Fragrant Harbour

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Mr Phillips established Lanchester as among the best youngish novelists around, so it seems likely that anybody who has read it will open Fragrant Harbour with high expectations. The title is a translation of "Hong Kong", and most of the story takes place in that territory, while it was still a colony. Historical fiction without trying to be historical fiction, without shoving facts and figures and culture down readers' throats, without pretension - such is Lanchester's accomplishment via engaging, believable characters telling their own fascinating, fictional stories. The book features:

Sham Shui Po is renowned among Hong Kongers for the richness and variety of its culinary scene, so while you’re in the area, try to bag a seat at Tim Ho Wan, a Michelin-recommended dim sum joint known for its delectable (and affordable) BBQ pork buns, steamed egg cake, bean-curd skin with pork and shrimp and pan-fried carrot cake. If you can’t find a seat there, worry not – the area abounds with old, established family restaurants, as well as noodle cafes, dumpling stores, beancurd factories and Chinese sweet shops selling traditional favourites alongside new twists with a regional bent, such as the durian pancake. West Kowloon Here I have an advantage over him, having been there in August 1945, trying to attend to released internees, and I can pit my memory against his imagination. This is a fortuitous advantage that a reviewer ought not to take. Still, Hong Kong was a more awful place in 1945 than this account of it makes clear.

Measurements

According to another theory, Hong Kong was named after a censer in front of the Tin Hau Temple in Causeway Bay. The censer travelled drifted to the island and was stranded on the beach in front of the temple. It was taken to the front of the temple, so they called the bay in front of it Hongxianglu Harbour and the hill behind it Hongxianglu Hill. The name 'Hongxianglu Harbour' was spread to the whole island, so the island was called Hong Kong. However, the Xinan Gazetteer shows that a Hong Kong Village and Hongxianglu Harbour appeared simultaneously but at different positions, so this theory is incorrect. As we prepared the event, we got to speak to so many people from professional artists to local elderly,” says Kwan. “A lot of them used to live on the boats or their parents lived on the boats, doing some business on the water, like selling supplies to the fisherman. This is a lot of heritage but they’ve never spoken about it to the public.” How (well) the juxtaposed stories gel together at the end is hidden in "that unique Hong Kong style in which the most significant information is present in the gaps, omissions and implications." Another theory is that Hong Kong was named after Xiang Jiang (a name by which Hong Kong is often known to locals), which used to be located in Pok Fu Lam. This legendary waterfall was popular among boatmen because the water was fresh and drinkable. However, the name Xiang Jiang was not coined until the last century, and the waterfall was likely located in Tap Mun and not the island, so this theory is false as well.

In Hong Kong, the Japanese established a concentration camp, the Stanley, in which civilians of both sexes were interned - a severe place, naturally, though despite the privations, something like 50 children were born there. Lanchester has to imagine what Hong Kong and the Stanley camp were like in those years. We hope the show challenges the notion of what it means to be from here, and inspires you to look at Hong Kong through multiple lenses.

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Lanchester has a suspicion of omniscience, of the magisterial certainties offered by a central unifying intelligence who knows everything about everyone in his own fictional universe. He prefers the oblique and glancing eye, the partial, limited intelligence. He is not the novelist-as-puppet-master, moving seamlessly between conflicting consciousnesses, as Ian McEwan did so masterfully in Atonement. What he is, rather, is a talented ventriloquist: he speaks most convincingly through other people, subordinating his own voice to that which is stylised and created. this oil has ZERO in common with fragrant harbour supreme. the latter oil is top soil, bitter, root veg, peanuts and damp earth and FHI, is well, Not. This is, in some ways, a really difficult book to review. Having lived in Hong Kong for four years, I got a frission of recognition and excitement when - particularly in the first section - the book seems to have been a carbon copy of the time I went through. This makes it difficult to separate the book from my own personal memories of my time in Hong Kong. However, the second section is almost like a history lesson of Hong Kong and again, was interesting just to see how the city had come together to be the place I knew. Sister Maria- activist nun and friend of Tom Stewart since his journey to Hong Kong, when they were shipmates. Dawn Stone- the 1990s British transplant to Hong Kong, a journalist turned big money Hong Kong corporate PR executive by the year 2000.