Rating: 
Summary: Elegant but Uneven
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Flagrantly Horrid
Review: Sometimes you can be reading a comparatively short book and discover that it's so poor that you feel you've been reading it forever. I'm afraid that's exactly what happened to me with "Fragrant Harbor" - I really struggled to finish it.The book is largely based in Hong Kong, and tells the story of a collection of characters - British mostly - who settle there. The stories are varied, ranging from one which is devoted mostly to World War Two, to a modern business intrigue. But in truth I thought that "Fragrant Harbor" was nothing more than a minor potboiler of a novel. In fact, so bad was the first section, dealing with the journalist "Dawn Stone" that I nearly disposed of the book at that point. Other sections of the novel are better written, but that's faint praise. What the reader really gets is a potted history of Hong Kong, akin to those you find at the beginning of travel guides, with a few stories thrown on top. Perhaps that might have worked had the dialogue not been so wooden, the characters so one-dimensional, and had it all not appeared so rushed - the author fast-forwards ruthlessly giving the impression that he cared little for taking time to develop his characters. I found all that intensely irritating. Hong Kong is a wonderfully interesting and challenging place, and deserves better than this.
Rating:
Summary: How did this book get published??????????????
Review: This book is a mess. The first story about Dawn Stone is passable with its flippant tone and somewhat entertaining writing. But the bulk of the "novel" is the second story that reads like a loooooooong drawn out newspaper article with superficial physical description, scanty dialogue, and a totally implausible plot. The main character Stewart is a two dimensional character - bland voice, little motivation, no description. He moves through a cardboard landscape and newspaper headlines. The description of what had to be a harrowing experience of Japanese occupation of the colony is done by cliches. The MI5 people who recruited Stewart must have been idiots to have put a hotel man in a bank. Stewart must have been a genius to have mastered Cantonese in 6 weeks, but why does he behave like an idiot the rest of the time. The letters from the Chinese nun are sparkless. Some of the writing is so sloppy that one wonders if his editor has been asleep. I grew up in Hong Kong and I lived among the expats. Mr. Lanchester might have gotten some of the street names right, but he is NO novelist. For a great novel set in Hong Kong, please read John le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy.
Rating:
Summary: How did this book get published??????????????
Review: This book is a mess. The first story about Dawn Stone is passable with its flippant tone and somewhat entertaining writing. But the bulk of the "novel" is the second story that reads like a loooooooong drawn out newspaper article with superficial physical description, scanty dialogue, and a totally implausible plot. The main character Stewart is a two dimensional character - bland voice, little motivation, no description. He moves through a cardboard landscape and newspaper headlines. The description of what had to be a harrowing experience of Japanese occupation of the colony is done by cliches. The MI5 people who recruited Stewart must have been idiots to have put a hotel man in a bank. Stewart must have been a genius to have mastered Cantonese in 6 weeks, but why does he behave like an idiot the rest of the time. The letters from the Chinese nun are sparkless. Some of the writing is so sloppy that one wonders if his editor has been asleep. I grew up in Hong Kong and I lived among the expats. Mr. Lanchester might have gotten some of the street names right, but he is NO novelist. For a great novel set in Hong Kong, please read John le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy.
Rating: 
Summary: Paints a believable, fascinating picture of Hong Kong....
Review: through the years. Good character development plus a compelling writing style, makes this a great read.
Rating: 
Summary: only partly satisfactory
Review: Two years ago, I knew little about HK; but recently I discovered an uncle of mine was incarcerated at Sham Shui Po at the start of the war (he was later killed on the 'Lisbon Maru'). This made me keen to find out more, but I'm afraid that 'Fragrant Harbour' is not the book to fulfill that wish.
The section I was most interested in (1939-42) is, I now know, peppered with inaccuracies. Without wanting to get bogged down in too much pedantry, early December 1941: "that first series of Japanese bomber attacks destroyed all of Hong Kong's planes and anti-aircraft batteries - all it's air defences" is plainly untrue. AA guns were still being used at Wong Nai Chung Gap a week later. I found this a little lazy and quite frustrating.
Then we come to the 'the twist'. I won't ruin it for anyone by revealing it, but what a swizz. I went back over the relevant text, assuming I'd turned two pages over and missed the points of reference. I hadn't - they're just not there! You can't suddenly turn a story on it's head like this if you don't give the reader at least a fighting chance of 'getting it'. There was no "Aaah! I see", no outwitting involved. The twist is, simply, a cheat, and it put me in a very negative frame of mind for what remained.
That said, there *is* stuff to enjoy here. Dawn Stone is annoyingly self centred and you can see what the author's trying to do there. It's a shame Sister Maria is reduced to appearing in letters for so long, too, as she introduces a much needed spikey dynamic to proceedings and I enjoyed it when she was centre stage. Ultimately, though, the bad points outweigh the good, which is a damn shame.
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