Fragrant Harbour

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I was hooked right from the outset, but didn’t realise the book would go off in another direction completely by page 50. Set in Hong Kong from 1935 to the present, he follows a man traveling on a ship to start a new life. Were our ancestors really so passionless and correct, or is it a lazy half-lie, sanctified by usage?

As a bonus I also learnt a lot about the Japanese occupation (through the book itself and subsequent Googling), something I only knew very little about before. The word ‘Hong Kong’ (or 香港 for those who can) is an approximate phonetic rendering of the spoken Cantonese, and the Cantonese word actually means ‘fragrant harbour’. By the time we get to Tom’s story we pretty much know that Hong Kong is beset by political corruption, dirty money, crime gangs, drugs and prostitution. Both books provided somewhat quirky endings but I'll certainly be reading more of his work in the future.It is a charming book, but its successor, the less challengingly entitled Mr Phillips, is more than that - equally original, yet in its quieter way more adventurous, gentler but more shocking.

The stories are interwoven in a similar way to in Capital and like in that book a seemingly scattered collection of stories come together nicely in the end. Julian Trevelyan ‘Trevelyan was brilliantly inventive and possessed a wit and innocence of eye that could discover enchantment in the most mundane scenes’. The stories of 3 people are told separately and only towards the end is it clear how they are interlinked. Keith Vaughan Keith Vaughan was born at Selsey, Sussex (1912) to Eric George Story Vaughan, a civil engineer, and his wife Gladys Regina Marian Mackintosh.Although I recommend the novel to anyone who is interested in colonial Hong Kong, I think Tom's section is a novel in itself, and a much more compelling one than the sections that precede and follow it. I do not want to add any spoilers but a few times I found myself going back to earlier passages to reread them after revelations later in the book helped to show them in a different light.