Fragrant Harbour

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It made me really long to go to Hong Kong (or Fragrant Harbour which is its chinese name) and I subsequently did! He is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Observer, and The Daily Telegraph, among others. But from the age of twenty there is clearer evidence for a sea-faring occupation since Wallis is listed as crew-member with the Belle Adventure, one of the many great sailing ships – schooners and brigantines – which carried global trade between 1820-1890 from UK ports to Europe and the United States. Lanchester weaves a circular tale of lives that unintentionally intermingle to produce life-changing events, and his vivid descriptions of the city and culture bring them to life for the senses to savor. 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.

He studied first at Armstrong College in Newcastle, and then at the Royal College of Art, London (1922-1927). Julian Trevelyan ‘Trevelyan was brilliantly inventive and possessed a wit and innocence of eye that could discover enchantment in the most mundane scenes’.

The book has an immediacy of detail – of smells, of the changing of colours of the sea, the feel of air against the skin – which reflect an early, intimate knowledge. The man fares better but offers few opportunities for the sort of writing we know this author is good at.

To see’ is an artist’s starting point; to translate that vision into both three dimensional space and two dimensional representation, into both buildings and paintings, was Yates’s life-long concern, both as architect and as painter. When she heads off to a lucrative magazine post in Hong Kong, we hope the cynic will be eaten by bigger dogs; but as we had feared, she settles in to suck their bones.

Perhaps the grossest of these occurs when a man - whose identity, for reasons already hinted, at, I can't reveal - manages, through the good offices of the very Dawn Stone who kicked off the story and is now an important figure in a shady Hong Kong media empire, to achieve an interview with the big boss. Both books provided somewhat quirky endings but I'll certainly be reading more of his work in the future.