The control and consistency of tone evident throughout the Stewart section, indeed throughout the novel, the final part of which is narrated by a young Chinese entrepreneur, is impressive. Lanchester's previous novels were witty and stylish, but they were also too cold and cerebral, underscored as they were by a young man's hauteur and desire to impress. Fragrant Harbour is different. There's a depth and emotional candour here that, long after you have finished the book, is hard to forget. You know the Americans have these stories. "What do you call a nine-hundred-pound gorilla with a machine gun?" "Sir." ... How do you get the attention of a nine-hundred-pound gorilla? You turn up with a twelve-hundred-pound one.'" (Tommy Cheung on p. 286) As someone very interested in portrayals of capitalism and capitalists in literary fiction, a lot of my favorite lines came during Matthew Ho's commentary: After being named a free port, the so-called "fragrant harbour" - a literal translation of the territory's name - became a key global trading stop, assisted also by the opening of a rail terminus from China.

We have Agarwood plantations in five countries and we strongly believe in holistic sustainability, investing in the communities we operate in to create positive social impact,” Watts said. The fish market is quiet from May to August, due to summertime fishing restrictions, so visit in the autumn or winter if you want to see it in action. That village is now known in English as Aberdeen, though its heritage lives on through its Chinese name, Hoeng 1 Gong 2 Zai 2 , which means Little Hong Kong. Aberdeen is one of those areas that is simultaneously famous yet overlooked: nearly everyone in Hong Kong could tell you it is the location of the renowned Jumbo floating restaurant, and they would probably advise you to take a sampan tour of its typhoon shelter, which is home to the remnants of a once-enormous floating village. But they likely haven’t spent much time in the picturesque south side neighbourhood themselves. 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.

First impressions of "Fragrant Harbour" (John Lanchester’s third novel) are that it's a well-written family epic about Hong Kong from 1935 to 2000 told from the perspective of four different narrators. a young 2018 oil from nagaland and similar to imperial naga but also different. part soaked part unsoaked wood.

When he surrenders to the Japanese, he reveals only that "the soldiers subjected me to certain indignities." We don’t need to know a bit more. Of his beatings, he says, "I will not describe what happened in detail, other than to say we were subjected to three sessions each, over about three days". When he breaks off an engagement to an English woman, he says "it is a conversation I prefer not to recall." When he parts company with Sister Maria, he reveals, "There might have been something more to say, but if there was, I couldn’t think of it." Lanchester was brought up in Hong Kong; his knowledge of the place is impressive. And what better setting to explore his fascination with money and its effect, good and bad, on those who pursue it? Ms. Stone describes Hong Kong as the "purest free-market economy in the world;" another character, more descriptively, call it a "money typhoon." (The image of plate-glass-window-as-urinal in the men's room of the swank club atop a harbor high-rise, where gentlemen can imagine the thrill of peeing on the peons below, is a perfect emblem of Lanchester's wry view of capitalist economy.) Money and the human response to it also appear to be key to Lanchester’s latest book, Capital, which I am eager to start as soon as I finish this review! More than this, I cannot say…John Lanchester knows exactly how much to say, and how much to leave unsaid... and so he leaves much for us to imagine. Tom was conscious of the trouble his own curiosity could get him into. When asked to play a role in the wartime resistance against the Japanese, he asks, "‘Isn’t it better if I know a bit more?’ It would be untrue to say I blush at the memory of asking that question. But it was one of the stupidest things I ever said."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.” Instead, Maria asks (a la "Casablanca"), "Do you remember Fanling?" To which he replies, "Of course I do. I think of it all the time." It begins to unravel by the third section, however. The plot twist involving two of the major characters contains two main issues - firstly, it doesn't really ring true for the characters and secondly, it's an example of the author keeping information from the reader just to create a twist. The final section is probably the weakest and drags the book down - it just reads like a slightly stilted telling of a business deal and the most interesting section. The most interesting part would be how the grandfather reacts to the new business deal, but this is not included within the book. Also, the book has the problem that it is not really about the Chinese experience of Hong Kong but how the Western world viewed it.