Amazon.co.uk Review
In his new novel
Fragrant Harbour John Lanchester, as in his previous books, shows an impressionist's gift for adopting different voices for his narrator. The moral hedonist Tarquin Winot who tells his story in
The Debt to Pleasure and the downsized suburbanite whose inner monologues provide the material for
Mr Phillips could hardly be more contrasting characters, yet Lanchester makes both equally convincing.
In Fragrant Harbour much of the story is told in the words of Tom Stewart, a young Englishman who sails to Hong Kong in the 1930s and ends up spending the rest of his long life there. The voice of Stewart--reserved, humane and understated--is as finely achieved as those in the earlier novels. Through his eyes we see Hong Kong's 20th-century history. The class-ridden and racially divided society of the 1930s is given the brutal awakening of the Japanese occupation. After the war, the old Hong Kong disappears and the city is transformed by economic boom and entrepreneurial energy. The approaching return of the city to mainland China brings its own problems, anxieties and upheavals.
Against this backdrop, Stewart's life, and particularly his relationship with Maria, a Chinese nun he first meets as he is travelling out from England in 1935, unfolds. Lanchester intertwines personal histories and the city's history with great skill, showing how the past lives on, even in a city as resolutely modern as Hong Kong. The narrator of the book's last section, a young businessman called Matthew Ho, may be the embodiment of the new Hong Kong but, as he knows himself, his life has been decisively marked by the old. --Nick Rennison
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'There's a depth and emotional candour here that, long after you have finished the book, is hard to forget... Fragrant Harbour is really a love letter to Hong Kong, redolent with the bright shine of romance and nostalgia for the indefinable essence of a place.' Observer 'Provides both the detail and panorama of a fascinating city... it has a cracking emotional thrust.' Financial Times
This novel from the author of Mr Phillips and The Debt to Pleasure encompasses 70 years of Asian history and four very different but subtly connected lives. Dawn Stone, a British journalist, soon to become head of media liaison for one of the most powerful businessmen in Hong Kong, begins the narrative with the convincingly uncompromising tone of a new breed of successful businesswomen. This gives way to a deft change in style and tempo as the story is taken up by Tom Stewart, a courageous and thoughtful Englishman, as he leaves the family pub in Kent just before the great Depression to make his fortune running the best hotel in Hong Kong. The colony will become his lifelong home despite the horrors of the Japanese invasion and internment and the atrocities of the Triads. His close and enduring friendship with a beautiful nun named Sister Maria forms the lynchpin of the novel. It is testament to Lanchester's technical mastery that, with only one page of her own narrative, the brave and dignified Maria is the pivotal character in the book, her short contribution providing the key to the relationships which connect the characters. Finally, a Chinese entrepreneur, Matthew Ho, brings us back to the harsh realities of modern-day Hong Kong as he struggles to keep his successful company afloat following the handing back of the colony to China in 1997 and in the face of endemic corruption. Despite the huge scope of the novel, Lanchester has produced a book which, at some 300 pages in the hardback edition, is tightly structured and finely crafted. His elegant prose evokes vividly a place with its own unique character and history, whilst his beautifully observed characters create a moving and compelling plot. (Kirkus UK)
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