Customer Reviews

Fragrant Harbor

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

For anyone who has read Lanchester's other novels (the fiendishly clever Debt to Pleasure and the Walter Mittyish Mr. Phillips), this novel will come as a big surprise. Far more serious, complex, and traditional a novel than either of these others, it might even be considered old-fashioned in its grand-scale story-telling. Concerning itself with three generations of people who have succumbed to the siren's song of Hong Kong as a financial capital--and sometimes found her to be a fickle mistress--the novel is as much about the city and the personal connections one brings to business as it is about individuals.

"Longevity can be a form of spite," Tom Stewart announces at the beginning of the novel. Stewart, an old man at the end of the century, has spent almost sixty years working in the former colony. On his way to Hong Kong in the early `30's, Stewart was taught Chinese on shipboard by Sister Maria, with whom he remained in contact as they both began their vocations--he as a hotel manager and she as a missionary to the remote countryside--and throughout their years in Hong Kong. Enduring the upheavals of colonialism, the Chinese revolution, the Japanese occupation and subsequent World War II atrocities, and the postwar rise of drug trafficking, graft, corruption, and the triads, Sister Maria and Stewart separately experience the myriad influences affecting both everyday life and business life in China and Hong Kong. Their different responses to these influences reflect both the tumult and vibrancy of the community, and give a broad scope to Lanchester's vision. Dawn Stone, an ambitious journalist whose career in Hong Kong is encapsulated for fifty pages at the beginning of the novel (a mystifying digression, it seems, at first), plays a role at the end of the novel as the complexities of business life during the turnover become threatening.

Filled with local color and the kind of detail accessible only to someone who has grown up in a place, Lanchester's novel vitalizes Hong Kong's life in both its glories and its sleaziness. The characters vividly illustrate the attitudes common to the periods in which they appear, and the novel, which never loses sight of its goal to tell a good story well, is both exciting and enlightening. A big novel in scope and ambition, I found it entertaining and stimulating, a wonderful read. Mary Whipple

I read John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbor both from the perspective of someone born and raised in Hong Kong of British descent, and someone extremely interested in the one-time colony's rich history. That combination uniquely qualifies me to appreciate the handful of novels that have dealt with the colony in recent years - and for the most part I have come away thoroughly disappointed.

That is not the case with Fragrant Harbor, however; where most authors show a complete lack of even basic geographic knowledge for the place - let alone how it works - Lanchester obviously knows his material. What he has done with this book is something truly stunning - he has carefully and tightly interwoven the real events, places and names in Hong Kong's history with his fictional characters and a touch of artistic license to create a story that not only entertains, but educates as well.

Fragrant Harbor is wholly satisfying on every level, and I can unreservedly recommend it to anyone interested in a well written story, a gripping read, or the subject matter itself - the lives and interactions of expatriates and refugees, both in Hong Kong and Asia in general.

I really enjoyed this book. I liked the sparks of humor, "What do you say to a 900 pound gorilla with a machine gun?" ("Sir.") My appreciation for it grew after I'd finished my reading and was able to look back on it. Granted, it's not until the last 50 pages of the book that you begin to understand why the first section about Dawn Stone is there. Until the reading is complete, the novel seemed disjointed; but afterward, it seemed remarkably unified. I loved how the characters of the first and last sections set in the modern time completed the story of Tom Stewart. The historical novel which is the largest middle section of the book is incredibly fascinating. The unrequited love of Tom for Sister Maria that is never quite articulated but certainly implied is the emotional glue that holds the tale. In the end, Lancaster brings us to a full circle fulfilled in time. As readers, we gain a greater perspective that supercedes the point of view of any of the individual characters which is a remarkable feat. While the criticisms that there are better Hong Kong novels or that he could have more description might be true, I think Lancaster has masterfully done something different. He weaves the reader through the storylines and then pulls us out of them to give a greater sense of wholeness. If angels live centuries in service, then the readers' perspective comes closer to that more eternal viewpoint through this novel which is breathtaking. Bravo!

John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbor adopts more complexity and formality in comparison to his two previous novels, the painfully humorous and opinionated The Debt to Pleasure and the satirical Mr. Philips. Readers who are familiar with the history of the former British colony will discern Fragrant Harbor a novel set against the historical backdrop of Hong Kong in the twentieth century (1935-1997).

Tom Stewart, the younger son of an inn owner in England, was born with a visceral desire to travel and China had always caught his imagination. In 1935, at the age of 22, he bought a ticket on the Darjeeling in a six-week voyage to Hong Kong via Marseilles, the Mediteranean, Suez Canal and Bombay. As the ship rounded a wide corner onto the Thames, the England shore receded and never did Stewart expect his rash decision to leave the country would alter the course of his life forever.

The arrival to the ship of two Catholic missionaries, Sister Benedicta and Sister Maria, caused an upheaval. When Sister Benedicta and a businessman Marler fell out on each other in a heated debate over the Catholic Church spreading superstition and ignorance, Stewart became a pawn of a wager. The wager stipulated that Sister Maria, a native of Fujian Province, could teach a Stewart wholly ignorant of the Chinese language and raised him to a functional standard in a matter of weeks.

Little did Stewart and Sister Maria know that the wager turned into a cherished friendship and proved its veracity when the two parted to their separate ways. Sister Maria diligently pursued her mission works in Mainland China while Stewart helped Masterson run The Empire Hotel in Hong Kong. Stewart's enduring of the changes of political environments, the Japanese occupation in early 1940s, and Mao's foundation of the People's Republic in 1949 burgeoned in him a close tie to the city.

In spite of Stewart's bittersweet reminiscence of his 60 years of life in the colony, he had painted an authentic picture of Hong Kong, with dashing verisimilitude, through the weathered gale of political shifts, the rampant economic shoot-up, and the augmenting corruption and crime. The magnitude with which he captured the geographical details and the vivid vignettes of Hong Kongers' lives could only be accessible to natives. Stewart expressed his complaisant affection for Hong Kong:

"You get past a certain point in life and you've accumulated a history in a place and so that's where you're from. Most of my memories and all my friends are here." (223)

I am a native of Hong Kong who never had the opportunity to live through the times Stewart had experienced. Growing up during the mid 1970s into the 1980s, when the fate of Hong Kong was put on the global spotlights, China prepared to take over the sovereignty in its glorious return to the embrace of motherland. Stewart had evoked the amazing fact that after the Bruits had reigned over 150 years, the English language (though taught in school and widely spoken) minimally penetrated the city. The Bruits had left behind its inveterate landmarks and traditions but only marginally affected the lives of average Hong Kongers.

The first part of the book, what seems to be some outrageous digression about a British journalist Dawn Stone's arriving at the colony in 1995, is to my minimal interest of the novel. While she did not contribute to the story until the very end, Lanchester has deftly employed her character to testify the near-snobbish lifestyle of modern Hong Kong cliques (the obsession of money, the swanking of wealth and expensive clothes, and the contention for success at the expense of stepping down others).

Tom Stewart reminded me the beguiling everyday, anecdotal life of Hong Kongers. He was taken by surprise by the ways in which he found the city a surprise. The exotic elements were what he expected and aggravated his desire to loosen the shackles of England. Like any foreign newcomers, he felt the need to conform and to fit in was crushing. Correspondences with Sister Maria through numerous letters had helped him adjust to the hustle-bustle. Inculcation of the Chinese language and literature gave him a lift in expanding his hotel business.

If one thing with which Stewart had nailed the place to the root, it would be the language and its speakers. Stewart deemed Cantonese (my native language) as one of the best languages for swearing because it was completely in harmony with the Cantonese characters (the bluntness, directness, money-mindedness, clannishness, worldliness, materialism, and argumentativeness). It truly hit home!

I unreservedly recommend this book to readers who want to explore the history and lives of Hong Kong in the twentieth century. Stewart's description of the city mirrored that to my grandfather. John Lanchester might have inadvertently mistaken Deep Water Bay for Repulse Bay, Magazine Gap Road for Old Peak Road, he truly knows the city where he spends a substantial amount of his life. He has presented his readers an unbiased view of Hong Kong: abound with its outward resplendency and underlying ignominy. After all Fragrant Harbor is a work of fiction, thoroughly and thoughtfully written. 4.2 stars.

A writer who likes to do something different each time out, John Lanchester sets his third novel in Hong Kong (which translates as "fragrant harbor"), his boyhood home, and a character as vivid, complex and contradictory as his human protagonists. A city created by waves of refugees and fortune seekers, vulnerable to attack, it has become a place focused on the energy of the moment, seducing newcomers with dreams of money and power, absorbing them in its push to the future.

The book's primary narrator, English expatriate Tom Stewart, is first glimpsed in a brief prologue as an old man contemplating the South China Sea and a tranquil, if dubious, satisfaction: "Longevity can be a form of spite."

The narration then shifts to the tart, sassy, modern viewpoint of Dawn Stone, looking back on her path to success from her arrival in Hong Kong in 1995 as a young journalist, fired with ambition and wide-eyed cynicism, to her involvement with the island's most powerful man, T.K. Wo.

For the longest section of the book, Stewart returns as a man of 22, embarking for Hong Kong in a spirit of adventure. The path of his life is set on that voyage when a loud-mouthed British businessman and an equally outspoken British nun make a bet that the nun's companion, a younger Chinese nun, Sister Maria, can teach Stewart Cantonese in the six weeks of their voyage.

An enduring friendship and unspoken passion is formed between the determined, idealistic Maria and the pliant, adventurous Tom. His newly acquired Cantonese lands him a hotel management job where he finds his niche in the teeming city and helps out Maria by hiring a boy - Wo Ho-Yan - who has fallen into bad company in China.

But already war is in the air. Civil War between communists and nationalists in China and the Japanese invasion of China have sent waves of refugees to Hong Kong and Japanese invasion of the city seems inevitable. Rumors and pronouncements fly in panic and denial. From the Hong Kong perspective, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is "the good news" as it may deflect Japanese forces.

Stewart is recruited as a British spy and placed in a bank. When the Japanese invade the New Territories, where Maria has been sent, he impulsively goes to find her, and they spend two horrific weeks hiding from the Japanese and aiding refugees. Despite her pleading that Tom flee with her to China, he returns to Hong Kong and his duties to the British. Though interned in a Japanese camp, the business of the bank must go on and Stewart is well placed to accept a radio from one of the city's gang leaders - brother of the boy he had tried and failed to help for Maria. When asked why he bothers to aid the British, Wo Man-Lee replies, "Maybe you win."

His old boss' health broken by the Japanese prison camp (where the author's grandparents were interned), Stewart takes over the hotel's management after the war as Hong Kong's fortunes rise again. Wo Man-Lee's gamble has paid off too and he is rapidly amassing a dynasty, aided by Hong Kong's appetite for debauchery and its easy corruption. Maria, however, has never forgiven him for corrupting his own brother. Stewart passes the years quietly and grows into old age on the sidelines as Hong Kong reels from the Chinese Cultural Revolution and panics over the coming 1997 handover from the British to the Chinese. Stewart's Quixotic and increasingly difficult adherence to a stubborn principle is a mystery to the narrator of the novel's final section, Matthew Ho, a businessman we met briefly through Dawn Stone, who is instrumental in the novel's conclusion.

In one of the books' many ironies, a place with so much history - colonization, invasion, waves of desperate immigrants, its volatile position between China and Britain - dwells only in the present, driven by the insatiable pursuit of money and commerce. Chance plays a major thematic part - if Dawn had missed any of her big breaks, if Stewart had embarked on a different ship, if Ho had missed his flight. And irony informs the structure of the novel, leading to a quiet, masterful, inevitable bombshell of an ending.

Lanchester's writing is assured, traditional. The story is sweeping and tumultuous yet told in a mannered, reflective, personal voice. And Lanchester's ("The Debt to Pleasure" and "Mr. Phillips," both prize winners) Hong Kong is as vibrant, exotic and ruthless a city as ever seduced an immigrant.

Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester is a novel that is hard to praise too highly. Set in Hong Kong, it presents the stories of four main characters, each of which is an immigrant to this city. Behind them at all times is a culture that rules their lives, sets the limits of what might be possible, but is always hard for outsiders to penetrate. That the culture affects all aspects of their lives, however, is a given.

Each character pursues self-interest, the different eras they inhabit defining and characterising the different stages of the city's development. Thus we see its pre-war emergence from a dirty nineteenth century right through to its contemporary role as a driving force of free market globalisation.

When Tom Stewart, on his way to Honk Kong in the 1930s, accepts the challenge of a wager, he changes the direction of lives, not just is own. A random, trivial suggestion suggests he might learn Cantonese in the thirty days of a shared voyage to new lives. His tutor is Sister Maria, a Chinese nun who proves to be an enlightened, motivating teacher. Tom Stewart learns the language, wins the bet and begins a relationship with things Chinese that will sustain him through war, peace, economic growth, professional life, clandestine activity and property speculation.

Dawn Stone, previously Doris, hails from Blackpool, but she makes it to Hong Kong. She has a career in the media, having gone through the once well trodden paths of learning her trade on provincial newspapers and then graduating to London. She makes it good and proper in the public relations business that booms out east. She seems to have few scruples and is ruled by pragmatism. She is not alone.

Michael Ho is a young businessman. He has a vision of an air conditioned future that is on a knife edge between success and failure. He is sub-contracted from Germans who operate north of London to avail themselves of the country's more flexible approach to labour. He has a rip-off sub-contracting factory in Ho Chi Minh City. He is Hong Kong based, but from Fujian, and thus also an immigrant. He has recently relocated his family to Sydney. Interests in Guangzhou will determine his fate. Mountains are high and the emperor is far away, his contacts tell him, so practices are mainly local. He must learn. He must raise capital. It is perhaps true everywhere in this global economy, where Hertfordshire taxi drivers remonstrate in Urdu and curse in English.

And it is pragmatism that rules the place. As globalisation becomes an issue, the place is the world, not just Hong Kong. In this new world which appears to be built on the professedly liberal economic ideas that have underpinned the colony's free-for-all, these immigrants to the place make their lives, make their fortunes in their own ways. But still there is a constant in that they can only succeed within the protective umbrella shade of bigger interests than their own. In a city state that grew out of an illicit and illegal trade in opium as British merchants and adventurers became international drug dealers to vulnerable China, people with wealth beyond measure push people around the chessboards of their interests, occasionally enthroning a pawn they might even have previously sacrificed.

As in A Debt To Pleasure, John Lanchester has us enter the world of an anti-hero. The character that drives events in Fragrant Harbour is but a name for most of the book. He is cold, calculating, driven by raw, undiluted self-interest. In this he is perhaps no different from anyone else. It's just that he is more successful at it, and thus less willing to risk that success. And he prevails. The emperor is far away. The mountains are high. In his case, he is the emperor and he owns the mountains. Power lives in pockets and, in a globalised economy, we are all immigrants, even in our homes. What a superb book!

The reviews of John Lanchester's first two novels, while favorable, criticized his lack of plot. I suspect that he resolved to "show them" with Fragrant Harbor. There is a lot of plot here, ranging from the early 1930s to the present day.

I love the way Lanchester writes. He's lucid, very smart, with a fine eye for telling detail and emotional ambiguity. And here he effectively weaves several story lines together as we move across seven decades of Hong Kong history.

The book is a page-turner and a literary novel at the same time, which is quite an achievement.

through the years. Good character development plus a compelling writing style, makes this a great read.

John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbor is an interesting, but flawed novel. Parts of it work very well, but the parts that don't work are more than merely disappointing; they give the book a surprisingly disjointed character.

The best part of Fragrant Harbor is the tale of Tom Stewart's life. Stewart, like tens of thousands of Britons before him, determines to escape the strictures of England and travel to the far East. He takes what is intended as a six-week voyage to Hong Kong and never returns. The great bulk of the novel tells of the life that he makes there, against the backdrop of the events that shaped Hong Kong in the 20th century.

One of the pleasures of this work is Lanchester's writing; he can be droll, he can be observant and he has a lovely economy of description. When Stewart lands in Hong Kong, he is, of course, a total stranger in this culture, and Lanchester does a good job of showing the change from Stewart's initial befuddlement at how utterly alien the city appears, to his growing acceptance and final love for his adopted home. This book has the scope of a typical historical novel, and while one learns a fair measure about Hong Kong's growth and development in the 20th century, the telling of the history seems natural, and not forced. The turning point of Fragrant Harbor is the Japanese attack in World War II, Tom Stewart's internment, and the story of how Hong Kong rebounded after the war.

The weaker parts of Fragrant Harbor are its beginning and its end. The initial section, which focuses on a yuppie journalist named Dawn Steel, has a certain breathless, shallow and cynical quality as Lanchester charts her early career in London, her move to Hong Kong and her subsequent career change. While the Dawn Steel portion of Fragrant Harbor allows Lanchester to make observations about the capitalist elite in Hong Kong in the late 20th century, there's a coldness and a sneer to the writing that is absent when he writes about Tom Stewart.

And the conclusion of the novel, in which Dawn Steel plays a role with the tale of the striving Chinese businessman Matthew Ho, feels even more tacked-on. Ho is supposed to provide a contrast to Dawn Steel, i.e., how the Chinese are faring, and the challenges they face, in the post-handover years. But although there is a clear tie between Ho and Tom Stewart, the entire Ho plot line felt contrived and artificial, an unpleasant mirror-image of the initial Dawn Steel line.

In summary, I liked great swaths of this novel, but I was somewhat disappointed by its disjointedness and the fact that its intersecting story lines seemed excessively artificial.

I found this 2002 novel intriguing because its set in Hong Kong. We first meet a British journalist named Dawn Stone who is an example of the modern Hong Kong. There's just a short chapter about her though. The main story starts in Chapter 2, and traces the life of Tom Stewart, a young Englishman, who first comes to Hong Kong in 1935. He travels by ship where he meets a young Chinese nun, Maria, who teaches him Cantonese. The relationship between these two people cover many years. Tom gets a job at a large hotel and eventually becomes a manager. The world is changing though; WW2 is beginning, and soon the Japanese take over Hong Kong. There are some awful scenes where Tom goes into China to find Maria who he would like to protect. That's when the book describes the horror of the Japanese takeover. Tom does find Maria but goes back to Hong Kong to work for the underground. Tom survives for a while but is eventually arrested, subjected to cruel beatings, and sent to an internment camp. Life there is awful but he does survive. And then, after the war, he purchases a hotel and the post-war boom in Hong Kong begins. There's corruption though, on every level, and this makes it dangerous for his friend Maria. As the years pass we get to see Hong Kong in transition, right up to the present day. I found all of this interesting and came away with an understanding of Hong Kong that I never had before.

However, I found myself frustrated with the story and the character development. There is a surprise at the end that I never saw coming which should have been foreshadowed. I never really got into any of the characters' skin. I didn't even feel any emotion when they were going through the horrors of war. The book was a travelogue and I did find this interesting. But a book needs appeal to my emotions on some level in order for me to give it my highest recommendation.

There are things to learn about Hong Kong in this book. Just don't expect to care about the people.