For anyone who knows Hong Kong at all well, however, this will be the novel of the year, if not of the decade. There's enough material for four or five books here. There's one sub-plot, for instance, that features the visit to the colony in 1938 of the young UK writers W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. The names are changed, and Auden is allowed to live on past his actual death date to feature later on in the story. The fate of a slightly mysterious manuscript he gets involved with appears to remain unresolved, however. But this book is crammed with aspects of Hong Kong life that those who know it at first hand will gasp to see so clearly and perceptively evoked. Cheung Chau, Deep Water Bay, Nathan Road, Kennedy Town, Stanley, Fanling -- if these names mean anything to you, this book will leap to life with extra immediacy.
For the rest, the plot involves an attractive young Chinese nun, immigrants to Hong Kong from China's Fujian province, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (nowadays HSBC), Hong Kong's wartime Japanese administration, criminal involvement in big business, hotel management, the Hong Kong police force, the role of Ghurka troops in patrolling the border, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the inter-island ferries, and the town of Faversham in the UK.
Lanchester has opinions on many Hong Kong institutions, some of them unambiguously critical. The book's tone, though, is deceptively mild. Lanchester sees the realities behind the affluent exterior but never allows anger, let alone outrage, to disturb the polished surface of his invariably stylish prose.
I found one error. The large birds that wheel over Hong Kong are not eagles, as one of Lanchester's narrators more than once asserts, but black-eared kites. This is a minor but surprising oversight -- one of the book's many merits is the meticulous way it has been researched.
The nearest novels to this are probably Christopher New's two books set in colonial Hong Kong, A Change of Flag and The Chinese Box. But it has to be said that Fragrant Harbour out-does these. John Lanchester's wings are stronger and carry him higher, and to more varied mental states. Both writers view life with a skeptical eye, but Lanchester sees more, and in addition he avoids the dyspepsia that New doesn't bother to hide, and which mars A Change of Flag in particular.
Fragrant Harbour is a masterpiece by any standards, and no one interested in top-quality fiction set in Asia should fail to read it. As for anyone who has ever spent any time in Hong Kong, the very first thing they should do on putting down this newspaper is rush out to a bookstore and buy themselves a copy.
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