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: 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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