John Lanchester's new novel is set in Hong Kong and features a journalist working for a paper called The Toxic. Both, he tells Rosita Boland, are worlds he knows well.
Fragrant Harbour is the English translation for Hong Kong; the exact poetic opposite of its other name, which we have come to associate with being stamped on cheap and tacky consumer items. One name seems all romance, the other all commerce. The cover of John Lanchster's new novel, Fragrant Harbour, is the visual equivalent of these two same-but-different cities. The cover is divided into two images: the first is a painting of the idyllic green water of a harbour upon which beautiful junks float, with low, pretty buildings in the background, and the second, beneath this, is an ice-blue photograph of a brightly-lit high-rise city.
An English writer, Lanchester - whose novel, The Debt to Pleasure, won the Whitbread First Novel Award in 1996 - read last weekend at the Kilkenny Arts Festival. His grandparents arrived in Hong Kong in the 1930s, he says, looking for work: "My grandfather was a dentist, and he soon had an enormous practice in Hong Kong, since he was the first European dentist there." There is a bit of squirming in seats when Lanchester explains how Chinese dentists worked at that time, using sharpened sticks to drill holes in rotten teeth - while the patient was conscious, of course.
"Hong Kong was both good and bad to them," Lanchester says. The bad bit was the second World War, which his grandparents spent in an internment camp. Lanchester himself went to Hong Kong when he was just six weeks old, and lived there until he was 18. His Hong Kong came to him both filtered from family stories and from his own experience of living there. It is a city which, within the last decade, has changed its political identity, from being a colony to becoming once more a part of China.
"I always knew I wanted to write a book about Hong Kong. It's like the city would be the house, the structure of the book, and the characters would be the furniture," says Lanchester. Fragrant Harbour follows the interconnecting story of four people over 70 years in Hong Kong's history, from the time when picturesque junks filled the harbour to the political handover of the territory, when the city had become of major financial importance.
Early in the novel, the bolshie Dawn Stone, a journalist, is introduced. Stone works for a newspaper whose wicked fictional title says it all: The Toxic. Lanchester is hilariously funny and sharp in his observations on the workings of a newspaper - he clearly used his time well when working as a journalist himself for various publications, including the Daily Telegraph.
In a restaurant the morning after his reading, Lanchester is getting ready to head to Sligo with fellow writer Andrew O'Hagan, who has rented a holiday house there. He orders espresso and a muffin. "What would the world be without muffins!" he quips.
In addition to writing novels, Lanchester has worked as a football reporter, a restaurant critic and an obituaries writer. "The deep freeze" is how he refers to the obits file, which every media organisation has - obituaries are pre-written for famous people, and regularly updated, ready for publication when the people die. Lanchester finishes his muffin and suggests mischievously that there is little difference between writing about a meal and a person's life: "They're both reviews".
He also worked, at one stage, in the classics department of Penguin Books, "where the only good writer is a dead writer". He is referring to the happy fact that books out of copyright can be republished without royalties having to be paid. Also, reviews are absent from this territory, since classic texts have long since passed critical tests.
Lanchester also worked as a deputy editor at the prestigious London Review of Books, to which he still contributes. What is it like to examine literature from such different sides of the publishing fence?
"Reviews are like the stock market; certain writers go up and down. If you don't have watertight compartments in your head, being a critic can stop you writing," he admits. "Being a critic helps keep you educated in what is going on, and keeps you interested."
Does he think there are certain qualities which distinguish reviews on opposite sides of the Atlantic? "In the US, they review the book rather than who they think you are. In the UK, there is an implicit emphasis on the pecking order of a writer; reviews want to fix people in their place. The thing is, reviews seldom have any effect on sales, be they good or bad. At Penguin, we'd look up sales figures and there was no correlation between reviews and sales. Word of mouth does it all: Bridget Jones's Diary got mixed reviews, so did Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I don't think any of Sebastian Faulks's books ever got good reviews."
So what is the value of reviews? "It's very important for first books," says Lanchester. "It puts the spotlight on a writer. And, increasingly, so many first books, first novels, don't get reviewed at all. It's even harder to get second novels reviewed. A lot of them just go into the ether."
It took him three years to write Fragrant Harbour. "I spent a lot of time looking out the window during that time," he says. "When I start writing a book, it feels like a large open space at first. Then it gets smaller and smaller, as the book becomes clearer. It shrinks down to a cave or a tunnel, and then it takes at least two years to get out of that tunnel."
Lanchester is wary of wasting time on false trails: "That's why I spend so long looking out the window: I try and work things out in my head before I write them down".
He writes in longhand, right through to the end of the first draft, and does not reread as he goes along. "With each new story, I like to have a new way of telling it."
He is a few thousand words into a new piece of work, but doesn't want to talk about it, for fear he will "talk it away". Where is he with it, in the large open space, or in the cave? "I can see the cave now," he says, looking past me, down another long creative journey, towards the entrance of an as-yet unexplored hollow.
Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester is published by Faber and Faber (£16.99 sterling)