March 22 (Bloomberg) -- In new fiction, three of the U.K.'s most interesting writers seek to document the impact of the far- off and political upon the personal. Their stories tell of faith, love and loss unfolding in the shadow of massacres and riots.

``The Optimists'' (Sceptre, 16.99 pounds, 311 pages; Harcourt, $24) is Andrew Miller's fourth novel. It centers on Clem Glass, a British photojournalist left traumatized after witnessing the aftermath of a genocidal bloodbath in Africa. The year is 1994, and although Miller refers only to ``the church at N-,'' we're clearly dealing with Rwanda.

Returning to his London home, Clem junks the clothes he wore on assignment and stows his cameras, leaving the films undeveloped. The pictures captured by his mind's eye prove harder to shake, and he drifts haunted through shapeless days, unable to work, roaming the streets around his home and scouring the papers for news of the massacre's perpetrator, Sylvestre Ruzindana.

Confronted with the worst that mankind is capable of, Clem loses his faith in human goodness. His need to recover it leads to a kind of pilgrimage, and along the way he encounters holy men and shrinks, a wise policeman and a dandy who leaves a trail of postcards inscribed with accounts of real-life miracles.

Private Terrors

Clem visits his father who lives for prayer, cloistered away in a monastic community off the Scottish coast. Traveling still farther north, he finds his elder sister in a psychiatric facility near Dundee, crawling back from a nervous breakdown and spooked by her own private terrors.

In Africa, his brother-in-arms was Silverman, a hardened foreign correspondent. Flying to Toronto, Clem finds the older man running a soup kitchen for the homeless, trying to work things out in his own way while his wife -- a romantic novelist who insists on happy endings -- waits back home in New York.

Eventually, news breaks of Ruzindana's arrest in Brussels and Clem heads for a showdown that turns out to be nothing like he'd imagined.

Miller's sonorous prose paints the world afresh even when Clem is at his lowest ebb. ``The Optimists'' touches on families, on the steeliness of hope and the relentless tug of the future, as well as on more tenebrous notions of how we square our own blessings with a knowledge of the wider world's ills. Dodging the happy ending, Miller strives for -- and attains -- something more lasting, more believable in light of horrors that loom all the larger for being merely hinted at in flashback: catharsis.

Too Much, Too Late

Matthew Kneale's ``Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance'' (Picador, 16.99 pounds, 263 pages; Nan A. Talese, $22) is a collection of globetrotting fables with chilling twists.

The abundance of its title is far from universal, and friction between the haves and the have-nots sparks many of these slick stories.

In ``Stone,'' a liberal, middle-class U.K. family boldly splits from their tour group in search of the real China, only to wind up with a man's life on their conscience. Shaken, they return home, whereupon cosy normalcy reasserts itself with appalling ease: they buy a country cottage for weekends, the children go to college, there are promotions for the parents. Soon, the whole episode becomes: ``Something far away, that was not quite real, and that could not touch them.''

Kneale enjoys teasing his protagonists with too much, too late. Somewhere in Central Asia, a lumbering American still wincing at his ex-wife's infidelities realizes that a local beauty could be his after all. Carrying her off, he becomes eaten up with fear that she, too, will cheat on him.

Meanwhile, nearer to home, a small-time London solicitor stumbles upon a bag stuffed with cocaine and watches himself act in a way that's out of character. Or is it?

Suicide Mission

The final story, ``White,'' tracks a Palestinian suicide bomber as he journeys to the scene of his atrocity.

Dawdling, he sketches the events that have led up to this moment: his uncle had turned informer and been killed by a Palestinian mob, leaving it up to him to cleanse the family name.

Harnessed with explosives, he boards a bus and is disturbed by an Orthodox Jew who looks uncannily like a cousin and by a girl's pretty smile. The bomber is ``an addict of history,'' Kneale notes. For the most part, the story's insights are banal.

This is Kneale's first sortie since ``English Passengers'' won him the Whitbread Book of the Year Award back in 2000, beating Zadie Smith's ``White Teeth.'' The stories are eminently readable, yet are forgotten easily, being too similar in tone and cast to leave more than the faintest tang of disappointment.

White-Water Drama

As the manager of a U.K. bank, Vince, the middle-aged widower at the swirling heart of Tim Parks's ``Rapids'' (Secker & Warburg, 12.99 pounds, 246 pages), should know better than to invest precious leisure time in a group bonding exercise. That's what a week's white-water kayaking in the Italian Alps translates as. To quote the trip's bellowing instructor: ``This is not, repeat not a holiday; it's a community experience, right!''

Vince takes the place of his late wife Gloria, a keen canoeist, joining their teenage daughter and other members of Gloria's water-sports club, the extended family she nurtured while he was lost to 16-hour days in the City, London's financial district.

Leading the kayakers is Clive, a bearded eco-militant fired by anti-globalization protests. Clive's Italian girlfriend, Michela, is 17 years his junior and intent on forgetting her traumatic childhood by speaking only English. She is devoted to Clive, but he has taken to sleeping on the floor, declaring this the wrong world for their love. A devotee of Michael Moore books and bomb-making manuals, Clive doesn't do irony.

The rapids of the novel's title course through its pages, a fierce presence felt even in the dark, smelt as well as heard. Their treacherous waters create plenty of seat-edge drama and false climaxes, though the eddies of our banker's thoughts are just as interesting to Parks.

Latent Love

Again and again, Vince's mind snags on Gloria's enigmatic last words: ``I'm so, so sorry.'' During the course of the week, their riddle finally gives up its secret, leaving him free to pursue his latent love for lithe, slippery Michela, while the rest of the group heads home and crackpot Clive flies off to wreak havoc at a summit in Berlin.

Parks goes to great lengths to show that Vince's interest in Michela is at once more profound and more elemental than simple lust, though the final scene is oddly embarrassing. Stirring up a whirlpool of political conundrums concerning capitalism, Third World debt and individual culpability, ``Rapids'' is a novel whose nuanced set pieces fail to add up to a satisfactory whole.

Last Updated: March 21, 2005 20:47 EST