I began reading Fragrant Harbour one midnight early last week, and was still reading it six hours later when I finally dragged myself to bed. When I got up, the first thing I did was start reading it again. I had something else that had to be seen to, and finally finished the book the afternoon of the following day. I had effectively done nothing else that wasn't absolutely essential for two and a half days. Now, having finished it, I feel as if I've just been dumped by someone I loved very, very much. This is in almost every way a very good book indeed.
Though not in itself a very literary place, Hong Kong has nevertheless had its fair share of fictional attention, and there may be another masterpiece on the former colony lurking somewhere in a forgotten library. But I would confidently hazard a guess that this is the finest novel on the city ever written. It's certainly the best I've read -- and by a very long chalk.
Some novelists go for color, some for action, some for style, and some for psychological insight. John Lanchester goes for all of these things, and what is remarkable is that he does all these different things so well.
The story has three main narrators. The novel proper starts with a young female reporter telling how she accepts a job in Hong Kong in 1995. The world she leaves -- high-powered London journalism where only union members are allowed to use the A3 photocopying machine -- and the world she arrives in -- champagne on Sunday junk trips, a Filipina maid, a mind-bogglingly lucrative job offer -- are finely and sardonically contrasted.
Lanchester then jumps back to the mid-1930s. The narrator becomes a young Englishman setting out for Hong Kong by steamer to make his fortune. His life there takes up half the book. It encompasses the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and his subsequent internment, riots at the time of the Cultural Revolution, the rise in influence of the triads, and the huge growth in the city's prosperity.
The narration then changes again, to the Englishman's half-Chinese grandson. The time's the present and the young businessman is working in the world of Internet servers, remote log-ons, factories relocated to Vietnam and mainland China, fraud, bribes, and numerous deals within deals.
By the end of the book you've been through 65 years of the territory's history. But Lanchester paces his story so well that the very texture of the prose changes from era to era. Different times see things in different ways. As communications get faster, the quality of human contact changes. Letters of apology become voice messages on cell-phones. Old principles can no longer be allowed to stand in the way of business.
Needless to say, Lanchester, though himself a comparative stripling at 40, doesn't allow the young to get away with anything. He has a brilliant coup up his sleeve for the ending, one that also brings the novel round full circle so that it ends up like a snake with its tail in its mouth. This is an extraordinary book.
The only possible criticism might be that a knowledge of Hong Kong's geography adds another whole dimension to the story's already varied pleasures. The publishers valiantly print maps as the book's end-papers, but Lanchester storms ahead regardless of what the reader in Manchester or Detroit might or might not be able to visualize.
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