The latest and the worst
Timothy Mo
FRAGRANT HARBOUR by John Lanchester
Faber, £16.99, pp. 300, ISBN 0576201768
Hong Kong is the elephants' graveyard of novelists, the last resort when they can think of nothing else to write about. It has figured as a setting for mediocre fiction so many times, it has been done to death.
First to enter this cemetery of literary aspiration in all senses was Stella Benson, who died in China in 1933 aged only 41. Married to an American in the Chinese customs service, this close friend of Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain, and acquaintance of Virginia Woolf, wrote patronising letters home about the locals in the authentic, strangulated accents of Bloomsbury, but her fiction makes chastening reading today — it is sobering to think that anyone who wrote with such transparent ingenuousness and clumsiness can have possessed the contemporary esteem she enjoyed. The late Richard Mason, in writing one of the few passable novels of the Colony, actually succeeded in adding a character not just to literature but urban legend. Every city in Asia has a Suzie Wong bar. Benson would not have approved — she wrote a paper for the League of Nations on white slavery which, like the postwar illegalisation of concubinage, actually made life harder for the hapless women and children in this traffic.
After Mason came James Clavell, now also deceased. Much as I am inclined to scoff at Clavell, his awful novels have stood the test of time, so far: four decades on, people still read Tai Pan and Noble House, which is more than can be said of the imitators who followed his spoor. There appear to be dozens of these mass-market historical potboilers and family sagas, many written by clever people in other walks of life who should have had the wit and discrimination to spare the world their outpourings. Sir Austin Coates, the former Assistant Colonial Secretary and son of the composer Eric Coates, wrote a lovely autobiography. Myself a Mandarin, and a solid biography of Jose Rizal, but his historical fiction is even more risible than that of Gore Vidal. I will not resuscitate the names of the others from their just oblivion. Anyone interested in unpretentious, authentic fiction about the place — not me, you retort — might try The Virgin Market by C. Y. Lee and the short stories of H. D. R. Baker, anthropologist and former language adviser to the colonial government, which were written principally to be read on radio but are fine texts on the page, too.
I personally arrived like Childe Roland at this dark tower of tusks and skeletons in 1978, passing through what was not so much a cultural desert as a howling wilderness. Anything different from what went before met with the derision of the laughing hyenas. From 24 years ago, this is the last sentence of the South China Morning Post's review of my novel The Monkey King, under the headline 'File Under Nuts': 'All credit to Timothy Mo's elbow for actually completing a novel, but this book is so bad it should never have been published.'
At the risk of putting my neck in the pillory that posterity reserves for the very thickest reviewers, John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbour appears to me an exercise in total futility. There can only be two justifications for giving the world yet another novel about Hong Kong — either the writer has an intimate knowledge of the place and his/her material is fresh and original (difficult) or at this stage of the novel introduces pioneering techniques which render the content immaterial (even more difficult). Lanchester does neither.
One of the most irritating things about Fragrant Harbour (a disputed but hackneyed translation of Hong Kong's name which will inspire despond in anyone familiar with the island) is its air of fake knowingness, one fatally and hilariously subverted by basic errors of geography and idiom. Lanchester drops Hong Kong place names like a child scared of the dark recites prayers. At one point one of the principal English characters. already resident 15 years in the Colony, remarks to a Chinese woman who is the mother of his illegitimate son that he is engaged to an Amanda Howarth. 'Works at Jardines. Lives with her aunt and uncle on the Peak. Bowen Road. Nice view when it's not foggy. Been out here two and a half years. We met on a boat. She's ... a very nice girl.' This is a perfect illustration of Anthony Powell's advice that novelists should be chary of imparting narrative information through Q and A, as the result can be stilted, but, still worse, Bowen Road happens not to he on the Peak. This single howler destroys Lanchester's credibility with anyone who knows the place.
Lanchester is as bad on elementaiy Cantonese. He has a Chinese character say to another as they are toasting each other in a Japanese restaurant in London, 'Yum cha'. In Chinese 'Cheers!' is 'Yum sing!' What Lanchester has his character say is 'Drink tea,' which is actually a figurative expression — to 'drink tea' means to go and eat dim sum from steamer baskets, perhaps with a specimen of the cup that mildly depresses steaming by one's side. Again the speaker is not trying to be funny or speaking in character.
The novel is constructed as a series of very loosely intertwined memoirs, monologues and letters by assorted characters. The most important connection is between old HK hand Tom Stewart, who arrives in the Colony in 1935, and a Chinese nun, Sister Maria, whom he encounters on a P&O boat. In true G. A. Henty style she teaches him Chinese on the passage. Not in Henty style he has sex with her as the Japanese are invading. After the war she is murdered for dishing the dirt on a Triad boss. Their son plays no part in the book, but Stewart is later saved from Caucasian yobbos on the Peak by his progeny's own son, Matthew Ho. Ho later saves his aircon business from bankruptcy by making a deal with T. K. Wo, the son of the Triad boss who had his grandma killed. The structure is neat and symbolically circular: early in the first chapter Ho sits next to Dawn Stone on the 747 out. She is an English hackette who writes a crusading article on corruption in the Colony but is co-opted as TK's publicity director and sets up the meeting at the end between Wo and Ho (which makes the reviewer wish he wasn't called Mo).
But contrivance and ingenuity are not enough. A pseudo-novelist like this can bang his flints together as long as he wants — he won't get the spark of life. Getting petty details wrong is not necessarily the kiss of death — authenticity can be conveyed by passion and commitment, real emotional investment in the characters. Lanchester lacks the self-confidence to go for bust and, like dithering on the highboard, this leads to a belly-flop. Novelists like John Derbyshire in the US and Sid Smith in Britain have little personal connection with China or Chinese but convey verisimilitude through art and imaginative conviction. Justin Hill took the bold step of having his mainland Chinese characters speak in totally idiomatic English-American, right down to 'Yeah'. It works. When Lanchester's Chinese speak Chinese, they sound just English.
The true feebleness of this book comes out in the scenes of the Japanese invasion — they lack all power and seem designed solely to advance the plot in order to get Sister Maria pregnant, I picked up Louis de Bernieres after this. By comparison it read like Tolstoy.
Previous page
