Fragrant Harbour

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But simply planting saplings is no guarantee of survival as the trees take years to mature. And the current mature population is under even more threat due to poachers.

PS: I also enjoyed James Clavell's novel 'Tai-Pan' very much. If you're interested in a novel about how Hong Kong started, read that. More recently, the harbour featured in Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014). The film also had its premiere here. Did you know? I was amazed how different this book is compared to the previous novels by Lanchester ('The Debt To Pleasure' & 'Mr Phillips'). In my opinion he's getting better and better. Looking forward to his fourth. 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."People are full of fantasies about how to do business in China. The key is that you must find people with power and deal directly with them and be clear about everything and be prepared to pay." (p. 269) Again and again, the key events of his life happen offstage. On first surrendering to the Japanese, he reports that: 'The soldiers subjected me to certain indignities.' We are never told what these certain indignities were. Later, after he has abruptly broken off his engagement with a high-spirited young Englishwoman, Stewart says: 'It is a conversation that I prefer not to recall.' It does seem ungrateful not to care much for so confident and studied a performance. The novel has many good things: well-turned dialogue, for instance. But it is as if, in his quest for size and scope, the author has momentarily lost his voice. One had come to recognise it - gently snide, naughtily knowing, at times extremely funny. This is the largest fish wholesale market in Hong Kong, occupying 15,700 square meters – equivalent to the size of one and a half football fields. The action here is at the break of dawn when fishermen arrive with their daily catch. Fish is auctioned and shipped off to markets, restaurants and hotels around Hong Kong.

How (well) the juxtaposed stories gel together at the end is hidden in "that unique Hong Kong style in which the most significant information is present in the gaps, omissions and implications." 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.Aberdeen Main Road. Open Tuesday, Thursday and Friday 10:00-22:00, Saturday, Monday and Wednesday 10:00-22:00, Sunday and holidays by appointment