Lanchseter Reviews

Memoirs of the surviving privileged classes who lost everything in twentieth-century revolutions can often seem terribly materialistic and self-pitying: when displaced aristocrats wail and wail for their lost tiaras or smashed porcelain, without a jot of sympathy for why they were asked to leave in the first place, you can begin perversely to develop sympathy for the cadres who called these people class parasites and threw them out. David Kidd's memoir of marrying into an ancient and wealthy Chinese family in 1948 shows every sign of such a work, but it's far better than it starts out to be (given his adoration for lives of privilege and his almost willfuil refusal to see the point of view of why anyone would support the Communists in 1949 in the first place). The superb descriptions of the Yu family's rotting but beautiful manor are done with great humor and artistry as well as with melancholy, and the very memorable portrait of the phlegmatic and wry Yus themselves seems to bring additional perspective and depth to the material. What emerges in the end is (despite the book's brevity) a very artful and moving snapshot of a world in transition

Beautifully, lyrically rendered in the author's inimitable voice, full of haunting descriptions of a world that is gone forever yet never to be forgotten. David Kidd was truly one of a kind, unique in every way.

This book haunts..it stays with you as a most intimate portrait of those special and tender people caught in the transition between the old China and the Revolution in 1948. No account has ever brought more tears and love for those real people who saw and felt their world change almost beyond their understanding.

I love reading about food - whether it be a description in a novel or a book specifically written about food. This is somewhere in the middle - a novel which is a parody of the foodie memoir.

The narrator Tarquin is a self-important snob, travelling from the UK to his home in Provence. He shares his thoughts on food and recipes, and also fills in the reader about his past. We learn that not only is he deluded about his own ability and living under the shadow of his world-renowned artist brother; but slowly we discover he is a very devious character as well.

This is a well written, funny story, and has the requisite yummy food writing (highly inspiring!) but it loses a star because of Tarquin's long winded philosophical discourses. I know it's a parody but....

In one of my very favorite prefaces, the protagonist (author) says that he is writing the preface before he writes the text, rather than writing the preface last as is commonly done:

". . .we are all familar with the after-the-fact tone--weary, self-justificatory, agrieved, apologetic--shared by ship captains appearing before boards of inquiry to explain how they come to run their vessels aground, and by authors composing forewards."

It is "a collection of memories, dreams, reflections, the whole simmering together, synergistically exchanging savors and essences like some ideal daube. This will, I hope, give the book a serendipitous, ambulatory, and yet progressive structure."

"Finally, I have decided that, wherever possible, the primary vehicle for the transmission of my culinary reflections will be the menu. These menus shall be arranged seasonally. It seems to me that the menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art."

"A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture or the psychology of an individual; it can be a biography, a cultural history, a lexicon. . ."

"It can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a memory, a fantasy, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark."

"I'm not sure that this would be my choice for a honeymoon hotel. The gulls outside my window are louder than motorcycles."

Sarcasm and snobbery are not the first things that leap into mind when reading a cookbook, but then this is not, as Lanchester's book says, "an ordinary cookbook". It's principal character with the unlikely name of Tarquin Winot displays all at once his genius, his command of history, literature, science and cooking as well as his humorous and utter contempt for others in this outstanding voyage across Europe and into the depths of evil. It starts fairly tamely, a la "Like Water For Chocolate," telling a recipe the long way through paragraphs of storytelling. But it more than tells a story; it dives into longwinded, sort-of correct and hilarious discourses into every possible subject that would make Benjamin Franklin proud. The sort-of-correctness of each anecdote becomes more and more suspect as Winot hints increasingly at a far more sinister side. His character facade changes as often as his disguises even as each recipe is more delicious and more detailed than the last. While the crowding genre of food-mystery/food-love/food-anything books continues to swell, the Debt to Pleasure stand out for the depth of Winot character, his brilliance, his evil, and ultimately, his fragility.

This semi-homage to Mrs. Dalloway follows the title character as he wanders around London on the first Monday after being fired from his longtime job as an accountant. Dressed and accesorized for work as usual, he walks, takes buses, and the subway, encountering performance artists, porno publishers, tennis players, museum goers, tourists, a TV presenter, his eldest son, a neighbor or two, and some bank robbers. These ambulatory and mental meanderings are recounted in a witty and restrained tone with deceptively simple precision. His lone quirk is an accountant's love of translating everything into numerical values, percentages, and probabilities. Lanchester is careful not to overuse this device, and thus it remains amusing and playful throughout.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Phillips spends a great deal of his time musing about sex, death, sex, love, sex, life, and soforth. The middle-aged, middle-class Londoner is clearly meant to be an everyman, a sympathetic type recognizable to all readers. So, although he has no particular "deep thoughts" or epiphanies over the course of his day, his interactions still leave one with a benevolent sense of humanity. It's a much more gentle and embracing book (despite some reader's prudish reactions to certain sexual details) than his well-received, if overly clever, debut, The Debt to Pleasure. This novel can almost be seen as the flipside to that one, totally different, but equally good. Not great, but good.

Whew. It's good to be back in my own consciousness. John Lanchester's "Mr Phillips" is the literary equivalent of that wonderfully quirky film "Being John Malkovich" a few years ago. From the first sentence, we are dropped in medias res into the curiously cool mindset of just fired ("made redundant" in his accountant's patois) Mr Phillips. It is Monday morning as we lie in bed with slumbering Mrs Phillips and drift into our various fantasies of other women, each meticulously "rated" in a manner befitting an ob-com CPA. Thus are the two central motifs ignited: women (and sex generally) and descriptive numeracy of all sorts.

From here, fiftyish Mr Phillips, who has decided not to reveal his employment situation to his wife (or two grown sons,) goes through the typical work-a-day motions and finds himself wandering aimlessly for the first time in over thirty years. His observations and analyses place us squarely in London, which, as usual, becomes an outsized character per se, one which shapes and effects its teeming international amalgam. Throughout, we are treated to"number/probability/odds" rants about any and all things. Regarding the lottery frenzy, for example, we find that "proper" actuarial tables show that "in order for the probability of winning the jackpot to be greater than the odds of being dead by the time of the draw, one would have to bet no earlier than three and a half minutes before the draw." Put another way, death has a greater chance of finding us than does the lotto fairy. This is but one of hundreds of revelations, all put forth with a completely straight-face.

The tics, eccentricities, inner symbols, fears, joys, memories, and fantasies - both light and dark -crowd the currents of this odd stream of consciousness. But, honestly, I now need to go shower to get the Underground's grimy Tube air off myself. Good to have been there, but also good to be home. A wonderful artistic accomplishment with the added treat of enabling one to take a holiday in London for a mere pence an hour (depending, of course, on your reading rate, the current rate of inflation, the cost of your book, the....)

...

"Mr. Phillips" is a book in which almost nothing at all happens; it's one of those "he goes there and does this, then goes there and does that," stories, yet it succeeds and it succeeds quite well, not because of John Lanchester's experience (this is only his second novel) but because of his enormous talent (this is, after all, the man who wrote the wickedly creative "The Debt to Pleasure").

Mr. Phillips is a man approaching middle age who suddenly finds himself out of a job. Sure, it was a boring job, but Mr. Phillips counted on it...and so did his wife. Unable to tell her what has happened, and perhaps unable to admit it even to himself, Mr. Phillips dresses for work each day, leaves the house at the appointed hour and then fritters away his time until he can safely return home again. If this doesn't sound like much of a plot, you can be assured it isn't. If it sounds boring, you can also be assured it isn't.

"Mr. Phillips" is a book that concerns itself with a single summer day in the life of the newly unemployed Mr. Phillips. Although there isn't much plot to speak of, we do get a very good look into the thought processes of Mr. Phillips, himself. By the time we finish the book we feel we know him better than we might know ourselves.

Mr. Phillips seems to be a man to whom strange things simply "happen." While he sets out to do nothing more exciting than roam around London, he become a witness to a bizarre display of sexual exhibitionism (on the bus, no less); he is almost "picked up" by a strange woman in the Tate Gallery; he visits a porn shop; he foils a bank robbery; and he has an encounter with an elderly woman with whom he discovers a connection. Not bad for an unemployed, middle-aged man who, on the surface, appears more than a little colorless.

These events are no more or no less than...events. But Lanchester is such a gifted writer and his insight into the psyche of Mr. Phillips is so witty and dead-on that we can't help but turn the pages eagerly, wanting to know more and more and more about this silly little man and why on earth he does what he does when he does it.

I know some people have been put off by the extremely arch tone Lanchester affected in "Mr. Phillips." I've read that some people find it distancing and felt it kept us from really getting to know Mr. Phillips. I felt just the opposite. I loved it and I thought it was brilliant of Lanchester to write the book in that manner. Mr. Phillips is, of course, a man who would speak, and even think, in very arch tones, so Lanchester's choice made me feel I was getting to know Mr. Phillips even more intimately, not less.

I have also heard complaints that the real "issues" in Mr. Phillips' life, e.g., his physical decline, the loss of his job, his emotional distance from his family and friends, are not addressed completely enough and intimately enough in this book. It's true, they are not addressed intimately, but once again, I have to applaud Lanchester's choice. Mr. Phillips is a man who is distanced from himself. His thought processes, which are what we're following in this book, simply would not, and could not, embrace his problems intimately. Here is a man who leaves the house and roams London day after weary day simply because he can't face the fact that he's been sacked. He certainly is not going to sit down and analyze the reasons why. The further Mr. Phillips can get from his problems, the better he likes it. In fact, he even entertains the notion of running away to Paris to eat "horsemeat and chips."

I think Lanchester's decision not to address Mr. Phillips by his given name is also a wonderful one, although he does let us know he has one and what it is (it is Victor, by the way).

While "Mr. Phillips" isn't quite the masterpiece "The Debt to Pleasure" is (that is a once-in-a-lifetime book), it is a book filled with writing and characterization that most authors can only dream of achieving. Lanchester is a man of enormous talent and creativity. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

I really enjoyed this book. I liked the sparks of humor, "What do you say to a 900 pound gorilla with a machine gun?" ("Sir.") My appreciation for it grew after I'd finished my reading and was able to look back on it. Granted, it's not until the last 50 pages of the book that you begin to understand why the first section about Dawn Stone is there. Until the reading is complete, the novel seemed disjointed; but afterward, it seemed remarkably unified. I loved how the characters of the first and last sections set in the modern time completed the story of Tom Stewart. The historical novel which is the largest middle section of the book is incredibly fascinating. The unrequited love of Tom for Sister Maria that is never quite articulated but certainly implied is the emotional glue that holds the tale. In the end, Lancaster brings us to a full circle fulfilled in time. As readers, we gain a greater perspective that supercedes the point of view of any of the individual characters which is a remarkable feat. While the criticisms that there are better Hong Kong novels or that he could have more description might be true, I think Lancaster has masterfully done something different. He weaves the reader through the storylines and then pulls us out of them to give a greater sense of wholeness. If angels live centuries in service, then the readers' perspective comes closer to that more eternal viewpoint through this novel which is breathtaking. Bravo!

John Lanchester's Fragrant Harbor adopts more complexity and formality in comparison to his two previous novels, the painfully humorous and opinionated The Debt to Pleasure and the satirical Mr. Philips. Readers who are familiar with the history of the former British colony will discern Fragrant Harbor a novel set against the historical backdrop of Hong Kong in the twentieth century (1935-1997).

Tom Stewart, the younger son of an inn owner in England, was born with a visceral desire to travel and China had always caught his imagination. In 1935, at the age of 22, he bought a ticket on the Darjeeling in a six-week voyage to Hong Kong via Marseilles, the Mediteranean, Suez Canal and Bombay. As the ship rounded a wide corner onto the Thames, the England shore receded and never did Stewart expect his rash decision to leave the country would alter the course of his life forever.

The arrival to the ship of two Catholic missionaries, Sister Benedicta and Sister Maria, caused an upheaval. When Sister Benedicta and a businessman Marler fell out on each other in a heated debate over the Catholic Church spreading superstition and ignorance, Stewart became a pawn of a wager. The wager stipulated that Sister Maria, a native of Fujian Province, could teach a Stewart wholly ignorant of the Chinese language and raised him to a functional standard in a matter of weeks.

Little did Stewart and Sister Maria know that the wager turned into a cherished friendship and proved its veracity when the two parted to their separate ways. Sister Maria diligently pursued her mission works in Mainland China while Stewart helped Masterson run The Empire Hotel in Hong Kong. Stewart's enduring of the changes of political environments, the Japanese occupation in early 1940s, and Mao's foundation of the People's Republic in 1949 burgeoned in him a close tie to the city.

In spite of Stewart's bittersweet reminiscence of his 60 years of life in the colony, he had painted an authentic picture of Hong Kong, with dashing verisimilitude, through the weathered gale of political shifts, the rampant economic shoot-up, and the augmenting corruption and crime. The magnitude with which he captured the geographical details and the vivid vignettes of Hong Kongers' lives could only be accessible to natives. Stewart expressed his complaisant affection for Hong Kong:

"You get past a certain point in life and you've accumulated a history in a place and so that's where you're from. Most of my memories and all my friends are here." (223)

I am a native of Hong Kong who never had the opportunity to live through the times Stewart had experienced. Growing up during the mid 1970s into the 1980s, when the fate of Hong Kong was put on the global spotlights, China prepared to take over the sovereignty in its glorious return to the embrace of motherland. Stewart had evoked the amazing fact that after the Bruits had reigned over 150 years, the English language (though taught in school and widely spoken) minimally penetrated the city. The Bruits had left behind its inveterate landmarks and traditions but only marginally affected the lives of average Hong Kongers.

The first part of the book, what seems to be some outrageous digression about a British journalist Dawn Stone's arriving at the colony in 1995, is to my minimal interest of the novel. While she did not contribute to the story until the very end, Lanchester has deftly employed her character to testify the near-snobbish lifestyle of modern Hong Kong cliques (the obsession of money, the swanking of wealth and expensive clothes, and the contention for success at the expense of stepping down others).

Tom Stewart reminded me the beguiling everyday, anecdotal life of Hong Kongers. He was taken by surprise by the ways in which he found the city a surprise. The exotic elements were what he expected and aggravated his desire to loosen the shackles of England. Like any foreign newcomers, he felt the need to conform and to fit in was crushing. Correspondences with Sister Maria through numerous letters had helped him adjust to the hustle-bustle. Inculcation of the Chinese language and literature gave him a lift in expanding his hotel business.

If one thing with which Stewart had nailed the place to the root, it would be the language and its speakers. Stewart deemed Cantonese (my native language) as one of the best languages for swearing because it was completely in harmony with the Cantonese characters (the bluntness, directness, money-mindedness, clannishness, worldliness, materialism, and argumentativeness). It truly hit home!

I unreservedly recommend this book to readers who want to explore the history and lives of Hong Kong in the twentieth century. Stewart's description of the city mirrored that to my grandfather. John Lanchester might have inadvertently mistaken Deep Water Bay for Repulse Bay, Magazine Gap Road for Old Peak Road, he truly knows the city where he spends a substantial amount of his life. He has presented his readers an unbiased view of Hong Kong: abound with its outward resplendency and underlying ignominy. After all Fragrant Harbor is a work of fiction, thoroughly and thoughtfully written. 4.2 stars.

A writer who likes to do something different each time out, John Lanchester sets his third novel in Hong Kong (which translates as "fragrant harbor"), his boyhood home, and a character as vivid, complex and contradictory as his human protagonists. A city created by waves of refugees and fortune seekers, vulnerable to attack, it has become a place focused on the energy of the moment, seducing newcomers with dreams of money and power, absorbing them in its push to the future.

The book's primary narrator, English expatriate Tom Stewart, is first glimpsed in a brief prologue as an old man contemplating the South China Sea and a tranquil, if dubious, satisfaction: "Longevity can be a form of spite."

The narration then shifts to the tart, sassy, modern viewpoint of Dawn Stone, looking back on her path to success from her arrival in Hong Kong in 1995 as a young journalist, fired with ambition and wide-eyed cynicism, to her involvement with the island's most powerful man, T.K. Wo.

For the longest section of the book, Stewart returns as a man of 22, embarking for Hong Kong in a spirit of adventure. The path of his life is set on that voyage when a loud-mouthed British businessman and an equally outspoken British nun make a bet that the nun's companion, a younger Chinese nun, Sister Maria, can teach Stewart Cantonese in the six weeks of their voyage.

An enduring friendship and unspoken passion is formed between the determined, idealistic Maria and the pliant, adventurous Tom. His newly acquired Cantonese lands him a hotel management job where he finds his niche in the teeming city and helps out Maria by hiring a boy - Wo Ho-Yan - who has fallen into bad company in China.

But already war is in the air. Civil War between communists and nationalists in China and the Japanese invasion of China have sent waves of refugees to Hong Kong and Japanese invasion of the city seems inevitable. Rumors and pronouncements fly in panic and denial. From the Hong Kong perspective, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is "the good news" as it may deflect Japanese forces.

Stewart is recruited as a British spy and placed in a bank. When the Japanese invade the New Territories, where Maria has been sent, he impulsively goes to find her, and they spend two horrific weeks hiding from the Japanese and aiding refugees. Despite her pleading that Tom flee with her to China, he returns to Hong Kong and his duties to the British. Though interned in a Japanese camp, the business of the bank must go on and Stewart is well placed to accept a radio from one of the city's gang leaders - brother of the boy he had tried and failed to help for Maria. When asked why he bothers to aid the British, Wo Man-Lee replies, "Maybe you win."

His old boss' health broken by the Japanese prison camp (where the author's grandparents were interned), Stewart takes over the hotel's management after the war as Hong Kong's fortunes rise again. Wo Man-Lee's gamble has paid off too and he is rapidly amassing a dynasty, aided by Hong Kong's appetite for debauchery and its easy corruption. Maria, however, has never forgiven him for corrupting his own brother. Stewart passes the years quietly and grows into old age on the sidelines as Hong Kong reels from the Chinese Cultural Revolution and panics over the coming 1997 handover from the British to the Chinese. Stewart's Quixotic and increasingly difficult adherence to a stubborn principle is a mystery to the narrator of the novel's final section, Matthew Ho, a businessman we met briefly through Dawn Stone, who is instrumental in the novel's conclusion.

In one of the books' many ironies, a place with so much history - colonization, invasion, waves of desperate immigrants, its volatile position between China and Britain - dwells only in the present, driven by the insatiable pursuit of money and commerce. Chance plays a major thematic part - if Dawn had missed any of her big breaks, if Stewart had embarked on a different ship, if Ho had missed his flight. And irony informs the structure of the novel, leading to a quiet, masterful, inevitable bombshell of an ending.

Lanchester's writing is assured, traditional. The story is sweeping and tumultuous yet told in a mannered, reflective, personal voice. And Lanchester's ("The Debt to Pleasure" and "Mr. Phillips," both prize winners) Hong Kong is as vibrant, exotic and ruthless a city as ever seduced an immigrant.

The Lanchester Strategy graphic series of books are interesting but lack depth. The books' focus is really on Sales. Forget Marketing -- you won't find it here. Also, old-school Japanese graphic novel approach weakens the message. There is little meat; however, it offers some relatively useful high-level information.Seasoned sales managers should ignore this -- but if you are new to the game, go ahead and buy them -- used.

i found this book to be less than good. It was vague and unsubstantial, having little basis or factual backup for its forthputs and explinations. It was not really what i had expected but well laid out, and with a many decent pictures.

This is a reprint of the 1916 book by the inventor of the Lanchester equations. Here Lanchester advances his N-Square Law, which has become what we now refer to as Lanchester Equations. The interest of the book is its historical value, as better presentations are to be found elsewhere. There are other interesting portions of the book beyond the mathematics, such as "aeroplane versus dirigible." The book's value is as a historical record of both the advent of military aviation and military operations research.

Dr.Taoka's original text from 1970s is worthwhile to view his original conceptualization of a marketing strategy employed by Japanese business. However, while the book's first third begins with defining a mathematical model in marketing its last two-thirds spiral into anecdotes of application. These 'case studies' use little of the formulas introduced earlier, suggesting that qualitative rather than quantitative methods are more useful in the field, and questions the validity of the first third of the book. The translation is a difficult read, despite its grammatical correctness, the words seem to make little sense. Maybe the "manga" comics are a better buy. Without quantitative methods much of Lanchester strategy is similar to methods from Sun Tzu to Andrew S. Groves: divide and conquer; superior numbers in battle is a plus; out-flank rather than meet powerful opponents head on etc., Nevertheless, the concepts laid down: market shares as ~70%= monopoly ~40%= market leader ~26% = player, shooting range, efficiency exchange and other pearls of Lanchester strategy has its roots in this book, and while the book isn't clearly a winner, the strategy is.

Marvin Gozum, MD

What a waste of time. Hong Kong is a wonderful place with an infinate number of stories that could have been told about it. Too bad a bad writer with no imagination chose to do it. Some of the great events of our century pass by in this book with all the feeling of a trade journal.