews
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Traversing the fine line between right and wrong
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-04-18
"Criminals" is not a brilliant piece of writing; nevertheless, it's an entertaining foray into how easily anyone of us can rationalize ethical or moral lapses. It is both a cautionary tale and a psychological study.
London banker Ewan Munro is on his way to visit his troubled sister, Mollie, in Scotland. En route, he chances upon an infant abandoned in a lavatory. Concerned with missing his bus with his luggage in it and worried about leaving the infant, he grabs the baby and runs for his ride. Mollie immediately falls for this baby, who she later names Olivia, and although Ewan and Mollie agree to turn her over to authorities, they never do. One misstep after another results in Mollie's keeping Olivia, with Mollie concocting a story to justify the infant's presence in her life. Olivia was abandoned after all. Why shouldn't she be rescued? That's what good people ought to do, isn't it?
Ewan is doubly concerned -- with Mollie's eroding mental state, and an unrelated indiscretion on his part, which smacks of insider trading that could end his career. Overnight, it seems, respectable brother and sister have become criminals. It is what Ms. Livesey called "the bad behavior that comes from inattention." It is a mess these normally circumspect people have created for themselves, and the mess gets messier when Kenneth, Olivia's mother's boyfriend, extorts money from them in exchange for his silence.
Characterization is solid. Very early in the book, the reader already has a firm grip on the characters' personalities. Here's Ewan in the third paragraph: "This is what people don't like about me. Even my spontaneity is calculated." A few pages later is Mollie, in a letter to Ewan, writing of black birds swooping down on her, voices oozing from the table and the tap, bones buried beneath the stone floor. If that isn't a clue to her madness, I don't know what is.
The plot is original, but farfetched. The book-within-a-book device employed as a means to bolster Mollie's claim of betrayal by her estranged husband is distracting. I'm not panning the book, though; there are lessons to be learned here and as a whole, "Criminals" does provoke some introspection.
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Of "crimes" of various degrees
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-07-01
A 4 month old baby girl is abandoned in a Perth, Scotland bus station in the gentsroom on the filthy floor next to a toilet.. Ewan, a decent young banker, picks her up and was on his way for help when he sees his bus taking off. He runs and catches it, figuring he'd turn the baby over to the police tomorrow.
His sister tho, who it turns out is having emotional/mental problems, foils him. Anyway, it turns out that the baby was........well I'm not going to say....that would be giving it away. Let's just say that sinister deeds are afoot.
Ewans take on this is;
"He (Ewan) had found a baby in a bus station and unwittingly kidnapped her, gone to Milan on business, sat in a chair that belonged to Lucrezia Borgia, slept with an Italian pianist in one way and Vanessa in another, met the deadly Coyle (Serious Fraud Office), discovered his sister had kept the baby, and accepted the offer of the woman who had betrayed him (insider trading) to drive them back here in a desperate effort to avoid grief and scandal."
A nicely told story of three honest well meaning people being burned by others. One a stranger, one not. Of "crimes" of various degrees.
BTW Ewan didn't kidnap this little girl. I don't know why, in the book, they keep referring to it as that. The kid was ABANDONED.
This is my first Margot Livesey.I'm going for her others now. Recommended.
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The problem with stupidity is that it is difficult to avoid
Rating  (4)
Date: 2002-11-03
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
For every person its life is construed by the addition of small details. The odd part its that we, somehow arbitrarily, decide which of those are important, and when that happens, necessary we miss the big picture. Consecuently our grasp on life.All the characters on this book have decided to make their life small and meaningless due to their lack of awareness. Even those who are cruel, their conduct is a result of their stupidity, more than out of inner evil. Forthe characters in this book the accidental arrival of a baby in their life creates such pressure that just overwhelms their already very thin capacity to repond to changes in their neurotic patterns. As expected the novel is construed upon the consequences of their emocional incompetence and their disastrous results, which at some points are funny. But more than that I agree with other reviewers that the author call upon us to medidate upon our petty obssesions and why, regardles of how important and significant we consider that they might be, the truth is that they are irrelevant and only refrain us from becoming happier persons.
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Insights about the human mind
Rating (4)
Date: 2002-10-14
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Livesey manages to make her readers question themselves; there is more than one ethical dilemma in this book. A baby is found, and taken care of by Ewan who has the best intentions. Only, his sister Mollie who is somewhat mentally imbalanced gets emotionally attached to the baby and manages through different logistical means to delay the report of the found baby to the police. Ewan has some problems of his own, too; he was a little bit careless about information that he revealed to somebody. There is a fine line between what you can and cannot do. Circumstances can arise that you had not (previously) thought of.Somehow, it is apparent, the margins must be on your side. Anybody can become a criminal. Anybody can also become a victim. The point is that it takes only so little of a false step to make your life altogether different from what it was. Human beings constantly interact, and it is impossible to foresee all implications of your actions. Livesey writes in a very interesting genre. This is a psychological thriller, but the focus is neither on the plot, nor on the solution. This is not a novel about being good or bad; it is a novel about understanding of the human mind. We are all human beings, and thus, we make mistakes. Sometimes we have to pay dearly for them. Sometimes somebody else has to pay dearly for them. This novel shows the need for understanding and forgiveness. Livesey writes in a way that is not condemning, more exploring. What would happen if situation X arised? I, as a reader, was very much intrigued by the result. She also uses traditional literary techniques such as writing pieces of another book within this novel. The result is well worth penetrating.
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How Easily Human Decency Can Slip Away
Rating (4)
Date: 2002-04-07
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Margot Livesey's "Criminals" is basically a tale of four or five interconnected lives, revolving around a series of accidents, miscommunications, intentional ignorance, and, in some cases, just flat out instances of human cruelty and greed. It is a mystery; it is not a mystery. Livesey belongs in a genre all her own, perhaps. Mollie is the occasionally unbalanced sister of Ewan, stuffed shirt banker and well-intentioned brother. Ewan finds a baby abandoned in the bathroom of a bus station on the way to Mollie's, and before he knows quite what he's doing, he's boarding the bus with the baby in his arms, without having notified any authorities. What is interesting is the events that follow, and the unraveling of the lives of the people who become affected by this baby. The novel counld have just as well been called "Greed" because it is basically this fault that lies at the core of each of these characters. Not necessarily all monetary greed, but also greed of the heart and (of course) greed of the loins. The suspense is a subtle one, that builds slowly from the beginning and ends up as one might have suspected. I found this to be the only fault, but perhaps it is not a fault at all, for while reading the novel, I felt as if I were a witness to a train wreck or some other human tragedy, peering through my fingers at what I suspect will inevitably turn out the way I'm afraid it will from the initial screeching of metal on metal. As in many things in life, it is not the outcome that is necessarily interesting, but the journey on the way to that outcome.
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