Hong Kong from capitalism to communism in the new novel by John Lanchester, published by Faber and Faber.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 14 June 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Most people will agree that Hong Kong is a powerful setting, but is it powerfully used here?

CHARLIE HIGSON:
I really didn't know what to think about it. I kept reading it thinking, "I will get the point of this soon," and I never really did, other than a sort of primer in the history of Hong Kong since the '30s.

A bit like Macbeth, I didn't ever connect with it an emotional level, but I found it quite interesting as an historical text about the story of Hong Kong.

MARK LAWSON:
Michael, towards the end, a key word is "refugee". He is working out a theme to do with people's relationship with their homeland, refugees, exiles.

Some people leave their country and their country leaves them.

MICHAEL GOVE:
Yes. All of them are fugitives from aspects of their past or character.

The word is brought in at the end, almost as though it's supposed to be a gong at the end, and you are supposed to say, "Ah, message."

I agree with Charlie. It's charming and quite well plotted and put together, but I didn't think it took me by the lapels or indeed gently introduced to me any great message.

It was pleasant, but like a Cantonese meal, not particularly strongly flavoured, and that point at the end is the message.

MARK LAWSON:
Germaine Greer, you and I gave praise to Mr Phillips' last book, "One Man Over One Day". This is a much wider canvas. Does he bring it off?

GERMAINE GREER:
I don't think he does. I do think he is a great writer and this is a story that he absolutely has to tell.

One of the things he is trying to do is to get it to make sense to himself. So he sets up this set of correspondences, but they are actually out of balance.

Dawn Stone is entertaining and a stylist, interested in style. She gets 60 pages. Then we get 176 pages of Tom Stuart, who I think is a man who lives an unlived life, who doesn't seem to know what's happening to him when it's happening.

That is a way of writing a book. You can write a book about a character who is unaware of his own setting, but Lanchester doesn't allow himself, because the story is too close to him, to build the set of sleights of hand and constructions that would let him do that.

Then we wind up in Sydney. As far as I am concerned, we are never in any of the places. Sydney is the one I know best, but even when we are in Hong Kong, I can't smell it or feel it.

I put it together with things like Empire of the Sun, with Jim Ballard's account of his childhood, which was so vivid. It might have been wrong, but it was alive.

This is somehow too hemmed in by its own narrative weight.

MARK LAWSON:
This is a book mentioned within the narrative?

GERMAINE GREER:
Yes. There are lots of books in this book. Maybe he had to cough this up because it's somehow the nub out of which the others will grow, but this book, in my view, is a valiant failure.