John Lanchester on the city with vertigo

John Lanchester's third novel is a portrait of Hong Kong, the place where he spent his childhood

The title of John Lanchester's new novel, Fragrant Harbour (Faber, 8th July, £16.99, 05712 01768), is a translation of the name of Hong Kong, the city where the author spent his childhood. Lanchester describes the name as an instance of the Chinese sense of humour: in fact, the city's smell, while "astonishingly distinctive", is not so beguiling.

Fragrant Harbour represents a new direction for Lanchester after two novels on a smaller scale: The Debt to Pleasure, the story of a murderous gourmet (which won the Whitbread First Novel award), and Mr Phillips, which described a single day in the life of a middle-aged accountant.

The new book traces the progress of Hong Kong during the 20th century through four different voices: Dawn Stone, an ambitious young journalist fresh out from England, who throws herself into the luxurious ex-pat lifestyle of Hong Kong under Chris Patten's governorship; Tom Stewart, travelling out to the city in the 1930s and experiencing the war years there, interned in Stanley camp; Maria, a Chinese nun whom Stewart meets on the boat out from England; and finally, Matthew Ho, who came to Hong Kong as a child refugee from the Cultural Revolution, and now in the 1990s is a young business entrepreneur.

For Lanchester, born in 1962, his whole childhood coincided with the dying days of colonialism and the dawning of the new nationalist era. He experienced the changing times close-up, moving with his banker father to Calcutta just as the banks were nationalised--"there were strikes and riots"--and later to Rangoon, where the banks were again nationalised the very day after the Lanchesters arrived and the family was placed under house arrest.

But most of his childhood was spent in Hong Kong, the city with the freest economy in the world. Lanchester describes it as "a kind of laboratory of unchecked capitalism"; nowhere is money so important as in Hong Kong, he argues, the first country ever to be richer than its own colonial power in terms of gross domestic product.

These days Lanchester lives in London with his wife, the biographer Miranda Carter, but he went back to Hong Kong shortly before its handover to the Chinese in 1997. He was disoriented by its rapid pace of change: "Smell is such a trigger of memory. You can go and stand in the place you stood in as a child and it smells exactly the same as when you were 10--but when you look around and not a single building is the same, that's really odd. If there was one seed for my novel, that would be it--that kind of vertigo of time and place. Even the harbour is smaller now; every year it shrinks as they reclaim the land."

The city's focus is ruthlessly upon the future: "If you're an old lefty like me, you think one of the things that is wrong with Britain is that we are obsessed with the past and think it is more important than the future. Whereas in Hong Kong the future is genuinely more important than the past--and that is actually quite shocking. Capitalism has been described as a force of creative destruction, and that's very strong in Hong Kong: if money makes it logical to do something, then they'll do it, whatever.

"And yet that is also misleading, because Chinese values are very family based: so there is both rampant individualism, and a very strong collective element which is to do with family."

Watching the handover ceremony on television and seeing the Pattens visibly upset, he felt an anger at the way the occasion was being presented as a purely symbolic moment, "people with ostriches on their hats, a large, empty, theatrical pageant of empire". After all, many people had lived their lives in Hong Kong--and he wanted to reflect some of those lives in Fragrant Harbour.

The novel features both ex-pats who choose to live in Hong Kong as if it were "Croydon, but with a lot of Asian people around"; and others, like Tom Stewart, who make the choice never to return to England. In the background of the novel is the rise of the Triads; Lanchester says he is interested in how dirty money becomes respectable, and such is the currency of this subject that he will not discuss it without first turning off the interview tape recorder.

In particular, he says, he wanted to write the story of Hong Kong during the war years, something his own grandparents had experienced: emigrating from Yorkshire in the 1930s, they were both interned in Stanley camp. "We're so obsessed with the war with Germany here that if you turned the TV on you'd think it was still running. But there's not much written about Hong Kong at all."

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