Fragrant Harbour

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There’s the ‘adult’s’ public house, the place of historical importance, the stations and architecture of an adult’s world. The pictures reference the child’s perspective, whilst the words are in the idiomatic style of a kind yet pedagogic parent, one who instinctually knows what might appeal, yet also wishes to be informative.

After the success of A Debt to Pleasure and Mr Phillips, highly accomplished but small-scale books, the author is working on a bigger scale, without attempting anything so vulgar and windy as an epic. I had seen nothing more vital and essentially ‘modern’ in the best sense of the word than the reproductions in this book…(1).Fragrance’ might stem from the fact that the harbour waters are sweetened by fresh water from the Pearl River; alternatively, it may refer to the sweet smell of incense being sold from the shore but carried by the wind across the harbour waters. Although they part on bad terms, Sister Maria remains a shimmering figure on the periphery of Tom's life in Hong Kong, and their one thought as the Japanese invade the region is to protect each other. Fragrant Harbour is the story of four people whose intertwined lives span Asia’s last seventy years. Tom Stewart leaves England just before it is hit by the Great Depression to seek his fortune, and finds it in running Hong Kong’s best hotel. Set in Hong Kong, from the intrigue and double-dealing of the 1930s, through the savagery of the Japanese occupation, to the year 2000, this novel depicts a tumultuous time and place, peopled with extraordinary characters.

The apparently important bit- part of a poet named Wilfred Austen, who is quite like his near-namesake Wystan Auden, does seem a bit gratuitous, but the author enjoyed it and pays his debt to pleasure. M. Forster Award, and the Premi Llibreter, been longlisted for the Booker Prize, and been translated into twenty-five languages.There is "a limpidity of the verbal surface and a seeming flatness which in fact conceals great intensities of feeling". His capacity for love, he says himself, is "elusive and equivocal" and his experience of grief is that it is numbing and passive, "something one undergoes rather than something one undertakes". Either way, it is no exaggeration to say that the view of Hong Kong harbour is one of the greatest views of the world. The central character is Tom Stewart, an Englishman in his 80s looking back on his life as an expat in the “fragrant harbour” (Cantonese for Hong Kong).