Fragrant Harbour, by John Lanchester

Hilary Mantel joins a fictional tour around the turbid waters of Hong Kong

Is it possible that the Chinese and the English understand each other? A peripheral character in John Lanchester's new novel says, of classical Chinese, that it already "feels" like a translation. There is "a limpidity of the verbal surface and a seeming flatness which in fact conceals great intensities of feeling". We are told that there is no equivalent register in English, no way of capturing this tone. But we think of how the English once imagined themselves: mandarin, nuanced, formal and profound.

It seems clear that the author is telling us how to read his book, though he makes his bid at a late stage in the text. 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.

The "fragrant harbour" – the epithet is ironic – is Hong Kong. The plot intersects with Lanchester's family history, though it seems not to draw on it directly. His grandparents went to the territory to make their fortune, and he grew up there.

The book has an immediacy of detail – of smells, of the changing of colours of the sea, the feel of air against the skin – which reflect an early, intimate knowledge. It is permeated by the history and myths of the region, in which the author and his characters are fluent.

Yet it comes as close to tonight's news bulletin as a novelist can get. The story runs from the Thirties to some three years after Chris Patten's handover to China. "The future is more important than the past," says the last character to speak. Encoded in that statement is a betrayal.

The book has three narrative voices, all first-person. This gives the author a problem. The first is a lightweight, and the others are sententious. After a brief flash-forward, we begin in the present day; a journalist called Dawn Stone tells us her life so far.

A favour – an implausible one – has taken Dawn from a job on a local paper in Blackpool to the diary column on a national, and onward to a post as a features editor. Dawn is slick and chippy, with faded ladette locutions. (At one point she is "horny".) Why make a character you have so little time for? She may indeed be an accurate representation of a type, but accurately described characters don't necessarily pull their weight in a novel.

When she heads off to a lucrative magazine post in Hong Kong, we hope the cynic will be eaten by bigger dogs; but as we had feared, she settles in to suck their bones.

After the allied victory, Stewart builds up his hotel business, while coming to terms with every local variety of graft and criminality. Maria continues her missionary work. When she vanishes, a Triad victim, it is of more account to Stewart than to the reader, whose nerves are shredded by her awesome rectitude. The pay-off from their polite passion becomes clear in a final section, which introduces a third voice.

Her boss in Hong Kong is a powerful and sinister Chinese billionaire; but he was a mere village boy in the Thirties, when he became the protégé of a hotelier, Tom Stewart. The book's second narrative strand finds Stewart as a young adventurer, a callow English boy sailing east for the first time. On the voyage he becomes the subject of a curious wager. A missionary nun, the Chinese sister Maria, bets that she can teach him Cantonese in six weeks. She wins; her success is to have the greatest impact on his fate. He falls in love with her, of course, but it is not clear what he does about it.

Though he is the son of a Kent publican, and had never been much east of Whitstable in early life, Stewart has inherited or acquired the emotional insufficiency of the Empire-building upper-class male. When the war breaks out, and he is beaten, tortured and interned, he acts like a hero, but expresses little more than a mild rancour towards the Japanese.

Were our ancestors really so passionless and correct, or is it a lazy half-lie, sanctified by usage? Did Englishmen never cry? If not, how far through their old Empire did the constraint extend? The reader may remember David Malouf's Australian prisoners in his 1990 war novel, The Great World: recall their monstrous, pitiful humanity, and the drama and passion of their stories. Malouf left his readers rolling in ashes; Lanchester's are left ceremoniously bowing, and picking lint from their sleeves.

After the allied victory, Stewart builds up his hotel business, while coming to terms with every local variety of graft and criminality. Maria continues her missionary work. When she vanishes, a Triad victim, it is of more account to Stewart than to the reader, whose nerves are shredded by her awesome rectitude. The pay-off from their polite passion becomes clear in a final section, which introduces a third voice.

But it is Stewart who has to carry the burden of the story. 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".

That is precisely the experience the novel offers: a passive one. There is pleasure in Lanchester's intelligent and measured prose, and in his rapid, seemingly expert analysis of a volatile and intriguing region.

After the allied victory, Stewart builds up his hotel business, while coming to terms with every local variety of graft and criminality. Maria continues her missionary work. When she vanishes, a Triad victim, it is of more account to Stewart than to the reader, whose nerves are shredded by her awesome rectitude. The pay-off from their polite passion becomes clear in a final section, which introduces a third voice.

That is precisely the experience the novel offers: a passive one. There is pleasure in Lanchester's intelligent and measured prose, and in his rapid, seemingly expert analysis of a volatile and intriguing region.