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.
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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